dripping from the channel. She was lying curled in the bottom of the boat.
“Kid… you all right, kid?”
“Sorry… I’m such a baby,” she gasped, and dragged herself back to the stern.
Paul found a paddle, but no oars. He cast off and began digging water toward the other side, but the tide tugged them relentlessly away from the bridge. He gave it up and paddled toward the distant shore. “You know anything about Galveston?” he called—mostly to reassure himself that she was not approaching him in the darkness with the death-gray hands.
“I used to come here for the summer, I know a little about it.”
Paul urged her to talk while he plowed toward the island. Her name was Willie, and she insisted that it was for Willow, not for Wilhelmina. She came from Dallas, and claimed she was a salesman’s daughter who was done in by a traveling farmer. The farmer, she explained, was just a wandering dermie who had caught her napping by the roadside. He had stroked her arms until she awoke, then had run away, howling with glee.
“That was three weeks ago,” she said. “If I’d had a gun, I’d have dropped him. Of course, I know better now.”
Paul shuddered and paddled on. “Why did you head south?”
“I was coming here.”
“Here? To Galveston?”
“Uh-huh. I heard someone say that a lot of nuns were coming to the island. I thought maybe they’d take me in.”
The moon was high over the lightless city, and the tide had swept the small boat far east from the bridge by the time Paul’s paddle dug into the mud beneath the shallow water. He bounded out and dragged the boat through thin marsh grass onto the shore. Fifty yards away, a ramshackle fishing cottage lay sleeping in the moonlight.
“Stay here, Willie,” he grunted. “I’ll find a couple of boards or something for crutches.”
He rummaged about through a shed behind the cottage and brought back a wheelbarrow. Moaning and laughing at once, she struggled into it, and he wheeled her to the house, humming a verse of
“You’re a funny guy, Paul. I’m sorry… “ She jiggled her tousled head in the moonlight, as if she disapproved of her own words.
Paul tried the cottage door, kicked it open, then walked the wheelbarrow up three steps and into a musty room. He struck a match, found an oil lamp with a little kerosene, and lit it. Willie caught her breath.
He looked around. “Company,” he grunted.
The company sat in a fragile rocker with a shawl about her shoulders and a shotgun between her knees. She had been dead at least a month. The charge of buckshot had sieved the ceiling and spattered it with bits of gray hair and brown blood.
“Stay here,” he told the girl tonelessly. “I’ll try to get a dermie somewhere—one who knows how to sew a tendon. Got any ideas?”
She was staring with a sick face at the old woman. “Here? With—”
“She won’t bother you,” he said as he gently disentangled the gun from the corpse. He moved to a cupboard and found a box of shells behind an orange teapot. “I may not be back, but I’ll send somebody.”
She buried her face in her plague-stained hands, and he stood for a moment watching her shoulders shiver. “Don’t worry… I will send somebody.” He stepped to the porcelain sink and pocketed a wafer-thin sliver of dry soap.
“What’s that for?” she muttered, looking up again.
He thought of a lie, then checked it. “To wash you off of me,” he said truthfully. “I might have got too close. Soap won’t do much good, but I’ll feel better.” He looked at the corpse coolly. “Didn’t do her much good. Buckshot’s the best antiseptic all right.”
Willie moaned as he went out the door. He heard her crying as he walked down to the waterfront. She was still crying when he waded back to shore, after a thorough scrubbing. He was sorry he’d spoken cruelly, but it was such a damned relief to get rid of her.
With the shotgun cradled on his arm, he began putting distance between himself and the sobbing. But the sound worried his ears, even after he realized that he was no longer hearing her.
He strode a short distance inland past scattered fishing shanties, then took the highway toward the city whose outskirts he was entering. It would be at least an hour’s trek to the end of the island where he would be most likely to encounter someone with medical training. The hospitals were down there, the medical school, the most likely place for any charitable nuns—if Willie’s rumor were true. Paul meant to capture a dermie doctor or nurse and force the amorous-handed maniac at gun-point to go to Willie’s aid. Then he would be done with her. When she stopped hurting, she would start craving—and he had no doubt that he would be the object of her manual affections.
The bay was wind-chopped in the moonglow, no longer glittering from the lights along 61st Street. The oleanders along Broadway were choked up with weeds. Cats or rabbits rustled in the tousled growth that had been a carefully tended parkway.
Paul wondered why the plague had chosen Man, and not the lower animals. It was true that an occasional dog or cow was seen with the plague, but the focus was upon humanity. And the craving to spread the disease was Man-directed, even in animals. It was as if the neural entity deliberately sought out the species with the most complex nervous system. Was its onslaught really connected with the meteorite swarm? Paul believed that it was.
In the first place, the meteorites had not been predicted. They were not a part of the regular cosmic bombardment. And then there was the strange report that they were
What manner of beings, then, had sent such a curse? Potential invaders? If so, they were slow in coming. One thing was generally agreed upon by the scientists: the missiles had not been “sent” from another solar planet. Their direction upon entering the atmosphere was wrong. They could conceivably have been fired from an interplanetary launching ship, but their velocity was about equal to the theoretical velocity which a body would obtain in falling sunward from the near-infinite distance. This seemed to hint the projectiles had come from another star.
Paul was startled suddenly by the flare of a match from the shadow of a building. He stopped dead still in the street. A man was leaning against the wall to light a cigarette. He flicked the match out, and Paul watched the cigarette-glow make an arc as the man waved at him.
“Nice night, isn’t it?” said the voice from the darkness.
Paul stood exposed in the moonlight, carrying the shot-gun at the ready. The voice sounded like that of an adolescent, not fully changed to its adult timbre. If the youth wasn’t a dermie, why wasn’t he afraid that Paul might be one? And if he was a dermie, why wasn’t he advancing in the hope that Paul might be as yet untouched?
“I said, ‘Nice night, isn’t it?’ Whatcha carrying the gun for? Been shooting rabbits?”
Paul moved a little closer and fumbled for his flash-light. Then he threw its beam on the slouching figure in the shadows. He saw a young man, perhaps sixteen, reclining against the wall. He saw the pearl-gray face that characterized the final and permanent stage of neuroderm! He stood frozen to the spot a dozen feet away from the youth, who blinked perplexedly into the light. The kid was assuming automatically that he was another dermie! Paul tried to keep him blinded while he played along with the fallacy.
“Yeah, it’s a nice night. You got any idea where I can find a doctor?”
The boy frowned. “Doctor? You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what? I’m new here.”
“New? Oh…” the boy’s nostrils began twitching slightly, as if he were sniffing at the night air. “Well, most of the priests down at Saint Mary’s were missionaries. They’re all doctors. Why? You sick?”
“No, there’s a girl… But never mind. How do I get there? And are any of them dermies?”
The boy’s eyes wandered peculiarly, and his mouth fell open, as if he had been asked why a circle wasn’t square. “You are new, aren’t you? They’re all dermies, if you want to call them that. Wh—” Again the nostrils were
