dreaming, unless this were a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.
Johnny's voice was small, very small and very far away.
'Ash.'
'Yes, Johnny.'
'The engines, Ash. The engines.'
He fought his body out of the pilot's chair, stood on weaving legs.
He could scarcely see…just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were leaden weights that he could not move…that were no part of him at all.
He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.
Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.
There had been strength, a surge of strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength was vengeance.
But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of brain, the strength of will rather than of mere bone and muscle that had let him do it.
He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more and his head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood and mucus and slobbered stomach slime that left a trail across the floor.
He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.
His fingers found the latch and pulled it down, but they had no strength and they slipped off the metal and he fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.
He waited for a long time and then he tried again and this time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again, and as he fell, he fell across the threshold.
Finally, after so long a wait that he thought he could never do it, he got on hands and knees again and crept forward by slow inches.
XXX
Asher Sutton awoke to darkness.
To darkness and an unknowing.
To unknowing and a slow, exploding wonder.
He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped in his arms, with his body pressed against it, as a child might sleep with a beloved Teddy bear.
There was no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of any life before. As if he had sprung full- limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.
He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it, and he lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.
But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side…and it was thus for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped into his consciousness without conscious effort, as if it were a thing he had known all the time, and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition and that, he thought, was strange.
So the thing beside him was an engine and he was lying on the floor and the metal close above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room.
A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark that ran across the threshold.
At first he thought that some other thing, some imagined thing, had crawled in slime of its own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered. It had been himself…himself crawling to the engines.
Lying quietly, it came back to him and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest and the clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole…whole and smooth and hard. Good human flesh. No holes.
So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was…if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect.
It sucked at the stars and it nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engines. It wanted energy. And the engines had the energy…more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid.
So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body, my direct-intake, energy-eating body sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers.
And I am whole again.
I am back in my breath-and-blood body once again and I can go back to Earth.
He crawled out of the engine room and stood on his two feet.
Faint starlight came through the visionplates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner.
His mind took them in and nosed them as a dog would nose a bone and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood calculating and undismayed in the face of death.
He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case was thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see the face, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what the faces had been like.
His hands went down and searched, winnowing through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of things he found and finally he found the thing he was looking for.
Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a single line of type, the tiny line at the very bottom.
And the line said:
Revised Edition
So that was it. That was the meaning of the word that had puzzled him: Revisionists.
There had been a book and it had been revised. Those who lived by the revised edition were the Revisionists. And the others? He wondered, running through the names…Fundamentalists, Primitives, Orthodox, Hard-Shell. There were others, he was sure, and it didn't matter. It didn't really matter what the others would be called.
There were two blank pages and the text began:
We are not alone.
No one ever is alone.
Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.*
His eye went down the page to the first footnote.
