AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS
Warren wondered how long they had been drifting. Thirty-seven days, the regular cuts in the tree limb said. Rosa had checked each one with him. At noon each day they made the ritual slice with his worn pocket-knife, carefully memorizing each fresh gash as it was made, so they wouldn’t confuse it with the others and think it was made the day before.
“What ya lookin’ at?” Rosa said, blinking out at him from beneath the low lean-to.
“Counting them,” Warren said.
“Thirty-seven,” she said, and he knew from the sound of her voice that she didn’t believe it either. Order, the beauty of number, structure—it was nothing out here. In all those days, how could they have gotten it right?
One or two must have slipped by. Or in the days of delirium, hadn’t he dreamed about sawing down the limb, forcing the days to pass, cutting until his knee slipped in the sweat and he fainted? He couldn’t remember.
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back in. Thought I heard something.”
She sat, listening to the hollow slap of waves against the bottom of the raft. There was only the murmur of the sea and an occasional rattling of metal as their rows of tin cans shifted on the deck. In a moment she lay down again and closed her dark eyes, shutting out the stark yellow of the tropical afternoon.
Warren looked back at the limb lashed to the raft. Thirty-seven days since the Manamix went down. Thirty-seven intervals of blinding light, starvation, dread, thirst.
There was a liquid rippling in the water and a deep thump against the raft. Rosa sat up. Warren gestured for silence and waited. The jumbled planks and logs of the raft creaked and worked against each other, and then the thump came again.
They moved automatically to their positions. She squatted on a log near the edge, stripped off her white blouse and dipped it into the water. Warren brought out his stick, slotted the rubber strip through the end and braced a long crude arrow against the sling. The arrow was an inch-thick slat from the Manamix lifeboat, tapered slightly and with a long iron nail at its head.
He slitted his eyes against the glare and looked out at the shallow troughs of the waves, trying to judge the pitch of the deck. The thumping came again. Warren was almost certain it was a Swarmer now, and not one of the large fish. There was something about the sound of their heads as they probed the underside of the raft, looking for a weakness . . .
Suddenly a ripple caught his attention. Rosa was rhythmically weaving the blouse through the water, and past her scrawny breasts he could see the sea warp and lift slightly with new currents that broke the surface.
That was their tactical error, the one they always made. Instinct told them to look first, gauge the target. Now the Swarmer was gliding back into the blue shadows under the raft, flipping over and coming around for the final pass. Warren tensed, sighted down the arrow.
Rosa must have seen the form an instant earlier. She flicked the rag out with a quick jerk and the Swarmer put on a last, frantic burst of speed to catch it.
“Haeee!” Rosa screamed. His snout broke water, long thin mouth leering up, pearl white eyes focused on infinity.
Warren let go the arrow and followed it automatically, scrabbling forward on all fours. The Swarmer had taken it under his gills, the nail buried deep in folds of slick green skin.
Rosa snatched at the arrow’s line. “Slow!” he said, lowering his chest into the water. “Don’t pull it out.”
The arrow was enough to stun the Swarmer, but that was all. In a moment he would thrash free of the line. Warren hung partly over the side of the raft and stretched out. He caught a ventral fin in one hand, then another. The Swarmer moved fitfully. Warren swung himself around, the wood cutting into his hip, and levered the body partly onto the raft.
Rosa took a fin and pulled the Swarmer up, flipped it over onto its side and used a foot to roll it away from the water. It began to arch its back, twisting to gain leverage for a push over the side. Its eyes bulged and the thin gills rasped audibly as they flared open and closed.
“Hurry!” Rosa shouted. Warren had his knife out and was weaving over the Swarmer, waiting for the right angle of attack. It slid away from him, toward the water. As it turned the knife came down, slipping into the soft tissues of the side and riding up against the spine. Warren slammed it down the length of the body, feeling the Swarmer convulse in an agony of pain. Then it straightened, gave a slight shiver and was dead.
Rosa was moaning rhythmically, holding it by a fin. Warren stepped back, keeping his footing against the swell, and nudged her.
“Get into the shelter,” he said.
She looked up at him blankly, paused and then scuttled under the plywood sheet that formed the roof of the lean-to. He looked after her with mild disgust.
It was the same as the last three times they’d killed one, but this time she seemed more distant and harder to reach. It was as though the Swarmers threw her back into an earlier stage of life, like a child. She could only tolerate the kill if it was part of a ritual, an elaborate program of actions that, if perfectly followed, enabled her to completely shut out the reality of the event.
Fluids were beginning to drain out of the Swarmer as it rocked on the deck. Warren cursed himself for his slowness and fetched the tin cans. He propped the Swarmer against a log, where the planking of the dismantled lifeboat joined the log and made a hollow. He jammed the cans against its body there, where most of the juices were dripping out, and braced the body against the swaying of the raft.
The green skin was slick, like a seal’s. The dorsal and ventral fins were sagging now, in death, but they helped guide the Swarmer through the water with incredible swiftness. In almost every detail it was like an ordinary fish. A little outsized, perhaps, almost four feet long.
The head gave it away. It didn’t taper and slant forward, but bulged with a large brain case. It carried the heavy bone forehead like a dolphin, and its face had the curiously squeezed look of some of the larger fish. But the thin mouth, large eyes and jutting jaw were alien. Earth had never evolved this particular combination.
“Look!” Rosa called. Warren stared out into the hills and valleys of water in motion, following her gesture. A gray cylinder floated ten yards from the raft.
The Swarmer was dribbling out the last drops from its lymphatic glands, and Warren knew that to get more would take both of them, hacking and sawing their way through the muscular hide, pressing the flesh for fluid. It wasn’t worth the trouble of forcing Rosa into cooperation.
He secured the cans and rolled the Swarmer over the side. Spray splashed into his face. His attention was focused on the cylinder and he did the job routinely for what seemed like the thousandth time, although it probably was somewhere in the twenties. Almost one for every day, he thought.
“Pull it in,” he ordered, moving back to the center of the raft. Rosa peered out at him from her shelter, uncomprehending.
He snorted in frustration. Perhaps he should slap her into awareness, like the time before. But the cylinder was drifting slowly away.
He moved gracefully to the tree limb and started unlashing it. His fingers were puffy from constant contact with water and the strips of bark slipped out of them.
In a moment Warren had it free and was walking at a crouch toward the raft edge nearest the cylinder. He noted automatically that no slight ripples disturbed the surface, no green shapes flitted in the deeps below.
It looked safe, just like the times before. If the Skimmers were laying a trap for him, they were taking their time about springing it.
He stopped a foot short of the edge and balanced himself against the swell. The gray tube bobbed sluggishly in the trough of a wave and drifted away a bit more.
Warren breathed deeply, curled his toes reflexively for balance, and leaned against the pitch of the deck, extending his arms out until his muscles popped. The limb was short at least a yard. He couldn’t reach the tube.
He swayed back, relaxing, and tried again.
Still short. And the gap had widened by a foot.
Warren closed his eyes against the biting afternoon glare and felt his leg muscles weaken. He mustn’t allow himself to get depressed.
If he let go, just once, he would be sucked into the same endless caverns Rosa was wandering. No, he had to hold on.
Warren turned and walked back to the shelter. He realized now how badly he’d wanted that tube, how much he’d looked forward to it.
He might have been able to understand this one. The second message had been a real improvement over the first. There had even been three English words in that one. So this third . . .
“Ah! Ah!” Rosa grunted, nudging him. She gestured frantically, clawing the air.
Warren jerked his head around and searched where the tube had been. A dark blue form leaped out of the water near it. It was a little larger than a Swarmer and it skipped lightly over the greenish foam of a wave.
Before Warren could move or even recognize the Skimmer, it ploughed into the water near the tube and submerged. An instant later it shot out again in an explosion of spray, caught the tube and threw it into the air with a smooth jerk of its head.
Warren brought the limb around, but the Skimmer had turned with startling abruptness and was speeding away. It disappeared into the slope of a wave like green marble and thrashed through. In a moment it was lost in the endlessly changing topography of the southern Pacific.
Rosa gave a dazed cry, but Warren ignored her and scrambled to the edge of the raft. The tube was only a few yards away and he quickly fished it in, noting in the back of his mind that the woman was cowering in the shelter, mumbling to herself.
He carried the slick organic cylinder back to the center of the raft. He handled it carefully, looking for anything that might be different about this one.
It separated easily at the middle and came apart with a small moist pop. Inside was the same rolled sheet. He spread it on the deck.
consque kopf amn solid. da ølen small
youth schlect uns. deringer change da.
uns b wsw. sagen arbeit bei mouth.
circle stein nongo.
Warren stared down at the thin parchmentlike scroll for a long time. Coming this close to the raft was—for a Skimmer—an incredibly brave act.
They must be getting desperate. Whatever it was they wanted him to know, time must be running out for them.
This would be the last message, he knew. And, shaking his head, almost crying with frustration, he saw that it made no more sense than the first one.
When he woke up in the water the Manamix was going down. Long fingers of tropical lightning curled beneath black clouds and he could see the ship taking water heavily to starboard.
It tilted steadily like a giant land animal caught in the endless net of the Swarmers’ spinning. The long green strands licked up the sides and over the deck. They were strong and flexible lines of organic chain molecules, spun out from their belly pouches by the thousands of Swarmers who now gathered around the bows. Biologists thought the strands must be used in the mating process, but why they should be of such length no one knew. Those, together with the holes already punched in the side by suicidal Swarmers in groups of three or four, could sink any light vessel.
The Manamix was shipping water dangerously. Warren knew the jets would never get out here, five hundred miles off the west coast of South America, in a driving, splintering storm. They would never arrive, as the Captain had said, to drop the canisters of poison that would stop the Swarmers. The Manamix had run out of the chemicals days ago, and now the ship wallowed in the swell and aboard the lights were going off and people were screaming.
The picture fixed in his mind. The Manamix was frozen as it slid over into its black grave, some orange running lights still winking. Lightning crackled and reflected in a thousand shattered mirrors of the sea. Stench of salt, biting cold, a hail of rain that blinded him. Then the thump of the empty lifeboat against a drifting box nearby and he began to move, to fight again against the current.
The rest was impersonal, as though it had happened to someone else. He climbed into the lifeboat and began paddling it away from the Manamix and the Swarmers. He sighted Rosa in the dim light and managed to pull the woman aboard. She was a journalist he’d met before on the Manamix.
She was covering the Swarmers for a wire service and wanted to take the run up the South American coast, in hopes they’d get to see a Swarm. The aliens had nearly driven man from the oceans within the last year, and the Manamix was one of the few freighter lines still running in the Pacific. She’d tried to get some opinions from Warren over drinks in the lounge, but he was an engineer and didn’t know any more about the Swarmer landings than she did.
They drifted all night. The two lay in the bottom of the boat, trying not to make any noise, because if the Swarm found it and thought it was occupied, their bone foreheads would smash the side in minutes.
As it turned out, the lifeboat began to sink without help from the aliens. It must have been damaged coming over the side of the Manamix. Seepage Warren found in the night turned into a steady stream by the time the warm dawn broke over them.
In the first light they could make out other refuse from the Manamix drifting nearby. There were uprooted trees as well, probably carried out to sea by the storm that had rushed down on the Manamix just as the Swarmers struck.
Warren risked his life and went into the water to collect it. He knew the Swarmers were savage and mindless. He’d read an article that said they were just the youngest forms and the Skimmers were an advanced minority. Swarmers obviously couldn’t have built the ships that dropped into Earth’s atmosphere and seeded the oceans five years ago.
But young or not, they would kill him instantly if they found him in the water.
Laboriously, for three days they paddled and collected, cut and built and lashed. They broke up the lifeboat and used it for decking over the logs and planking they could find. A coil of wire provided lashing. An aluminum railing could be pounded into adequate nails.
Rosa held up well, at first. They never saw any other survivors of the Manamix. Elementary navigation told Warren they were drifting almost precisely due west; if they could hold on, a search pattern might eventually find them.
One night, feeling a curious liberation from his past, he took Rosa with a power and confidence that surprised him. He was sure he would survive.
He used some of the lifeboat’s rations for bait and caught a few fish. After some experimentation he made a bow and arrow accurate enough to shoot fish on the surface, but the bait and line were faster.
Then the water began to run out. Rosa kept their stores under the plywood shelter, and at seven days Warren found the water was almost gone. She had been drinking far more than her share.
“I had to,” she said, backing away from him. “I can’t stand it out here. I get so thirsty. And the sun, it’s too hot, I just . . .”
He hit her a few times, short, brutal chops. But there was no satisfaction in it. She had taken their water and it was gone. After an hour of depression, with Rosa cringing away from him at the far end of the raft, he began to think again.
There was a strange freedom in him which came to the surface when he was working on the problem. In the cool, orderly processes of his intellect he found a kind of rest.
He squatted on a level plank and automatically rocked with the swell, but inside, where he lived, the world wasn’t just the gurgle and rush of waves, the bleaching raw edge of sun and wind. Inside, there were the books and the diagrams.
More, there were bits and pieces of things he’d known, and now a chance to put them together.
Chemistry. Warren rigged a distilling apparatus using two tin cans. He cut a small slit in the rubber stopper of a water bottle and lowered it into the sea on a long fishing line.
He vaguely remembered—or did he imagine?—that the deeper water was colder. If he pulled a sealed can of it up from twenty feet below, and let it sit inside a second can in the sun, perhaps it would steam like a champagne bucket. Then the evaporated water would condense on the side of the first can, as salt-free moisture.
He tried it again and again. It never worked. But he was trying, he was thinking, he was holding onto himself. That was enough.
Nine days out the water was gone. Rosa cried and called him filthy names. She bit her shoulder in a rage but didn’t seem to notice it.
The next day the sea was more turbulent. Water poured over the deck, washing them continually so it was impossible to sleep or even rest. In the late afternoon Warren discovered small jelly seahorses about the size of a dime riding in the sea foam that lapped over the raft. He stared at them and tried to remember what he’d learned of
biology.
He knew if they started drinking anything with a high salt content the end would come with stunning swiftness. But he had to take a chance.
Warren kicked and talked the woman into helping him collect a handful of the seahorses. He put a few on his tongue, tentatively, and waited until they melted. They were salty and fishy to the taste, but seemed less salty than sea water. The cool moisture from a full handful brought them both relief, and they gathered them in eagerly until darkness fell.
Day eleven was intolerable.
Warren sat with closed eyes, carefully working through the clear, logical hallways of his mind. The temptation to drink sea water was festering in him, boiling into the clean and neat compartment where he was trying to live.
He had to keep running over the chain of logic to keep himself convinced.
If he drank sea water, he would take in a certain quantity of dissolved salt. But his body needed very little salt, and it had to get rid of any salt it absorbed above this small amount. The work of secreting extra salt is done by the kidneys, which remove from the blood all waste products in the form of urine.
For this the kidneys need water. At least a pint a day.
He made it into a chant and said it over and over. The waves danced and billowed before him. Their dried rations lay heavy and dead in his stomach. He focused on the chant.
Drink a pint of sea water a day. That gives about ten cubic inches of salt-free water.
But the kidneys need more than ten cubic inches to process the salt in the pint.
The kidneys react. They take water from the body tissue.
The body dries up. The tongue turns black.
Nausea. Fever. Death.
Later, Warren guessed that he sat there most of the day, reciting the logic to himself, polishing it down to a few key words, making it perfect.
The thump under the deck brought him out of it. Rosa stirred. Warren knew suddenly, intuitively, what it was. A Swarmer had found them.
He moved smoothly, concentrating. Here was another problem to be solved.
The thumping continued, working across the raft. They were different from the playful knocks the dolphins made.
The Swarmer broke water five yards from the raft and turned belly-over once, goggling at them with a bulging eye. Rosa threw up her hands in terror and the Swarmer, which had started to dive again, stopped and circled around the raft, following her awkward scuttling.
Coolly, Warren shot.
Hauling in the wounded alien, battering it to stillness with a club, gutting it and watching the thin, pale yellow fluid ooze from the tissues into the cans—he did these things alone, working in absolute concentration, and never noticed Rosa. He didn’t hear her whimpering, stumbling approach as he lifted a can to his lips.
He caught the cool, slightly acrid taste of the fluid for an instant. And then she struck the can from his hands and it clattered on the deck, spilling the precious juices across the boards.
His punch drove her to her knees. “Why? What . . .”
“Wrong,” she stuttered out. “Ugly, bad.” She shook her head, blinking.
“They’re not . . . not normal. Can’t eat . . .”
“You want to drink, don’t you?”
“Na . . . yeah, but not that. Maybe a little, I . . .”
He looked at her coldly and she moved away. The Swarmer was dripping its precious fluids out onto the planking and Warren rushed to prop cans under it. He drank the first can, and the second. Rosa sat on the other side of the raft and whimpered.
The third can he set down halfway between them, and after a moment Rosa came over and sipped it slowly. The taste was bland, not very salty, and remarkably like stale beer.
After that they came to an unspoken agreement. Rosa would help lure the Swarmer if it came near the raft, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—gut it and extract the watery pouches of fin-fluid, the blood or the eyes. Warren had to do that.
While Rosa sat dreamily swaying at the center of their rectangular island, humming and singing to herself, coiling deeper into her own private retreats from sun and salt, Warren worked and thought.
He studied the Swarmer body, finding the soft pulpy spots where it was vulnerable to an arrow, tracing its circulatory system and the delicate flow of muscles that moved it. Almost every day now they heard the shuddering bang of a Swarmer under the raft, and always it eventually surfaced and was killed.
They seemed to have none of the wary, vicious predatory instincts the Swarms had shown near land. Perhaps the lone Swarmers out here were scouts for the Swarmer schools that swept the oceans, and were not trained—or bred—to attack.
Warren experimented, practiced, tried new things. He cut up the cloth and made small bags to hold the richer parts of the Swarmer carcass, and then chewed it until every precious drop of the brackish, warm fluid was squeezed out. It nearly made him sick, and after several days, when his body’s reserves of water had been built up again, he twisted pieces of the flesh in the cloth and got nearly the same amount.
On Day Twenty-one Rosa sighted the capsule. Her cry awakened Warren from a vague, shifting sleep under the lean-to.
Darting away in the distance was the first Skimmer they’d sighted. The Skimmers were an enigma to the biologists who studied the aliens. There were not many of them, and they operated independently of the Swarms. Only one or two had been killed, in the first months when the aliens were breeding explosively through the oceans—since then, the lean blue forms stayed well out of range of ordinary weapons.
But they didn’t control the Swarms, either. Skimmers had been attacked by Swarmers within sight of several ships. They maneuvered intelligently and fought well, but Skimmers lacked the thick frontal bone structure of the Swarmers, and they didn’t display such blind ferocity.
Warren fished in the gray tube and turned it over in his hands. The smooth surface of plasticlike organic substance was obviously machined—or was it? Could it have been grown, perfect and symmetrical? The alien ships that dumped eggs into Earth’s oceans were obviously the product of an industrial culture. But how could the Swarmers or Skimmers have made them, without maniples?
The thin slick scroll inside was indecipherable.
sechton xxmenapu de an sw by w able. sagon
mxxil vesse l ansagen mannia wir uns??fth
asdmnø5b erty earthn profuilen. co
kallen knoptft.
Warren studied it and turned the combinations of letters over in his mind endlessly. It was no code, because some of the words were clearly English or something else close to German.
vesse l must be vessel. And ansagen—to say, to announce? Warren wished he had more than a dim memory of his college language courses.
The message was in clear, cold typeface like a newspaper, and somehow was impressed onto the sheet without showing any slight indentation on the back. A photographic process, perhaps.
It gave him something to focus on through the long bleaching days of waiting, of trying to ignore the salt itch in his growing beard and all over his skin, of listening to the quiet whisper of waves and the endless weaving chant that Rosa had taken up.
She shrieked in terror whenever a Swarmer approached in the distance now, but Warren guessed that, on some level, she knew they were relatively safe until the raft neared a Swarm. The scouting Swarmers might see them, but apparently they couldn’t remember the raft’s location well enough to bring a full school of the aliens back to attack.
And the Swarmers were coming more frequently now. They were beginning to get two, sometimes three in a day.
The second message gave him fuel for the burning rationality that consumed him. Again a long blue body, a blur of motion, dropped it near the raft just after a Swarmer kill, as though the Skimmers were using it as a diversion.
gefahrlich gross solid mnxxl%8
anaxle”. uns. normen 286 w!! scatter
fortune lilapa xerot.
Warren wished for writing implements, if only to keep track of the endless permutations he made on the messages. gefahrlich—danger, dangerous? gross: big, great. uns again, German for US.
He tried to scratch marks on the rolled sheets, but the surface wouldn’t take an impression. If there were some way to communicate with them, to ask questions, he might get an idea of what the Skimmers wanted. To negotiate? What would be a sign of peaceful intent?
In the back of his mind Warren was beginning to frame theories to explain the messages. Occasionally he recoiled from the alienness of it, but those impulses were getting easier to control.
He understood without ever admitting to himself that his absorption in planning, detail and the cold beauties of logic was as much a comforting distraction as Rosa’s primitive chant. So the messages were necessary to his balance.
But he knew it was pointless unless he could fathom the confused lines set out with such rigid neatness on the thin sheets he held.
He squatted, peering at the third message with tired red eyes for long, dragging minutes. Time, he needed time.
“Heh! Wa-Warren!” Rosa called. He followed her gesture.
There was a dot on the horizon. It danced into visibility over the ragged waves, bobbing with random jerks, but it was there.
“Land,” Warren breathed deeply.
Rosa’s eyes swelled and she barked out a sharp cackling laughter through drawn lips. “Land! Land!” she cried, bouncing on her calloused feet in an erratic jig.
Warren blinked and forced his eyes to focus. He estimated the current and measured the angle the dot made with their course. They could reach it by dark, perhaps sooner. He took his club and began knocking out the supports of the plywood lean-to. In the center of the raft he knelt, measured with hands and fingers, and began constructing a series of supports for a vertical beam.
The work did not take long. Setting a loose-fitting collar into the deck took all Warren’s remaining nails, but the large plywood sheet belted easily to the vertical beam he erected in the collar. Wire passed through holes in the sheet held it to the beam, and trailing lines at the corners allowed him to tack with it from a position at the rear of the raft. It made a passable sail.
He dragged out a makeshift rudder he’d fashioned weeks before and fitted it into the housing he had laboriously carved out near the back edge of the raft. It was weak and clumsy, but with it he could impart a slight side motion to the raft, and hopefully steer toward the island ahead.
It had to be an island. Their chances of ever encountering another were negligible. The chance to stand on firm ground again . . .
Warren held his hand up against the buttery afternoon glare. Firm ground. No continual sickening pitch of the deck. Solid.
solid.
Could the Skimmers mean the island? gefahrlich gross solid. Dangerous great island. scatter. Leave? To scatter was to rebound off something. Avoid the island?
Warren smiled to himself. There was a key to it. Some beauty, some order that would lift him up out of this stinking raft.
He pulled slowly on the wires and canted the plywood sheet at an angle to the breeze. The rudder creaked as he adjusted it and held it in place with a wooden chock.
The island was nearer and he could see a low ridge running down the middle of it. It didn’t look very high. He did a mental calculation and decided they would arrive sooner than he’d expected. The wind was picking up, too.
Rosa was moving about the raft, humming to herself and eating from the food tins that remained. Warren felt a twinge of anger. She was eating out of turn.
She seemed calm, once she’d seen the land. She passed near him and looked up, grinning wildly, and said, “Okay?” Warren nodded.
Okay. They would make the island. But he wasn’t satisfied, not yet. He was bringing them in to graze along the southern shore, to have a look before they beached.
Southern? What was there . . .
wsw. West south west. uns b wsw.
we be wsw?
On the wsw part of the island? We—the Skimmers.
He noticed Rosa squatting at the front of the raft, dipping it down slightly into the rushing bluegreen swell and throwing thin sheets of hissing foam over the planks. She knew it wasn’t good for the raft to ride like that. It was slowing them down.
But he didn’t say anything to her. He needed the time. The Skimmers were all he had out here and they had tried to tell him
something.
They were different. They didn’t have Swarms, they didn’t attack. Their bodies were thinner and they carried a larger brain case.
A vague thought flitted across Warren’s mind, a half-defined guess. Was this all a kind of warfare, the Swarms out of control, attacking and isolating the continents while the Skimmers tried to stop them? Something like a race war between political factions?
The island grew and a dim shadow caught Warren’s eye. It lay low in the water around the island, a brown line throwing up white rushes of surf that caught the light.
A reef. The island was going to be harder to reach. He would have to bring the raft in and loop around it, trying to find a path into the lagoon. Either that or smash into the reef that ringed the island.
circle stein nongo. stein was—rock! don’t go into the circle.
Warren slammed the tiller over full.
It was all there. The Skimmers were telling him, leading him.
Rosa grunted and looked back at him. She had noticed the change in the raft’s direction. He ignored her and pulled in the wires to cant the plywood sheet further into the wind.
It was all there! small youth schlect uns. The Skimmers had misspelled schlecht, German for bad. small youth bad us. Were the Swarmers a lower stage of development? Just out of the egg, primitive, running wild in a different environment from the
home world?
the swarmers are bad for us. US—the Skimmers. Or was Warren included? He must be.
Rosa stumbled toward him and the island seemed to grow.
“Wha’? Land! We go there!”
He wrinkled the salt-caked skin around his eyes, focusing on her face, but it looked different, strange. He didn’t know this woman. She was nothing to him.
She stepped closer and he hit her. She whimpered and sat on the deck, peering up at him in confusion.
He ignored her, feeling elated and calm. He gauged the small shifts in the wind and sighted in on the dark mass ahead. The reef stood out clearly now. And . . .
There was something moving on the beach.
Even at this distance he could make them out. Long green bodies lay in the sand, moving slowly inland. They were crawling with painful effort, dragging themselves along, but a few had already made it to the green margin of vegetation.
Swarmers. A Swarm that was learning to crawl out of the sea, practicing on a deserted island in the Pacific. Swarmers entering the next stage of their development.
The island was suddenly nearer and Rosa was pounding at him weakly, shrieking. He had been standing there, numb, trying to think, to understand.
“Crazy? Crazy? We die out here.”
“What?” he said, distracted. The raft was veering, but it would come close to the reef.
“You ’fraid! ’Fraid the rocks.” She gaped at him, eyes bulging. “No man would . . .”
“Shut up.” They were rushing down on the island and the current was picking up.
“Na . . . na, I won’t. Gimmie.” She looked around wildly. “I swim.”
She scrabbled along the deck, picking at the planking. In a moment she found a larger board and tried to pry it up.
Warren breathed deeply and felt a calm swell up from his chest. He would do one last thing for her, and then be alone.
He walked over to the struggling woman, judged the correct angle and levered the board out of the deck with a rasping of nails. She snatched at it.
They were running by the reef now and Warren could see the forms on the beach clearly. They had stubby thick fins at the side that worked slowly against the sand. They crawled like turtles.
No, land wasn’t the answer. The Swarmers were on the land now. They’d take it eventually, just as they’d taken the oceans. A man who clung to the land was finished. No, the answer . . .
Warren turned and looked out to sea. The rim of the world was an irregular line in the dusk. A sweeping circular arc, broken here and there by clouds. Clean, free. wsw.
Rosa went over the side with a splash. There was a narrow path through the reef no more than fifty yards away and she made for it, floating partially on the board.
Warren automatically studied the water, but no green forms followed her. If the Swarm wasn’t large here they might not notice her before she reached the beach.
He ran an eye along her probable path, estimating, and worked it out. It was good to be calculating again. Rosa would make the shore in a few more minutes.
It was surprisingly difficult to see her, though, for darkness was falling rapidly now. Under the wind the sea was breaking up into oily facets that reflected the dull orange of the sunset on the clouds. An ocean of mirrors.
He peered down at the water. Mirrors. What did he see there?
“No man . . .” she’d said. Maybe not. Maybe he was something more, now. The Skimmers could tell him that.
He felt the tug of the lines in his hand and made a slight correction in the heading to steady a yaw in the raft.
He was gathering speed. When the thin scream came out of the dusk behind him he did not turn around.