the first, but not at all reassuring. He cried out and writhed beneath his confining covers.
Tedesco depressed his tongue the way he had done before, spoke softly to him, waited out the seizure, held him to be certain it was all over, then slowly lowered his head back onto the makeshift pillow.
For a while there was nothing more ominous than perspiration and chills. Then, near dawn, as the sky was growing more purple and less black, Jask began to gnash his teeth together, grinding them so loudly that Tedesco felt as if someone were standing beside him and making the noise in his ear. He tried to stop Jask from doing this, but he made no headway.
The sky continued to lighten.
Jask screeched unintelligible curses, flailed madly about him on all sides, rose up and beat at the air, all the while holding his eyes squinted tightly shut.
He fell back, exhausted, still grinding his teeth, gathered his strength and flailed some more, hooted and whimpered, kicked at the earth and the air. He seemed to be fighting some monstrous battle with an awful but invisible enemy meant only for his eyes.
After dawn his behavior was better. He stopped moving so much and settled into a calm, sound sleep.
Or a deeper coma.
Tedesco wished he knew which it was.
Three hours after dawn Jask stirred uneasily, groaned deep in his throat and blinked his red, swollen eyes, tears sliding like beads of oil from the corners of them. When Tedesco leaned over him, he seemed to stare through the bruin as if he were not there. He was delirious, rolling his head agitatedly from side to side, licking his lips, mumbling incoherently to himself.
He drank passively, allowing Tedesco to force two ounces of water between his pale, cracked lips, and then he began to splutter and refused to take anything else.
He called Tedesco's name, his voice shallow and sibilant.
“Yes?” the bruin asked. He leaned closer, waiting, staring into those shiny, fevered eyes.
“Tedesco?” Jask repeated.
“I'm here.”
But it was clear that Jask was still talking only to himself, for he gazed through the mutant, and his call was not one of recognition, merely the fragment of a dream.
The morning passed.
Tedesco was not hungry, though he had last eaten quite some time before. He knew he would need strength, and he unwrapped a meat stick for his lunch. After a few bites he could not swallow any more. He rewrapped the meat, put it in the rucksack, and sat by the sick man, watching for trouble.
The night air warmed as the day progressed, and the myriad colors rippled on all sides.
In the middle of the endless afternoon Jask began to perspire again, though this attack of fever went unrelieved by the periodic chills he had endured earlier. He soaked the garments in which he was wrapped and continued to sweat, until Tedesco began to fear that he would eventually dehydrate.
When he drank now, he consumed far more than an ounce or two of water, sucking greedily on whatever the bruin put in his cup, though he was still not free of his fevered delirium or genuinely conscious of what was happening.
When the flask was empty, Tedesco began to pour from the fat leather water bag. Worriedly, he watched Jask drink, checked the slowly but certainly decreasing level of their last water supply, and looked anxiously at the sky, hoping for rain.
As darkness settled overhead and the intensity of the lights from the bacteria jewels increased, with two- thirds of the water gone from the leather bag, Jask's fever broke. One moment the beads popped and ran on his face — the next he was no longer sweating. In a few minutes he was cool and dry.
Tedesco was still sitting by him when, an hour later, Jask opened his eyes and looked blearily around the clearing. He smiled tentatively at the bruin and said, “I feel terrible.”
“But better?”
He smacked his gummy lips. “Better, yes. How long was I asleep?”
Tedesco said, “Too long.” He grinned with relief.
Tedesco would have liked to make soup for their supper, because he knew that Jask would benefit by having something warm in his stomach. But he dared not risk using the last of the water, for some of it would inevitably boil away and be lost in the making of the broth. Unless it rained they were going to need every precious ounce in their water bag. Instead of soup, then, they ate the remaining fresh fruit as they talked about Jask's weakness and subsequent illness.
“It couldn't have been sheer exhaustion that laid you up like that, my friend,” Tedesco said. “You were feverish and delirious. I'd say you picked up a bug of some sort, a kind of flu that you had never been subjected to in the filtered air of your fortress and in your few ventures out of it. Not a serious bug, mind you, but one just bad enough.”
“Not serious? You said that I almost died,” Jask reminded him, squirming to take the pressure off his left buttock. He ached from head to foot.
“And that you did. But you're from Pure stock — which means you come from people who are so inbred that they've become weak and susceptible to the slightest infection.”
Jask thought about that for a while, did not like the implications, but restrained himself from making a hasty and belligerent reply. He did, at least, owe Tedesco that much courtesy. He said, '' You used most of the water on me and lost a couple of days' traveling time. Why?”
“You couldn't go on,” the bruin said.
Jask shrugged, found that the simple gesture required more effort than it reasonably should have, and said, “Why not kill me, then? You threatened to kill me before this.”
“Would you rather I had?” Tedesco asked, avoiding the question.
“It might have been for the best,'' Jask said, considering his answer carefully. He thought of how far they were from Lady Nature, the enclave, everything he knew and trusted. “I certainly can't go on for a few days yet; I'm too weak to stand, let alone walk. Unless it rains, we're going to be in dire need of water because my illness required so much… Yes, you should have killed me.”
Tedesco was frozen for a moment, staring hard at the smaller man, then stood so abruptly that he startled his sick companion.
“You ungrateful, cowardly shit! You stupid, sniveling, self-pitying little bastard!'' His voice was quite a bit above a scream and just less than a roar of thunder. “You people in the enclaves look down your noses at the 'tainted' and loudly proclaim your superiority, but you couldn't survive a minute in a fair contest with any mutated man. Every last one of you is a vampire, sucking life from what the prewar men left you, leeches that don't contribute anything!”
“I—” Jask began.
Tedesco shouted him down. “You say that muscles are a sign of the primitive, that a civilized man should be puny while machines do all his work and protect him. That's nothing more than a cheap philosophical excuse for what you people have let yourselves become. What are your people? Slugs, degenerates, maggots, turds, all of you!”
“Really, you can't say that—”
Tedesco whirled, swooping in at him, reached for him with a suddenness that was terrifying, his lips drawn from his teeth, eyes wide. He grasped Jask's shoulders and lifted him half off the ground, held him up so that they were face to face.'' Maybe I should have let you die. And if I had any common sense, maybe I should have put a power bolt through your brain!” As the bruin spoke, he sprayed Jask's face with warm saliva. “But I didn't! And since you pulled through whatever it was you had, you might as well be made useful.”
Jask tried to pull free, couldn't manage it.
“Starting tomorrow,” the mutant said, “we're going to take that scrawny, underfed, undermotivated body of yours, and we're going to turn it and you into a valuable part of this expedition. We're going to get you up and moving. We're going to start you on an exercise program — push-ups, sit-ups, knee-bends, the whole works. We're going to put muscle where there isn't any, whether you think it makes you primitive or not. You're going to start eating well. If you can keep breakfast down, you'll take a full stick of meat, half a loaf of bread and canned fruit for lunch. You'll have two sticks of meat and a quarter pound of cheese for supper. Protein and more protein—”
