about eight hours to drown the way they work it. Really delightful.”
“I bet there isn’t any food here at all.” Pickard laughed.
The lieutenant frowned at him, nodded at him so Simmons could see. Simmons shook his head and went back to a room at one side of the oval chamber. The kitchen was strewn with soggy loaves of bread, and meat that had grown a faint green fur. Rain came through a hundred holes in the kitchen roof.
“Brilliant.” The lieutenant glanced up at the holes. “I don’t suppose we can plug up all those holes and get snug here.”
“Without food, sir?” Simmons snorted. “I notice the sun machine’s torn apart. Our best bet is to make our way to the next Sun Dome. How far is that from here?”
“Not far. As I recall, they built two rather close together here. Perhaps if we waited here, a rescue mission from the other might——”
“It’s probably been here and gone already, some days ago. They’ll send a crew to repair this place in about six months, when they get the money from Congress. I don’t think we’d better wait.”
“All right then, we’ll eat what’s left of our rations and get on to the next Dome.”
Pickard said, “If only the rain wouldn’t hit my head, just for a few minutes. If I could only remember what it’s like not to be bothered.” He put his hands on his skull and held it tight. “I remember when I was in school a bully used to sit in back of me and pinch me and pinch me and pinch me every five minutes, all day long. He did that for weeks and months. My arms were sore and black and blue all the time. And I thought I’d go crazy from being pinched. One day I must have gone a little mad from being hurt and hurt, and I turned around and took a metal trisquare I used in mechanical drawing and I almost killed that bastard. I almost cut his lousy head off. I almost took his eye out before they dragged me out of the room, and I kept yelling, ‘Why don’t he leave me alone? why don’t he leave me alone?’ Brother!” His hands clenched the bone of his head, shaking, tightening, his eyes shut. “But what do I do
“We’ll be at the other Sun Dome by four this afternoon.”
“Sun Dome? Look at this one! What if all the Sun Domes on Venus are gone? What then? What if there are holes in all the ceilings, and the rain coming in!”
“We’ll have to chance it.”
“I’m tired of chancing it. All I want is a roof and some quiet. I want to be alone.”
“That’s only eight hours off, if you hold on.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll hold on all right.” And Pickard laughed, not looking at them.
“Let’s eat,” said Simmons, watching him.
They set off down the coast, southward again. After four hours they had to cut inland to go around a river that was a mile wide and so swift it was not navigable by boat. They had to walk inland six miles to a place where the river boiled out of the earth, suddenly, like a mortal wound. In the rain, they walked on solid ground and returned to the sea.
“I’ve got to sleep,” said Pickard at last. He slumped. “Haven’t slept in four weeks. Tried, but couldn’t. Sleep here.”
The sky was getting darker. The night of Venus was setting in and it was so completely black that it was dangerous to move. Simmons and the lieutenant fell to their knees also, and the lieutenant said, “All right, we’ll see what we can do. We’ve tried it before, but I don’t know. Sleep doesn’t seem one of the things you can get in this weather.”
They lay out full, propping their heads up so the water wouldn’t come to their mouths, and they closed their eyes.
The lieutenant twitched.
He did not sleep.
There were things that crawled on his skin. Things grew upon him in layers. Drops fell and touched other drops and they became streams that trickled over his body, and while these moved down his flesh, the small growths of the forest took root in his clothing. He felt the ivy cling and make a second garment over him; he felt the small flowers bud and open and petal away, and still the rain pattered on his body and on his head. In the luminous night—for the vegetation glowed in the darkness—he could see the other two men outlined, like logs that had fallen and taken upon themselves velvet coverings of grass and flowers. The rain hit his face. He covered his face with his hands. The rain hit his neck. He turned over on his stomach in the mud, on the rubbery plants, and the rain hit his back and hit his legs.
Suddenly he leaped up and began to brush the water from himself. A thousand hands were touching him and he no longer wanted to be touched. He no longer could stand being touched. He floundered and struck something else and knew that it was Simmons, standing up in the rain, sneezing moisture, coughing and choking. And then Pickard was up, shouting, running about.
“Wait a minute, Pickard!”
“Stop it, stop it!” Pickard screamed. He fired off his gun six times at the night sky. In the flashes of powdery illumination they could see armies of raindrops, suspended as in a vast motionless amber, for an instant, hesitating as if shocked by the explosion, fifteen billion droplets, fifteen billion tears, fifteen billion ornaments, jewels standing out against a white velvet viewing board. And then, with the light gone, the drops which had waited to have their pictures taken, which had suspended their downward rush, fell upon them, stinging, in an insect cloud of coldness and pain.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
“Pickard!”
But Pickard was only standing now, alone. When the lieutenant switched on a small hand lamp and played it over Pickard’s wet face, the eyes of the man were dilated, and his mouth was open, his face turned up, so the water hit and splashed on his tongue, and hit and drowned the wide eyes, and bubbled in a whispering froth on the nostrils.
“Pickard!”
The man would not reply. He simply stood there for a long while with the bubbles of rain breaking out in his whitened hair and manacles of rain jewels dripping from his wrists and his neck.
“Pickard! We’re leaving. We’re going on. Follow us.”
The rain dripped from Pickard’s ears.
“Do you hear me, Pickard!”
It was like shouting down a well.
“Pickard!”
“Leave him alone,” said Simmons.
“We can’t go on without him.”
“What’ll we do, carry him?” Simmons spat. “He’s no good to us or himself. You know what he’ll do? He’ll just stand here and drown.”
“What?”
“You ought to know that by now. Don’t you know the story? He’ll just stand here with his head up and let the rain come in his nostrils and his mouth. He’ll breathe the water.”
“That’s how they found General Mendt that time. Sitting on a rock with his head back, breathing the rain. His lungs were full of water.”
The lieutenant turned the light back to the unblinking face. Pickard’s nostrils gave off a tiny whispering wet sound.
“Pickard!” The lieutenant slapped the face.
“He can’t even feel you,” said Simmons. “A few days in this rain and you don’t have any face or any legs or hands.”
The lieutenant looked at his own hand in horror. He could no longer feel it.
“But we can’t leave Pickard here.”
“I’ll show you what we can do.” Simmons fired his gun.
Pickard fell into the raining earth.
Simmons said, “Don’t move, Lieutenant. I’ve got my gun ready for you too. Think it over; he would only have stood or sat there and drowned. It’s quicker this way.”
