“Sorry I haven’t seen anything of you and Sloe,” Jubal said.
suppose?”
“You’ve been busy. Sloe called vou on the vision.”
“Oh that. Come on into my hut, Rog.”
We walked over to a temporary structure; the grass was overloaded with dew. In Jubal’s hut, J-Casta was dressing, smoking a cheroot as he dexterously pulled on a shirt. He gave me a surly greeting, whose antagonism I sensed was directed through me at Jubal.
As soon as the latter closed the door, he said: “Rog, prom-ise me something.”
“Tell me what.”
“If anything happens to me, I want you to marry Sloe. She’s your sort.”
Concealing my irritation, I said: “That’s hardly a reason-able request.”
“You and she get on well together, don’t you?”
“Certainly. But you see my outlook on life is… well, for one thing I like to stay detached. An observer, you know, observing. I just want to sample the landscapes and the food and the women of the solar system. I don’t want to marry, just move on at the right time. Sloe’s very nice but”
My ghastly inability to express the pressure of inner feeling was upon me. In women I like flamboyance, wit, and a high spirit, but I tire quickly of them and then have to seek their manifestation elsewhere. Besides, Sloe frankly had had her sensibilities blunted from living with Jubal. He now chose to misunderstand my hesitations.
“Are you standing there trying to tell me that you’ve already tired of whatever you’ve been doing behind my back?”
he demanded. “Youyou” He called me a dirty name; I forgot to make allowances for the strain he had been undergoing, and lost my temper.
“Oh, calm down,” I snapped. “You’re overtired and over-wrought, and probably over-sexed too. I’ve not touched your little woman1 like to drink from pure streams. So you can put the entire notion out of your head.”
Trouble came to us as suddenly as it had done to the lake, although nobody afterwards could have said there had been no warning.
He rushed at me with his shoulders hunched and fists swing-ing. It was an embarrassing moment. I am against violence, and believe in the power of words, but I did the only possible thing: spring to one side and catch him a heavy blow over the heart.
Poor Jubal! No doubt, in his frustration against the forces of nature, he was using me only as a safety valve. But with shame, I will now confess what savage pleasure that blow gave me; I was filled with lust to strike him again. I can per-ceive dimly how atrocities such as the Massacre came about.
As Jubal turned on me, I flung myself at him, breaking down his defences, piling blows into his chest. It was, I suppose, a form of self-expression.
J-Casta stopped it, breaking in between us and thrusting his ugly face into mine, his hand like a clamp round my wrist.
“Pack it up,” he said. “I’d gladly do the job myself, but this is not the time.”
As he spoke, the hut trembled. We were hard pressed to keep our feet, staggering together like drunken men.
“Now what” Jubal said, and flung ppen the door. I caught a rectangular view of trees and mist, men running, and the emergency dam sailing away on a smooth black slide of escaping water. The banks were collapsing!
Glimpsing the scene, Jubal instantly attempted to slam the door shut again. The wave struck us, battering the cabin off its flimsy foundations. Jubal cried sharply as he was tossed against a wall. Next moment we were floundering in a hell of flying furniture and water.
Swept along on a giant sluice, the cabin turned over and over like a dice. That I was preserved was the merest acci-dent. Through a maze of foam, I saw a heavy bunk crashing towards me, and managed to flounder aside in time. It missed me by a finger’s width and broke through the boarding wall. I was swept helplessly after it.
When I surfaced, the cabin was out of sight and I was being borne along at a great rate; and the ugly scene in the cabin was something fruitless that happened a million years ago. Nearly wrenching my arm off in the process, I seized a tree which was still standing, and clung on. Once I had re-covered my breath, I was able to climb out of the water entirely, wedge myself between two branches and regain my breath.