normal uniform jet of a Merseian eye, not the white rim that would have
meant contraction. Good. Flandry stroked shakily the bald, serrated
head. I’d’ve hated to do you in, old chap. I would have if need be, but
I’d’ve hated it.
Hurry, you sentimental thimblewit! he scolded himself. The others’ll
arrive shortly, and they tote guns.
Still, after he had rolled Cnif out onto the soil, he found a blanket to
wrap the Merseian in; and he left a portable glower going alongside.
Given that, the scientists would be in no serious trouble. They’d get
chilled, wet, and hungry. Maybe a few would come down with sneezles and
wheezles. But when Ydwyr didn’t hear from them, he’d dispatch a flyer.
Flandry re-entered the bus. He’d watched how it was operated; besides,
the basic design was copied from Technic civilization. The manual
controls were awkward for human hands, the pilot seat more so for a
human fundament. However, he could get by.
The engine purred. Acceleration thrust him backward. The bus lifted.
When high in the night, he stopped to ponder charts and plans. He dared
not keep the stolen machine. On an otherwise electricityless and
virtually metalless world, it could be detected almost as soon as a ship
got aloft in search of it. He must land someplace, take out what he had
in the way of stores, and send the bus off in whatever direction a wild
goose would pick.
But where should he hide, and how long could he, on this winter-bound
world?
Flandry reviewed what he had learned in the Merseian base and nodded to
himself. Snowfall was moving south from the poles. The Ruadrath would be
leaving the ocean, had probably commenced already. His hope of survival
was not great, but his hope of raising hell was. He laid out a
circuitous route to the coastlands west of Barrier Bay.
XVI
—
When first they woke, the People had no names. He who was Rrinn ashore
was an animal at the bottom of the sea.
Its changes were what roused him. Water pressure dropped with the level;
lower temperatures meant a higher equilibrium concentration of dissolved
oxygen, which affected the fairly shallow depths at which the People
estivated; current shifted, altering the local content of minerals
raised from the ocean bed. Rrinn was aware of none of this. He knew
only, without knowing that he knew, that the Little Death was past and
he had come again to the Little Birth … though he would not be able to
grasp these ideas for a while.
During a measureless time he lay in the ooze which lightly covered his
submerged plateau. Alertness came by degrees, and hunger. He stirred.
His gill flaps quivered, the sphincters behind them pumping for an ever
more demanding bloodstream. When his strength was enough, he caught the
sea with hands, webbed feet, and tail. He surged into motion.
Other long forms flitted around him. He sensed them primarily by the
turbulence and taste they gave to the water. No sunlight penetrated
here. Nevertheless vision picked them out as blurs of blackness.
Illumination came from the dimly blue-glowing colonies of aoao (as it
was called when the People had language) planted at the sides of the
cage; it lured those creatures which dwelt always in the sea, and helped
Wirrda’s find their way to freedom.
Different packs had different means of guarding themselves during the
Little Death, such as boulders rolled across crevices. Zennevirr’s had
even trained a clutch of finsnakes to stand sentry. Wirrda’s slumbered
in a cage–woven mesh between timbers–that nothing dangerous could
enter. It had originally been built, and was annually repaired, in the
spring when the People returned, still owning a limited ability to
breathe air. That gave them energy to dive and do hard work below,
living off the redeveloping gills an hour or two at a stretch. (Of
course, not everyone labored. The majority chased down food for all.)
After their lungs went completely inactive, they became torpid–besides,
the sun burned so cruelly by then, the air was like dry fire–and they
were glad to rest in a cool dark.
Now Rrinn’s forebrain continued largely dormant, to preserve cells that