Alice stood upon the bank, her toes almost touching the water. The bank was, at this point, only an inch above the water. The short grass continued from the plain to form a solid mat that grew down on the river bed. Burton could feel the grass under his feet as far as he could wade. He threw his soap onto the bank and swam out for about forty feet and dived down. Here the current suddenly became stronger and the depth much greater. He swam down, his eyes open, until the light failed and his ears hurt. He continued on down and then his fingers touched bottom. There was grass there, too.
When he swam back to where the water was up no his waist he saw that Alice had shed her clothes. She was in closer to the shore, but squatting so that the water was up to her neck. She” was soaping her head and face.
He called to Frigate, “Why don’t you come in?”
“I’m guarding the grails,” Frigate said.
“Very good!” Burton swore under his breath. He should have thought of that and appointed somebody as a guard. He wasn’t in actuality a good leader, he tended to let things go to pot, to permit them to disintegrate. Admit it. On Earth he had been the head of many expeditions, none of which had been distinguished by efficiency or strong management. Yet, during the Crimean War, when he was head of Beatson’s Irregulars, training the wild Turkish cavalry, the Bashi-Bazouks, he had done quite well, far better than most. So he should not be reprimanding himself…
Lev Ruach climbed out of the water and ran his hands over his skinny body to take off the drops. Burton got out, too, and sat down beside him. Alice turned her back on him, whether on purpose or not he had no way of knowing, of course.
“It’s not just being young again that delights me,” Lev said in his heavily accented English. “It’s having this leg back.” He tapped his right knee.
“I lost it in a traffic accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was fifty years old.” He laughed and said; “There was an irony to the situation that some” might call fate. I had been captured by Arabs two years before when I was looking for minerals in the desert, in the state of Israel, you understand…’
“You mean Palestine?” Burton said. ”
“The Jews founded an independent state in 1948,” Lev said. “You wouldn’t know about that, of course. I’ll tell you all about it some time. Anyway, I was captured and tortured by Arab guerrillas. I won’t go into the details; it makes me sick to recall it. But I escaped that night, though not before bashing in the heads of two with a rock and shooting two more with a rifle. The others fled, and I got away. I was lucky. An army patrol picked me up. However, two years later, when I was in the States, driving down the Turnpike, a truck, a big semi, I’ll describe that later, too, cut in front of me and jackknifed and I crashed into it. I was badly hurt, and my right leg was amputated below the knee. But the point of this story is that the truck driver had been born in Syria. So, you see the Arabs were out to get me, and they did; though they did not kill me. That job was done by our friend from Tau Ceti. Though I can’t say he did anything to humanity except hurry up its doom.”
“What do you mean by that?” Burton said.
“There were millions dying from famine, even the States were on a strictly rationed diet, and pollution of our water, land, and air was killing other millions. The scientists said that half of Earth’s oxygen supply would be cut off in ten years because the phytoplankton of the oceans – they furnished half the world’s oxygen, you know – were dying. The oceans were polluted.”
“The oceans?”
“You don’t believe it? Well, you died in 1890, so you find it hard to credit. But some people were predicting in 1968 exactly what did happen in 2008. I believed them, I was a biochemist. But most of the population, especially those who counted, the masses and the politicians, refused to believe until it was too late. Measures were taken as the situation got worse, but they were always too weak and too late and fought against by groups that stood to lose money, if effective measures were taken. But it’s a long sad story, and if we’re to build houses, we’d best start immediately after lunch.”
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