Hulann was afraid. Desperately. Painfully. But there was something else stirring in him as well. It took some moments before he realized that this other thing was guilt.
Though surely there must have been things the boy wished to say to Hulann (curses and damnations should fill at least an hour; a naoli rarely engaged in physical violence with one of his own kind, resorting to sustained verbal denunciations to work off accumulated frustrations), he merely sat upon the rubble, the concrete, wood and steel, the plastic and aluminum, watching the alien. He did not seem frightened nor particularly angry. Curious, more than anything else.
It was quite an uncomfortable situation as far as Hulann was concerned. To be spat upon and reviled would have raised his own hatred. Hating the boy, he could have acted. But the lengthening silence was a wall he could not breach.
Hulann went to the rat, kicked the chunks of stone away and looked at the corpse. He prodded it with a tentative foot. The fleshy body quivered with a post mortem muscle spasm and was still again. He walked back to the boy and looked up at him where he sat just slightly above eye level.
The boy looked back, his head tilted to one side. He was, Hulann supposed, a pretty specimen by human standards. His head seemed somewhat too large, but its features were well placed for his species. He had a thick mass of golden hair. Hair alone astounded the scaled naoli; golden hair was nearly too much to comprehend. Blue eyes beneath yellow brows, a small nose, and thin lips. His smooth skin was dotted here and there with what the humans called 'freckles' and strangely considered an attribute-but which the naoli chose to regard as imperfections in coloration and possibly the marks of disease (although they never had been able to study a freckled human at close quarters).
'What are you doing here?' Hulann asked.
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
Hulann interpreted this as indecision, though he was not certain that some more subtle, complex answer was being given.
'You must have some reason for being down here in the cellars!'
'Hiding,' the boy said simply.
Hulann felt the guilt again. He was doubly frightened. To be in the presence of a human after all that had happened was terrifying enough. But he was also afraid of his own guilt-and his lack of concern for that guilt. A good naoli would immediately call for help on the Phasersystem, then turn himself into the traumatist and get himself sent home for therapy. Somehow, though, the guilt feeling seemed fitting. Deep in his overmind, he had a desire to know penance.
He repeated the arguments fed to all the naoli by the Phasersystem during the psychological conditioning periods every morning. He attempted to recall that cold, eerie forest where the plants had been sentient and monsters had lurked in the trees. But that seemed silly now.
'Are you turning me in?' the boy asked.
'That is my duty.'
'Of course. Your duty.' It was said without malice.
'I would be severely punished.'
The boy said nothing.
'Unless, of course, you were to escape before I could apprehend you,' Hulann said.
Even as he spoke, he could not believe his vocal apparatus had formed the words. He had always been an individual of great common sense, of cool thought and reasoned action. Now, he was engaging in sheer madness.
'That's no good,' the boy said, shaking his head so his yellow hair bounced and sprayed about. To Hulann, the sight was breathtaking. 'I can't get away. I crawled in here because I thought it was safe. I thought I'd come out when you'd all gone.'
'Ten years,' Hulann said. 'That would be ten years.' The boy looked surprised. 'That's how long our researches will take-the reconstruction of daily human life alone.'
'Anyway,' the boy interrupted, 'I'm stuck here. There's food and water. I thought I could hole up. Then you came along. See, it's my leg.'
Hulann moved closer, raising the double lids completely free of his huge, oval eyes. 'What's wrong with it?'
'I was hurt,' the boy said, 'in the final stand.'
'You participated in the battle?'
'I was on a grenade lobbing station. Loader, not marksman. We were struck with something. Don't know what. See? Here. It's kind of dirty, but you can see.'
Hulann was within a foot of the boy now. He saw a tear in the lad's thigh, perhaps five inches in length. It was crusted with dirt and blood, very ugly looking. His trouser leg had been torn off, and there was nothing to protect the wound from all the filth it had come into contact with. Hulann could see a giant bruise spreading out in all directions from the gash.
'You'll poison from that,' he said.
The boy shrugged.
'Oh, certainly you will.' He turned and started back toward the other cellar, beyond the caved-in ceiling.
'What are you doing?' the human asked.
'I've got a kit in the next room. I'll bring it back and do something for your leg.'
When he returned with the medicines, the boy had come down from the rubble and was sitting on the floor. Hulann could see that he was in pain. But the moment the boy realized the naoli had returned, he erased the grimace from his features.
'Some of the medicines would endanger you,' he said, talking as much for his own gratification as for the human's. 'But I think I can remember which ones will do some good.' He fumbled through the kit, brought out a hypodermic needle designed for naoli skin. He would have to remember to be gentle; human skin was fragile. He filled it with green liquid from a green bottle. When he turned to inject it into the boy's thigh, he stopped. 'It should be cleaned,' he said.
'It won't clot,' the boy advised. 'It stopped bleeding a lot faster when I let the dirt collect.'
Hulann dampened a sterile sponge and bent to the muddied wound. Abruptly, he recoiled, realizing he was going to have to touch the human.
'Could you clean it?' he asked of the boy.
The human took the sponge, smelled it for some reason or other, then began swabbing the wound. It was soon apparent that three hands were required to do a proper job, two to hold away the ragged edges of the flesh and the third to daub at the crushed slash.
'Here,' Hulann said at last, taking the sponge. 'Hold your hand here.'
And he touched the human. He held one side of the wound while the boy held the other, and he worked the antiseptic into the flesh until he had sponged away the last of the dirt. New blood slowly welled, ran down the leg.
Hulann injected the green fluid into several points about the wound, then bound the thigh in a pressure bandage of light, two-molecule cloth that had almost no bulk. The bleeding stopped.
'It will be healed in three to four days,' he said.
'We had these bandages too. But they were pretty scarce for civilians during the last ten years of the war.'
As Hulann repacked the kit, he asked, 'Why didn't you just let the rat kill me?'
'They're ugly. No one should die under one.'
Hulann winced. His double stomach burned on both levels with acidic agitation. Surely his guilt index must have risen higher than eighteen points. Or was it merely that his guilt was now a conscious thing?
'But I am a naoli,' he argued. 'We're at war.'
The boy did not answer. When Hulann clamped down the top of the medical kit, the boy said, 'My name's Leo. Do you have one? A name?'
'Hulann.'
He thought it over, nodded his yellow head with approval. 'I'm eleven. How old are you?'
'Two hundred and eighty-four of your years.'
