Transit

TWENTY

Avery and Barbara got back to Camp Two just before sunset on the third day. They came back from the opposite direction in which they had set out. Avery had proved his pet theory that they were living on an island.

But the trip had been a journey of exploration in more senses than one; for he and Barbara had found each other. After months of sharing the same predicament, the same uncertainties and achievements—and the same tent—they had become so familiar with each other that familiarity itself had become a barrier. Familiarity and the unseen presence of Christine.

Not that the memory of Christine was now dead. But it was no longer a private thing. It was a small, enclosed world that Avery at last wanted to share—a poignant fragment of history that belonged to Barbara as much as to him. It belonged now to Barbara because it belonged to her understanding of him. It had dominated his life, had helped to make him what he was; and because of that it would become part of their shared life also.

There was so much now to share, and they were hungry for sharing. They wanted to know about each other’s childhood, each other’s work, each other’s ambitions. They wanted to capture the essence of all the separate years there had been before those curious crystals, lurking in a winter landscape, had started the sequence of events that brought them together on a world beyond the world’s end.

For them, love had been a kind of explosion. They were suffering from a spiritual concussion; and they knew, happily, that it would be a long time before they could settle down to accept it calmly.

However, the shared delirium did not hinder them from carrying out Avery’s original project. It merely turned it into a different kind of adventure—a double exploration.

That first morning they slept until the sun was well above the horizon; and, on waking, their first need was to make love again—perhaps to assure themselves that the discoveries of the night had not ended with the night.

It was a different kind of lovemaking. The physical desire was not so great. It was a lovemaking with much affection and much tenderness. They talked and even made fun of each other. Only at the climax, when they both seemed to be briefly lost inside a warm, bouncing ball of darkness, were they silent. Immediately afterwards, there was laughter and light.

‘Darling, we shall have to stop this,’ panted Avery. ‘Otherwise we shall be crawling back to Camp Two on our knees and with our tails between our legs.’

‘With your tail between my legs,’ said Barbara impishly. ‘I don’t ever want to stop. Nobody told me it could be this nice…. Maybe that’s because nobody knows.’

But they did manage to stop—by a great effort of willpower. Avery found some fruit, and they had breakfast— still naked, still unable to resist touching each other. Despite the fruit, they were very thirsty; but they did not find any drinking water until they had travelled two or three miles.

They marched conscientiously until after the sun had passed its zenith. Then they had another meal, and the heat of the afternoon provided an excuse for a siesta; and the siesta provided an excuse for more lovemaking.

They were bathed in sweat. Their sweat mingled. They gasped with the lovely, compulsive exertion; and the mingled scent of their bodies became an overwhelming aura; itself the most subtle of all aphrodisiacs.

As soon as the sun was touching the seaward horizon, they went down to the water and lay in the shallows for a while, hand in hand, recovering themselves. Then with the coming of twilight, they resumed the journey.

So far they had seen no trace of the golden people and very few animals—none of the dangerous ones. Perhaps it was, as Barbara had suggested, that, for once, a benevolent deity had carefully arranged matters for their benefit, as a form of compensation for past ordeals. They seemed to be truly alone in a world that had been specially created to allow men and women to discover each other.

As they walked at a very leisurely pace through the early evening, Avery began to have a mild and halfhearted attack of conscience. He felt, as he put it, that they really ought to have been ‘a trifle more scientific’ about the whole project.

‘I thought we were being scientific,’ said Barbara wickedly. ‘We have just about tried every reasonable position that comes to mind.’

‘Darling, you’re sex-crazed. You know damn well what I mean…. We should have done about three miles on the coast, then a mile inland, then another three along the coast, and so on As it is, I don’t even know how far we’ve come.’

‘As it is,’ retorted Barbara, ‘I don’t even care.’

But their carefree attitude nearly led them into trouble. They had been strolling lazily along the coast for about four hours—with occasional rests—when they rounded a small headland. They were both being drawn into an almost hypnotic state by dancing patterns of moonlight on the sea; and so they did not notice the camp of the golden people until they were within fifty yards of it. If there had not been a fire to attract their attention, they might either have missed it altogether or walked straight into it.

Avery saw the fire a split second before Barbara. There was no need to tell her what to do. Half-crouching, they backtracked and then made for the cover of the nearby cliff. Its base was strewn with slabs of rock and large boulders. It was not a high cliff, and it did not seem difficult to climb. Avery had an idea.

‘If we can get up there,’ he whispered, pointing. ‘We shall be able to look down on them and get a decent view.’

Barbara shivered. ‘What if there’s one of them sitting on top?’

‘It’s a risk,’ he admitted, ‘but not much of one. Not at this time of night. There’s not much point in having a guard this far away from camp.’

They scrambled up the cliff face quite easily. It was far from being vertical, and there were plenty of footholds. At the top they found that they had an almost clear view of the whole camp area, which was now about seventy feet below them and nearer, horizontally, than when they had first glimpsed it.

The golden people had found a different way of protecting themselves than building their camp on a rock. They had made a small clearing in a thickly wooded area. From the trees they had cut down, they had constructed two quite large hexagonal huts, complete with windows, doorways and porches. By the side of each hut there was a hemisphere whose smooth surface was almost dazzling in the moonlight. The hemispheres, thought Avery, were probably some kind of opaque glass or plastic. They appeared to be used as store-chambers. Standard equipment, perhaps—like cabin trunks….

The two main huts were at a distance of about ten yards from each other. The fire was between them. On each side of it there were home-made benches and a table. The whole camp was surrounded by a moat, perhaps two yards wide. The water in it appeared to be flowing quite quickly. Avery could just make out what seemed to be a narrow supply channel disappearing into the trees and a small exit channel that took the surplus water down towards the beach. In the camp area on the shore side, he could discern a structure that looked like a portable bridge. Probably it was pushed across the moat every morning and withdrawn every evening.

Only one of the golden people, a man, was visible. He was sitting on one of the benches and appeared to be constructing something out of wood. But on the flimsy evidence of the two huts, and on a sort of vague principle of symmetry, Avery decided that altogether there must be a population of four. Goddammit, there had to be! They—the tantalizing, inscrutable They—had set up some kind of experiment involving two opposed groups.

Avery was filled with admiration for the golden people—and also with an intensely personal feeling of inadequacy. Assuming—as a reasonable hypothesis— that both groups had been set down on this planet at the same time, and again assuming that they, too, were strangers to each other and just ordinary representatives of their race, they had already achieved a hell of a lot. Not for them the easy existence. They had set about establishing a base that could later be expanded. They were builders, pioneers—not indolent, expatriated city types…

Of course, there was still the possibility that they were indigenous. But the more Avery thought about it, the more improbable it seemed. No, they were not in-digenous. They, too, were guinea-pigs in exile. But what guinea-pigs! Already they had diverted the course of a stream and made their own houses and furniture. Guinea-pigs with a difference!

Avery hoped desperately that the kind of experiment They had devised was not the kind he suspected. But he began to feel that the hope was a forlorn one.

He wanted to stay and observe the camp a little longer, but Barbara was getting distinctly unhappy. ‘Please, darling, let’s get away from here now,’ she whispered. ‘The more I see of this place, the less I like it. These golden people give me the shudders.’

He squeezed her hand, and nodded. ‘The bigger they come, the harder they fall,’ he murmured lightly, but his voice lacked conviction.

They scrambled back down the cliff. Just as Avery had decided to make a wide detour inland, one of the moons was obscured by cloud. They took advantage of the brief and partial darkness to creep stealthily past the camp of the golden people, as close to the sea as possible.

The cloud was not as co-operative as they had hoped, and the moon emerged once more when they were almost parallel with the man on watch. He was no more than forty yards away, and if he had looked towards the shore he must surely have seen them. Avery gripped his tomahawk apprehensively, but the man was intent upon his work. After all, there was no need to keep a strict watch when your camp was protected by a six-foot moat!

With the camp safely behind them, Avery and Barbara kept up a brisk pace for the next couple of hours. They wanted to have as much distance as possible between them and the golden people when daylight came.

At last they were too tired to go any farther, and wearily unrolled the sleeping bag in a sandy hollow just above the high-water mark. They were too tired even to make love, and fell asleep very quickly. Dawn came far too soon.

They were still tired, but not too tired. And somehow —quite strangely separate from the physical aspect— they needed it. The love came quick and fierce and curiously refreshing. Afterwards, they bathed in the sea. Breakfast hung from a tree and was theirs for the reaching. .

‘This, I’m afraid, is the point where we have to decide,’ said Avery reluctantly.

‘Decide what, darling?’ Barbara used the word ‘darling’ on every possible occasion. It was still a luxury. It gave her much pleasure.

‘Whether to play fair with Tom and Mary, and turn back—I promised we’d not be longer than four days—or whether to be damned selfish, take a chance and press on.’

Barbara sighed. The exploration did not matter to her all that much. But it mattered to Avery, therefore it mattered….

‘Actually,’ she said at last, ‘we’ve only really been away one and a half days. If you are so keen, we could keep going for nearly another day—but then we’d have to come back at a cracking pace and walk through most of the afternoons.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose there would be any time for love.’

‘When we get back, we’ll have all the time in the world for love.’

She smiled. ‘It still won’t be enough.’

They—or, rather, Avery—finally decided to take the gamble and continue going forward. As Barbara had said, they could afford the best part of another day; and then, if they found nothing worth finding, they would head back for camp at top speed. Provided they could get safely past the camp of the golden people a second time, the extra day would cost nothing more than two pairs of sore feet.

But as it happened, the gamble paid off. By lunch time they had reached a stretch of coast that suddenly and inexplicably seemed familiar to Avery. There were no outstanding features—it was pretty much the same as the miles of coastline they had already passed—yet still there was something he associated with it. His bewilderment lasted for a few minutes, then suddenly he remembered.

‘This is where I saw the metal sphere,’ he told Barbara exultantly. ‘A few miles farther on, there’s a rock pool where I found some footprints God, it seems ages ago….’ He grinned happily at her. ‘We’re only a couple of hours from Camp Two, sweetheart…. So it’s an island, after all.’

‘You’re sure this is the place?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘How can you recognize it?’

‘I don’t know—but I do recognize it Don’t worry, I’m not suffering from delusions.’

Suddenly, Barbara was jubilant. ‘Then if we’re so near, there’s no need to hurry. We can have a glorious afternoon without any problems and still get back a day ahead of schedule. We could even ’

‘No we can’t.’ He knew what she was thinking. ‘Tom and Mary have probably been worrying their heads off. We ought to get back this evening.’

Barbara accepted defeat gracefully. ‘Now we know what it’s like,’ she said, ‘we can fix ourselves up with an official holiday later—and no record marches.’

Avery laughed. ‘We can have a dozen a year if you feel like it—without any loss of pay.’

‘But this will still be the most precious one,’ she said. ‘The honeymoon isn’t over yet. Let’s make the most of it.’

They did—all through the long hot afternoon. Then they bathed once more in the sea, and finally made their way back to camp, tired out, and with the deliciously shared guilt of intimate conspirators. As they passed the remembered rock pool, Avery thought about his fleeting vision of a land mass across the sea. He scanned the horizon intently; but, although the air was very clear, there was nothing to be seen. Perhaps it had been a bank of cloud after all. In his present mood, it did not seem to matter greatly. It was much more important that Barbara’s hand was lying in his….

Tom and Mary looked at their faces and instinctively understood. Mary had seen them coming, and all four met on the shore. They flung their arms round each other as if they had been separated for months.

‘Well, now,’ said Tom solemnly, ‘you two look as if you have had a harrowing time—very harrowing indeed. I can see we shall have to nurse you back to health.’

‘Only back to strength,’ retorted Avery. ‘We have already demonstrated the quality of our health…. Incidentally we’ve also found where the golden people live. And we are on an island, Tom, not a very big one. How the devil we managed to avoid finding out for so long, I’ll never know.’

‘We have news for you, too,’ said Tom. ‘Mary’s pregnant. She suspected it for some time, but now she has the classic symptom.’ He grinned. ‘It operates early in the morning, just before breakfast—so that I have to do the work.’

‘Felicitations,’ said Avery to Mary. He kissed her. ‘I only hope you don’t get strange yearnings for pickled onions and that sort of thing. The nearest grocery shop is an awful long way.’

Barbara was feeling smug. ‘If I don’t join you at the clinic soon, Mary dear, the law of averages will have gone bust.’

Suddenly, Tom became serious. ‘Damned if I know what we are going to do about doctors and midwives and all that rot.’

But Mary was strangely unperturbed. ‘Stop worrying. What do you think women have been doing for about a million years?’

As they were going back to camp, Avery had a sublime thought. ‘We never drank that bottle of champagne, did we? I knew there would be a good excuse for it sooner or later.’

Tom began to hurry on ahead. ‘I’ll try to get it cooled down to blood temperature in the sea,’ he called.