“Something’s been nibbling at these things,” he called. “And I think I see what was doing it. Only they’re dead.”
Jimmy Lin’s hot-water scheme worked fine-to be sure, at the cost of some burned fingers, transferring the hot pebbles to the container of water, but in a few minutes the container was gently simmering and meals were coming along. When Patsy got her stew, though, it was lukewarm and only partially softened. It didn’t matter. She’d lost most of her appetite when she saw the three little dead creatures-looking a little like lizards, maybe, though densely furred-with their mouths wide open in the rictus of death.
“Different chemistry,” Rosaleen said soberly. “I guess I can forget that idea.” And when someone asked what idea she was talking about, she explained, “I was thinking we might try some of the fruits from those trees when our rations run out, but if our food kills them, I doubt their food will be any better for us.”
Patsy stopped eating to look at the heap of rations. It had not occurred to her to think of it as a nonrenewable resource. She didn’t like the conclusions that thought led to. “Rosaleen? With seven of us eating, how long do you think the food will last?”
Rosaleen looked at the tally in her hand. “Let’s see, three meals per day per person, that’s twenty-one portions a day, divided into, according to this, two hundred and seventy-three portions . . . say, thirteen days. A bit more, maybe.”
“And then?”
“And by then,” Rosaleen said firmly, “I presume Dopey will have come back with the guns, and we’ll have taken over the base and there’ll be all the food we want from Starlab.”
“Or not,” Patrice said.
Rosaleen nodded. “Or else we will probably have been killed in the attempt, so it’s not a problem.”
“So then why were you counting the food?”
She hesitated. “I suppose because there is always the chance that Dopey won’t come back.”
It was what Patsy had known she would hear, but that didn’t make it any nicer. She pressed the point. “And if Dopey doesn’t come back, and that’s all there is, how long before we starve to death?”
Rosaleen didn’t answer at first; while she was thinking Dannerman spoke up. “Did you ever hear of a man named William Bligh?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He was the captain of an old sailing ship, the Bounty, hundreds of years ago. I guess he was a pretty mean son of a bitch, even for those days; anyway, his crew mutinied. Somebody made a book out of it. I never read the book, but one summer in graduate school I worked for a local theater, and they put on a musical based on it. I sang the first mate, the guy who led the mutiny. He was a man named Fletcher Christian.”
“I didn’t know you were a singer.”
“Who said I was a singer? They weren’t fussy about that kind of thing at the theater. Neither was I; they didn’t pay anything, but you got to meet a lot of girls there. Anyway, Christian made the mutineers put the captain and some of his loyal crew over the side in a longboat instead of hanging them out of hand. The mutineers gave them two days’ rations or so, and Captain Bligh managed to get every man in the boat safely to a British port a couple of thousand miles away. They rowed six or eight weeks before they reached land, and all that time they lived on the little bit of water they could catch when there were rainstorms, and the food that was only supposed to be rations for a couple of days.”
She thought that over. Another month or two in this place, with nothing to eat at all? And no realistic hope of rescue? “That’s not particularly good news,” she said.
Dannerman nodded. “We don’t really need three meals a day, though. Two would be enough, I think. That ought to give us another couple of weeks, anyway.”
But that wasn’t really great news either.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Patsy
When everyone had eaten, Pat and Dan took off on their mission of exploration. It surprised no one to see that they were walking hand in hand as they left. No one said anything, though-well, no one but Jimmy Lin. “Hey, guess what?” he said, grinning, pointing to where Pat’s laundry still hung on the tree. “The lady left her underwear behind. Probably figured it would just get in the way?”
Nobody responded but Patsy, and she said only, “Shut your mouth.” She turned her back on him and walked over to where Patrice was sitting cross-legged on the ground, studying some carved wooden objects pulled out of the yurts. “It’s none of his damn business what they do,” she said-then, lowering her voice, “Although, you know?, he’s probably right. How about that bath?”
“In a while,” Patrice said absently, looking at a piece of age-darkened wood as long as her forearm, one end flattened and rounded. “Rosaleen wants to go along, but she’s resting. Patsy? What do you think this thing is?”
Patsy considered the question. Although the object was worn and chipped at the edges, she was pretty sure of its identity. “I’d say a snow shovel-if they ever had snow here,” she hazarded. “Some kind of a shovel, anyway.” She squatted beside the other woman, poking through the little pile of artifacts. Most were wood-the shovel, a rod with a pointed, fire-hardened end (too thick to be a spear; maybe a digging stick?), something that looked like a salad fork, several things that didn’t look like anything Patsy recognized at all. What wasn’t wood was glassy rock-one pretty obviously a sharp-edged knife, the others harder to identify. “They didn’t have any metal, did they?” Patsy discovered. “Sort of like the Stone Age?”
“More like pre-Columbian America,” Patrice said thoughtfully. “Those yurts are pretty well built. . . and doesn’t this look like writing?” She flipped over an oval chunk of wood, and it was true, there were things that looked like wobbly characters incized on the wood. “Makes you wonder who these people were.”
But Patsy didn’t want to wonder about these unknown people. They were tall and skinny; they lived in tents; they farmed- there was the remains of an overgrown produce plot along the stream-and they were gone. That much they knew, and the only important fact in the lot was the last one. The Skinnies were gone. There was no chance they would ever know anything more about them; but when Patsy said as much, Patrice got a funny expression. “You’re sure of that? You don’t think we’ll all meet up again at the eschaton?”
Patsy gave her a hard look, and got up to put some new pebbles in the fire to heat. That was another thing she didn’t want to think about.
Then, when Rosaleen woke up and announced it was time for the adventure of the bath, there was another one. Patrice helped Rosaleen to the “ladies’ room” in the bushes; Martin, gathering wood for the fire, decorously diverted himself to a part of the grove they hadn’t investigated, and a moment later appeared again, looking perturbed. “There’s something odd here,” he called. “Come look.”
As the others straggled over, Patsy saw what he was talking about. “It just stops,” she said, looking in wonderment at the vegetation. It did. The gnarly trees they had used for firewood stopped short, in a mathematically precise straight line; the branches on the near side swooped and dangled in all directions, but on the side away from them the branches were bent at sharp angles. Past them was a growth of quite different vegetation, equally dense, but thick shrubbery rather than trees. There was no point where a shrub crossed into tree territory or a tree branch into the shrubs’.
Rosaleen studied the line of demarcation for a moment, then painfully lowered herself to grub at the ground. A moment later she had revealed the same sort of line that had surrounded their cell, metal and glassy segments alternating. “Do you know what I think?” she said wonderingly. “I believe there used to be one of those walls here.”
“I think so, too,” Martin confirmed. “And it had to be here for a long time-long enough for the trees to grow up against it.”
Patsy was craning her neck to see what was past the shrubbery, and what she saw made her catch her breath. “Look at that,” she called. There was open ground there, but planted- planted in regular rows of tall stalks.
“It looks like farmland,” Patrice said, staring. “And there’s a path-and, hey, what’s that thing over there on the ground?”
The thing along the path was definitely a machine. It had three wheels, bicycle-size, though the spokes were wood-the whole thing was wood, as far as Patsy could see, and it had a sort of basketwork thing in the middle. A farm cart? But if there was a farm, where was the farmer?