right up to the moment of death. But, with the best efforts possible, even our training does not produce the same results as practice.
Ian had been right to needle me about my condition, gently as he had done it. The best facilities aboard the biggest space warships do not compare to the reality of being out in the field. My choice of work lies between the stars, but there is no denying that those like myself who spend the working years in ships grow rusty in the area of ordinary body skills. Now, at night, out next to the earth on my own, I could feel a sort of self-consciousness of my body. I was too aware of the weight of my flesh and bones, the effort my muscles made, and the awkwardness of the creeping and crawling positions in which I had to cover the ground.
I worked to the right as Kensie was working left, covering the slope segment by segment, clicking off these chunks of Cetan surface in my mind according to the memory pattern in which I had fixed them. It was all sand and gravel and low brush, most with built-in defenses in the form of thorns or burrs. The night wind blew like an invisible current around me in the darkness, cooling me under a sky where no clouds hid the stars.
The light of a moon would have been welcome, but Ceta has none. After about fifteen minutes I came to the first of nine positions that we had marked in my area as possible locations for watchers from the enemy camp. Picking such positions is a matter of simple reasoning. Anyone but the best trained of observers, given the job of watching something like the Gebel Nahar, from which no action is really expected to develop, would find the hours long. Particularly, when the
hours in question are cool nighttime hours out in the middle of a plain where there is little to occupy the attention. Under those conditions, the watcher’s certainty that he is simply putting in time grows steadily; and with the animal instinct in him he drifts automatically to the most comfortable or sheltered location % from which to do his watching.
But there was no one at the first of the positions I came to. I moved on.
It was just about this time that I began to be aware of a change in the way I was feeling. The exercise, the
adjustment of my body to the darkness and the night temperature, had begun to have their effects I was no longer physically self-conscious. Instead, I was beginning to enjoy the action.
Old habits and reflexes had awakened in me. I flowed over the ground, now, not an intruder in the night of Nahar, but part of it My eyes had adjusted to the dim illumination of the starlight, and I had the illusion that I was seeing almost as well as I might have in the day.
Just so, with my hearing. What had been a con-
fusion of dark sounds had separated and identified itself as a multitude of different auditory messages. I heard the wind in the bushes without confusing it with the distant noise-making of some small, wild plains animal. I smelled the different and separate odors of the vegetation. Now I was able to hold the small sounds of my own passage—the scuff of my hands and body upon the ground—separate from the other noises that rode the steady stream of the breeze. In the end, I was not only aware of them all, I was aware of being one with them—one of the denizens of the Cetan night.
There was an excitement to it, a feeling of naturalness and Tightness in my quiet search through this dim-lit land. I felt not only at home here, but as if in some measure I owned the night. The wind, the scents, the sounds I heard, all entered into me; and I recognized suddenly that I had moved completely beyond an awareness of myself as a physical body separate from what surrounded me. I was pure observer, with the keen involvement that a wild animal feels in the world he moves through. I was disembodied; a pair of eyes, a nose and two ears, sweeping invisibly through the world. I had forgotten Gebel Nahar. I had almost forgotten to think like a human. Almost—for a few moments—I had forgotten Else.
Then a sense of duty came and hauled me back to my obligations. I finished my sweep. There were no observers at all, either at any of the likely positions Kensie and I had picked out or anywhere else in the area I had covered. Unbelievable as it seemed from a military standpoint, the regiments had not even bothered to keep a token watch on us. For a second I wondered if they had never had any intention at all of at-
tacking, as Ian had believed they would; and as everyone else, including the Conde and Michael’s bandsmen, had taken for granted.
I returned to the location of the tunnel-end, and met Kensie there. His hand-signal showed that he had also found his area deserted. There was no reason why Michael’s men should not be moved out as soon as possible and put to work laying the mines.
Michael opened the hatch at the scheduled time and we went down the ladder by feel in the darkness. With the hatch once more closed overhead, the light came on again.
“What did you find?” Michael asked, as we stood squinting in the glare.
“Nothing,” said Kensie. “It seems they’re ignoring us. You’ve got the mines ready to go?”
“Yes,” said Michael. “If it’s safe out there, do you want to send the men out by one of the regular gates? I promised the Conde to keep the secret of this tunnel.”
“Absolutely,” said Kensie. “In any case, the less people who know about this sort of way in and out of a place like Gebel Nahar, the better. Let’s go back inside and get things organized.”
We went. Back in Kensie’s office, we were joined by Amanda, who had temporarily put aside her search for a social solution to the situation. We sat around in a circle and Kensie and I reported on what we had found.
“The thought occurred to me,” I said, “that something might have come up to change the mind of the Naharese about attacking here.”
Kensie and Ian shook their heads so unanimously
and immediately it was as if they had reacted by instinct. The small hope in the back of my mind flickered and died. Experienced as the two of them were, if they were that certain, there was little room for doubt.
“I haven’t waked the men yet,” said Michael, “because after that drill on the weapons today they needed all the sleep they could get. I’ll call the orderly and tell him to wake them now. We can be outside and at work in half an hour; and except for my rotating them in by groups for food and rest breaks, we can work straight through the night. We ought to have all the mines placed by a little before dawn.”
“Good,” said Ian.
I sat watching him, and the others. My sensations, outside of having become one with the night, had left my senses keyed to an abnormally sharp pitch. I was feeling now like a wild animal brought into the artificial world of indoors. The lights overhead in the office seemed harshly bright. The air itself was full of alien, mechanical scents, little trace odors carried on the ventilating system of oil and room dust, plus all the human smells that result when our race is cooped up within a structure.
And part of this sensitivity was directed toward the other four people in the room. It seemed to me that I saw, heard and smelled them with an almost painful acuity. I read the way each of them was feeling to a degree I had never been able to, before.
They were all deadly tired—each in his or her own way, very tired, with a personal, inner exhaustion that had finally been exposed by the physical tiredness to which the present situation had brought all of them except me. It seemed what that physical tiredness had
accomplished had been to strip away the polite covering that before had hidden the private exhaustion; and it was now plain on every one of them.
“. . .Then there’s no reason for the rest of us to waste any more time,” Ian was saying. “Amanda, you and I’d better dress and equip for that scout of their camp. Knife and sidearm, only.”
His words brought me suddenly out of my separate awareness.
“You and Amanda?” I said. “I thought it was Kensie and I, Michael and Amanda who were going to take a look at the camp?”