Jimmy craned his neck, then had an objection. “So how do you know we’re not in the core of our own galaxy? Christo Papathanassiou told me once-“
“That there were a lot of stars crowded together there, too? Sure there are. But there’s something else at the core, and that’s a hell of a big black hole. If we were anywhere near that we’d know, because we’d all be dead now from the radiation.”
From up ahead, Dannerman was trying to get their attention. “Quiet!” he ordered. “Do you hear that?”
And as soon as they stopped talking, Patsy did. It was a thick slobbering noise, not quite a roar, definitely not friendly.
In a moment Patsy saw what it was. Something was crossing from a patch of shrubbery toward the lake, off to their right, no more than thirty or forty meters away. There were two somethings, one larger than the other. Patsy couldn’t make out details, but the heads looked as huge-mouthed and wide-nostriled as a hippopotamus-though wearing something puzzlingly like a mustache. Not really a mustache, she corrected herself; the strands weren’t hair; more like the tentacles of an octopus. The bodies, though, were streamlined as a seal’s, and they flopped along the ground on their fins like any pinniped. As she watched, the smaller of the two slipped into the water; the other planted itself on the shore and gargled at them again before following the other.
“Christ,” Pat breathed from up ahead. “Was I wrong, or were those things wearing some kind of collars?”
“Perhaps they are pets,” Rosaleen said dryly. “I don’t think I want to try to return them to their owners just now, though. Please, can we proceed?”
They did. They gave the lakeside a wide berth, all of them watching worriedly to see what might come up at them out of the water. But nothing did.
Once past the lake the distance was short. They crossed a meadow-delightfully speckled with patches of phosphorescent grasses, smelling peculiarly of mown wild onions and mint. Once or twice Patsy thought she heard a distant whickering from the woods, and Jimmy Lin startled everybody when he declared he’d seen something flying there. But then they crossed a little ridge, and there before them, laid out in the brilliant starshine, was a valley with a bright stream running through it, and some sort of structures beside the stream.
“They look like tents,” Patrice said in awe.
“Yes,” said Rosaleen, summoning up the strength to stand for die last little bit. “Dopey said there would be dwellings for us.”
“Tents aren’t ‘dwellings,’ “ Jimmy Lin complained; and then, when they were closer: “My God, they aren’t even tents! They’re what you call ‘yurts.’ Like the things the Uighur ethnics live in, up in Xinjiang Province, you know? And they stink.”
So they did; as soon as Patsy came within range she smelled it, a long-ago aroma of spice and decay. On the other hand, she was well aware that she herself was far from fragrant, and she eyed the stream water longingly.
She wasn’t the only one, though not for the same reason. Behind her Dannerman asked, “Think we can drink that river water?”
Rosaleen was limping after him. “What choice do we have?” she asked, painfully crouching over the stream for a closer look. Most of the others followed. At that point in its course the stream ran over a pebbly bottom, and, in the glory of starlight from that blazing sky, it looked crystal-clear. It also looked empty. If the stream held any population offish or insects-or of whatever would pass for either in this place-Patsy couldn’t see them.
She put a finger in the water and quickly revised her thoughts of a quick bath; that water was cold. Next to her Dannerman hesitated, then dipped his cupped hands into the stream. He lifted the water to his nose to smell, then tasted it.
“It seems all right,” he said judiciously. “Tastes good, in fact.”
That was enough for Patsy. She cupped her hands in the stream, drank; and then realized how thirsty she was and drank more, and then more still. She wasn’t the only one, either. Most of the others were following Dannerman’s example, until Rosaleen said thoughtfully, “I wonder if we shouldn’t have boiled it first.”
“Boiled it how?” Pat asked, but Patsy wasn’t listening. She was remembering what a case of violent diarrhea was like, learned well from some heavy-drinking and poorly sanitized picnics in her college days. What would that be like here, without any pink medicine waiting in the dorm dispensary to calm the outraged bowels down?
But it was a little late to think of that, and now everybody- no, she corrected herself: every one of the men; the women seemed less bossy-had a plan to offer. “We need to make a fire,” Jimmy Lin was saying, and Martin was arguing, “First we must fix up some sleeping accommodations for Rosaleen,” and Dannerman was urging that they check the woods out, in case there were surprises there.
“Fire first,” Jimmy insisted. “To keep vermin away, and so we can cook some of this crap instead of eating it cold.”
“Cook it in what?” Pat asked. It was a reasonable question. Patsy thought wistfully of the score or so of pots and kettles and asparagus cookers and omelette pans in her (seldom-used) kitchen in New York. Would they have to reinvent pottery? Dig out clay? Throw bowls on a wheel, the way she vaguely remembered from one of the less enjoyable courses she’d taken in high school? But Jimmy dismissed all questions. “Get me firewood,” he ordered. “Preferably dead stuff that’s fallen to the ground; let me worry about the rest of it.” And, when there still were arguments, grandly: “Don’t forget, I was an Eagle Scout at Kamehameha High.”
It was Dannerman who lost out. Exploration, they decreed, would have to wait for daylight; meanwhile Martin and Jimmy Lin had their way. Patsy found herself carting wood from the edge of the forest-ears alert for any sound, eyes searching the dimness-while Dannerman cut it into quarter-meter lengths with the serrated blade from his belt, and Martin drafted Pat and Patrice to drag everything out of the yurts for inspection. Everything the yurts contained was old, fragile and decayed; but there had been things that could only have been pallets that still seemed useful. Well, maybe useful. Certainly not comfortable. They were sacks filled with powder that had once been leaves and grasses, along with brittle sticks that still had sharp edges; and they were more than three meters long and less than a meter wide.
They would do. Martin ordered four of them returned to the largest and cleanest of the yurts, three to another-why, Patsy thought, amused, they were doing sex-segregated dormitories! And when he had made sure Rosaleen was comfortable, or as comfortable as she could hope for, he emerged to help Jimmy Lin rasp deadwood into a kind of powder with the little files from Rosaleen’s hair sticks. And then Jimmy did his Eagle Scout thing, spinning a stick between his palms against a rock, finally getting a smoldering glow from the friction. And ten minutes later he had his campfire going, throwing out orders in all directions. “Only put in small sticks,” he commanded. “Not too much wood. What we want is an Indian campfire-small, so it won’t use up our fuel too fast. And now-who’s for a real home-cooked meal?”
But no one was. What they wanted was sleep. Exploration could wait, eating could wait- it had been a long day for everyone. For Patsy, too, but somehow she found herself volunteering to take the first watch to keep the fire fed. She had had some idea that, once everyone else was well and truly asleep, she might just dip herself into that brook and try to get at least the surface layers of grime and stench off her long-unwashed body. That notion didn’t last; when she tried the water with one toe it was even colder than she had remembered.
Replenishing the fire was about the easiest job Patsy had ever had. Jimmy’s orders had been explicit: no more than four or five sticks at a time, none at all until there were no more flames, just glowing coals, because you didn’t want actual flames. Patsy debated what to do with the longest sticks, too long to fit in the tiny fire. She didn’t want to try to break them for fear of waking the others up, wasn’t sure she had the strength to do it, anyhow, and had no idea where Dannerman had left his glassy blade; but then she worked out a simple solution. She laid them across the fire until the middle sections had burned through, then picked up the ends and tossed them in. Nothing to it.
The hard part was staying awake. For the first hour or so little pinpricks of fear kept the adrenaline flowing. Distant whickerings in the wood, the gentle plop of something falling from a tree, a nearby growl (which turned out only to be Martin snoring)-every sound was an alarm. Almost anything, Patsy thought, could leap raging at her out of the trees; but then time passed and nothing did, and the fears, while not going away, changed character. Were they really going to try to take on the might of the Horch killing machines with a handful of popguns? Should they be doing that, anyhow? (Or was Dannerman right about the dangers of taking sides?) And, that biggest question of all, how much truth was there in the promise of eternal bliss (or otherwise) in this improbable eschaton? The questions revolved themselves through her tired brain-with, of course, no answers. She was fed up with the endless supply of unanswerable questions.