Transit

TEN

The night passed uneventfully. Two moons—one only very slightly larger than the other—drifted slowly like luminous balloons across a star-studded sky; and at last a red sun, curiously like Earth’s sun, lifted above tree-tops already beginning to stream as a light dew evaporated.

Barbara and Avery had shared their watches, but Tom and Mary each took theirs alone. As it turned out, their vigils were rather short because Barbara and Avery did not turn in until less than a couple of hours before dawn. Though their sleep was brief it was remarkably refreshing; and at breakfast time they found it difficult to believe that they had spent most of the night huddled together by the fire. Avery, in fact, was mildly embarrassed by the memory. It seemed to imply the existence of an intimacy that he was not yet willing to accept.

Breakfast itself was a simple affair—the remainder of the fruit. Afterwards, Avery asked Tom to study the plastic pictures and then take himself off on a hunting expedition—without the gun.

Tom was in an unco-operative mood—possibly, thought Avery, as a result of last night’s whisky. But, after delivering himself of a little speech on the entire uselessness of trying to catch ‘game’ with his bare hands, he made his departure. He spent some time looking for suitable throwing stones on the shore. Then he went inland. Avery did not set any limits to the hunt. He merely asked Tom to make sure he didn’t get lost and to be back in about three hours. It was obvious that risks were going to have to be taken sometimes; and, since nothing dreadful had happened so far, Avery began to feel that the dangers might not be so great as he had imagined. He was worried still about the man Mary had seen. But to adopt an entirely defensive attitude seemed neither practical nor wise.

For himself, he decided upon a little exploration— along the shore. There was one problem particularly that he wanted to solve, though he realized that there was probably very little chance of solving it in a single day. The question was: had they been dumped on a relatively small island or a large land mass? There was, as yet, no way of telling; and although the answer did not seem to offer any special survival value, he felt it was important to know.

Before he departed on what could only be regarded as a preliminary survey, he gave clear and emphatic instructions to Mary and Barbara. They were not to go out of each other’s sight. In fact they were to stay as close together as possible. If they went looking for more fuit, they must each carry a knife or hatchet and one of them must also have the gun. He repeated the standing order that the revolver must only be used in the last resort; if it was a question of survival. He also added the perhaps unnecessary advice that, if it came to shooting, whether it was man or beast, whoever had the gun must shoot to kill.

It was a bright warm morning when Avery finally set off on his exploratory jaunt; and he began to feel optimistic. Not optimistic about anything particular, but simply about the remarkable and exciting fact of being alive. The sun was already a little higher than it had been on the previous day when he had awakened: and a rough and ready calculation indicated that a day on this planet lasted about twenty earth-hours.

Day One had, necessarily, been a bit of a shambles, he decided. Day Two must be used to increase both knowledge and self-reliance.

He had been walking along the shore for about half an hour when he came across the footprints. There were two sets—one larger than the other—possibly a man’s and a woman’s. They came from the direction of the trees to a small rocky pool, and then went back to the trees again, where they disappeared in the grass and undergrowth. The prints on the sand were clear and quite fresh-looking. Whoever had made them might still be in the vicinity.

Avery reconnoitred cautiously among the trees, but he found nothing. Presently, he returned to the rocky pool to see if he could find anything in the nature of a clue.

The pool itself was small and only a few yards from the high water mark on the stretch of sand. The strangers, evidently, had been kneeling for some time by the edge of the pool. There were marks where their toes must have dug into the sand; and four small patches of weed had been flattened.

Avery knelt carefully in two of the depressions to see what he could see. The pool contained several very small fish and apparently nothing else but a few smooth round stones, each about the size of a large fist. But presently one of the stones moved, and Avery recognized it as a very ordinary looking crab. According to the set of plastic pictures, crabs were particularly good to eat. He wished now that he had brought something with which to catch them and to carry them. He did not care greatly for the prospect of using his hands.

He wondered guiltily whether he ought to go back to Camp One for a pan or a bucket. But finally he decided against it. Tom was on a hunting expedition. If he found nothing else, he would very likely come across some crabs.

Perhaps it was the search for food that had brought the strangers to this pool in the first place. Perhaps they would be coming back to it.

Avery stood up and looked about him uncertainly. Then, after a little hesitation, he decided to carry on with his survey. But the mood of optimism had evaporated. He began to feel anxious and exposed once more.

Suddenly, a thought struck him. Perhaps the Others (as he was beginning to think of them) were not indigenous but displaced persons as well! It would be absurdly comic if they were two groups of displaced terrestrials living now on a strange planet in fear of mutual discovery. But then he remembered Mary’s description of the man she had seen. Somehow, it had not sounded like a description of a man who had recendy been abducted: it had been more like the description of a man who was quite at home in his natural surroundings—a man who, perhaps, was justifiably surprised and annoyed at the intrusion of strangers.

Avery continued to walk along the beach, but he took care to stay close to the sea so that he could not easily be taken by surprise if someone happened to be watching him or following him behind the cover afforded by a green, luxuriant wall of vegetation.

Time passed. The morning wore on. Nothing happened. Avery’s exploration took him past several small bays and round a fairly large headland. But there was still nothing to indicate whether he had covered a tiny stretch on a very long shore or had almost travelled round a very small island. He had an impression that the shore had a general tendency to bend more towards his right. Even so, the land could still be a relatively small bulge belonging to a very large mass.

He began to feel discouraged. For one thing, he wasn’t being very scientific about the expedition. He should have been trying to plot his changes of direction by the sun, or something equally methodical. For another thing, he was beginning to feel anxious about Mary and Barbara. On reflection, it seemed to him that it had not been a good idea to leave the two women alone. Come to that, it probably wasn’t even a good idea for him or Tom to wander off alone. Henceforth, he decided, and until they knew more about their surroundings, expeditions would be undertaken in pairs—one man and one woman. That would certainly be a safer arrangement.

Avery glanced at his watch and realized that he had been away from camp nearly two hours. It was time to go back. He had not intended to be away for more than three hours. He stopped and gazed intently at the shoreline ahead, which was visible for about half a mile before it bent once more to the right. He learned nothing—except that it was much the same as the miles of shore he had already walked over. Then he gazed seaward, scanning the horizon intently.

It was a clear morning. The sky was cloudless. High above, it was an intense blue; but where it came down to meet the sea it dissolved into a faindy misty purple. Avery stared at the purple fusion of sky and sea. For a moment, he thought he saw a far, vague outline of land. Then it dissolved. It came once more—and dissolved once more. It could be land or a low-lying bank of cloud —or just the strain of staring.

Reluctantly, Avery began to retrace his steps. He decided not to mention his mirage—if it was a mirage—to the others. Otherwise they might all begin seeing things to order. But, if it was real—if it was another piece of land— sooner or later someone else would see it. And anyway, if it was a piece of land, it was at least twenty miles away, probably much more. And without a boat, twenty miles of sea was—well, twenty miles of sea…Of course, it should be possible to build a boat On the other hand, why waste time building boats and looking for more problems? The only worthwhile objective at the moment was to learn enough to stay alive…. His head was beginning to ache.

Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks and stared incredulously. He had almost reached the rocky pool where he had discovered signs of the Others. But it was not the pool that caught his attention, for it was now hidden.

It was hidden behind what seemed to be a monstrous, blinding, golden ball that was perhaps thirty yards in diameter and that looked as if it was poised to roll into the sea—from which it might even have emerged.

Avery stared at the shimmering, motionless ball. It was so bright that his eyes began to smart, but he could not turn away. He felt the hysteria beginning to rise inside him—a tiny bubble of unreason expanding to such a pitch of tightness that it must presently burst.

It could be the sun, he thought idiotically. The sun could have fallen out of the sky, and now it’s lying here on the sea-shore. It’s not a great sphere of fire, it’s a ball of liquid gold—and time has stopped, because I ought by now to have been burned to a cinder.

The sweat poured down his face, the smarting in his eyes became a sharp-edged pain; but a distant whisper of common sense told him that he was neither dead nor burning. His impulse to hysteria remained petrified at tie point of explosion. After the first fantastic shock, his brain began to work once more.

The great ball was radiant and motionless. But there had to be some way in which it had got there. The one thing he did know was that it must have arrived less than an hour ago.

Despite the radiance, the curiously unreal sensation of tremendous heat, he forced himself to go a litde closer, looking for tracks in the sand.

There were no tracks in the sand. There was not even a dent. The ball seemed to rest without weight, as if it was suspended at the end of an invisible rope. Cautiously, Avery walked round it. There was nothing—nothing but the pool and the footprints he had discovered earlier.

Then suddenly he heard a tiny, dry crackle—as of fine splinters of glass being broken. For a fraction of a second he thought he had simply imagined the sound. But at the same time the golden ball just disappeared.

It did not go up or away. It did not make any loud noise or create any turbulence in the air. What it did do was so utterly absurd as to give Avery serious doubts about his own sanity.

It simply faded.

A golden sphere, thirty yards in diameter, whose surface seemed to have the fluid iridescence of a massive globule of molten metal—to say nothing of the intense heat—just faded before his eyes. For a moment its outline appeared to vibrate intensely. Then it became transparent. And there was nothing.

Avery stood and stared. And blinked. The pain was going from his eyes. He felt drunk and unsteady and stupid and empty. He felt that he could no longer trust himself to think—just as he could certainly not trust himself to see.

There was no mark on the sand. Nothing had been disturbed, nothing at all. It was as if the mysterious sphere had never been.

That, of course, was the answer, he told himself reluctantly. After a couple of days or so as the prisoner of a computer in a spaceship and a night and a day on an island where it was possible to see two moons and sixlegged rabbits, who would not be subject to visions?

Yet he did not really believe it was a vision, just as he did not really believe that the nebulous land-shape he had seen on the horizon was a vision.

What then? Answer: he was going slightly—ever so gently and inevitably—clean out of his head. The leader of the expedition! Stark staring!

Anybody want to place bets on group survival, gents, with dear old demented Richard Avery running the show? Stand by to repel boarders, folks, we’re being invaded by twenty-four-carat balloons. Never mind! All you have to do to cause the bastards to disappear up their own spherical arses is to make a noise like splinters of glass with schizophrenia.

Ah, that was it! The noise. Not splinters of glass. Static electricity. The crackle you get with a sweater when you take it off in a dry atmosphere. Rub two girl guides together in a dry climate and Christ, he thought. This won’t do. I’ve got to dig a nice little, warm little, dark little hole representing sanity and bury the elasticated remnants of my mind in it before they go snapping off in a glorious bloody exeunt.

Maybe everything’s an illusion. Maybe Barbara and Mary and Tom and two moons and an intelligence-testing computer and a skyful of alien stars have all come bursting out of my own sweet bullshitting unconscious mind….

Maybe I’m in a lovely nut-house in London, and the next thing I know I’ll be waking up after a long shot of electroplexy to collect my season ticket for rug-making—

Barbara, Mary and Tom. He wanted to see them. He wanted to see them, touch them, talk to them as he had never wanted anything before in his life. Above all, he wanted the bitter security of not being alone.

He began to walk quickly, past the pool, back to camp. But he could not control himself. The walking became faster and faster. Then it became a headlong sprint. He was too old for that kind of pace. He had smoked too many cigarettes, he had let his body sag into a middle-aged bundle of bones and perished rubber. But he didn’t care. Speed was the thing.

He ran until the very air seemed to grate like gravel in his lungs. He ran until the pain in his chest was such that he expected his heart to literally break out like a tortured fugitive. He ran until the bright beach ahead began to darken and the forest and the sea swirled about him like green and turquoise mists that would presently close above his head and bury him in a warm sweet vapour of unbeing.

He ran until he heard the shots.

One, two… three… four—five—six…

They sounded very near. They sounded almost as if they were inside him.

They acted like a signal of release on his overworked body. He fell flat on his face in the sand, and lay there panting and groaning.

He wanted to find out about the shots. He rolled over and tried to get up. But the pain wouldn’t let him. It sat on his chest, an invisible conqueror, and sent needle probes of anguish and shame through his trembling limbs.