12

The day became warm and humid. Hot breezes hurried through the forest all afternoon, carrying strange odors and small, flowery floaters. Max spotted large bladderthings drifting high up among the swaying branches, occasionally eating one of the flowers. One bladder-creature let out some air and seemed about to descend in pursuit of a floater, but a gust of wind swept them both away. Weak from lack of food, Max sat with Lucinda against a tree, dozing but unable to sleep. Emil lay on a bed of leaves.

“He’s dead!” Lucinda cried late in the afternoon. Max roused himself and crawled over to the motionless figure. Lucinda was crying softly as she knelt at her brother’s side.

Max leaned over and saw that the boy was breathing. “He’s alive.”

“Maybe he’ll get better,” Lucinda whispered, as if fearful of waking him. Max crawled back to the tree and tried to find some sleep.

Emil was still unconscious when Max awoke and saw stars appearing over the clearing as the yellow-white sun went down. He peered at his timer and saw that it had taken ten hours for the sun to set.

Lucinda opened her eyes suddenly, turned toward her brother’s motionless body, and cried, “We’ve got to do something!”

“Maybe he’ll be better by morning,” Max said, trying to put his arm around her.

“You know he won’t,” she answered, pushing him away.

Max remembered his father telling him about the senseless death of his friend when a quake had struck the mining town on Mercury. This made no sense, either, Max thought angrily as he looked at Lucinda.

Her eyes were wide as she stared at her brother in the twilight. “I could have kept him from going into that grass,” she said.

“It wasn’t your fault. He went ahead of us before we could notice the hooked briars, or suspect they might be deadly. Try to get some more rest, or we won’t be able to do anything.” He felt exhausted as Lucinda put her head on his shoulder.

When he awoke again, long after the alien midnight, a dim red sun had risen over the clearing. A few minutes later it was joined by a pale white sun that stayed low over the trees, casting a sickly glow into the briar-grass. Max realized that they were probably on a planet circling the bright yellow-white sun that had set, in a system that included these two, more distant stars. He moved carefully away from Lucinda, then crawled over and listened to Emil’s labored breathing.

“He’s worse, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes,” Max admitted as he stood up. “We’re rested enough to carry him back now. Maybe the passage has opened.”

“Moving him might hurt him even more.”

“We have no choice. You take his feet.”

They lifted him. He showed no sign of waking. Carrying him sideways, they moved through the forest. Max began to sweat. Emil let out a loud rasp as they began to climb the rocky incline below the outcropping. Max slipped on the wet moss but held his balance, gripping Emil more tightly as he and Lucinda staggered into the opening.

They hurried through the cave and entered the portal. When they neared the point where the barrier had stopped them, they put Emil down, and Max went ahead, feeling for the obstacle.

“It’s not here!” he shouted, then bumped into it. “It’s still up,” he said in despair, then slid down against it and wrapped his arms around his middle to keep from shaking. His stomach knotted as he asked himself what he was going to do. Try to keep from panicking, he supposed. Try not to let his own terrors push him and Lucinda into a panic that would destroy any chances they might have. Maybe this was what people meant when they talked about being brave— going on, staying calm, trying to survive in as reasoned a way as possible even when you were certain it would do no good.

Lucinda’s dark shape sat down next to him and said, “He’s going to die, and we’re never going to leave this place. Why is this stupid thing here? What do they want us to do?”

“I think we got lured into this by an automatic transport system,” he said. “I just don’t feel that anything alive is running it.”

“It’s going to kill us,” she said tearfully.

“If we’d been lured in for some sort of programmed purpose,” Max said, “it wouldn’t include letting us die.”

“Then the habitat got caught by it in the same way.”

“Probably.”

“Where?”

Max felt weak. “Near Earth’s Sun, maybe.”

“But we saw the Sun disappear as we came in.”

“Maybe it only looked that way. We were pulled into a station. . . .”

Emil began to wheeze, as if something was caught in his lungs. Max and Lucinda crawled over to him.

“Emil,” Max whispered.

The boy was struggling to say something, but Max heard only more wheezing. He touched Emil’s forehead. It was hot with fever.

“He’s worse,” Lucinda said.

They crawled back to the barrier. Its hardness felt cruel against Max’s back. He felt angry and resentful. Was there an alien turning it on and off somewhere?

Lucinda rested against him. “All we can do is wait,” he said, “until the barrier lets us through. There’s nowhere else we can go.”

“We can die here or wander around some more,” she said, “and end up even more lost.” Her body shuddered against him, but she didn’t cry. He clenched his teeth and tried to think. It seemed certain that the return to Earth had somehow started this chain of events. Why couldn’t the habitat have stayed away? From Centauri it might have gone on to another star, and then another. . . .

He put his arm around Lucinda as she fell asleep. He listened to her breathing for a while, then closed his eyes and surrendered to the dark.