(A voice): “Cleaver? Cleaver! Wake up, you big slob. Cleaver! Where the hell have you been?”
Cleaver groaned and tried to turn over. At his first motion, the world began to rock, gently, sickeningly. He was awash in fever. His mouth, seemed to be filled with burning pitch.
“Cleaver, turn out. It’s me-Agronski. Where’s the Father? What’s wrong? Why didn’t we ever hear from you? Look out, you’ll-”
The warning came too late, and Cleaver could not have understood it anyhow. He had been profoundly asleep, and had no notion of his situation in space or time. At his convulsive twist away from the nagging voice, the hammock rotated on its hooks and dumped him.
He struck the floor stunningly, taking the main blow across his right shoulder, though he hardly felt it yet. His feet, not yet part of him at all, still remained far aloft, twisted in the hammock webbing.
“What the hell-”
There was a brief chain of footsteps, like chestnuts dropping on a roof, and then a hollow noise of something hitting the floor near his head.
“Cleaver, are you sick? Here, lie still a minute and let me get your feet free. Mike-Mike, can’t you turn the gas up in this jug? Something’s wrong back here.”
After a moment, yellow light began to pour from the glistening walls, and then the white glare of the mantles. Cleaver dragged an arm across his eyes, but it did him no good; it tired too quickly. Agronski’s mild face, plump and anxious, floated directly above him like a captive balloon. He could not see Michelis anywhere, and at the moment he was just as glad he couldn’t. Agronski’s presence was hard enough to understand.
“How… the hell…” he said. At the words, his lips split painfully at both corners. He realized for the first time that they had become gummed together, somehow, while he was asleep. He had no idea how long he had been out of the picture.
Agronski seemed to understand the aborted question. “We came in from the Lakes in the ’copter,” he said. “We didn’t like the silence down here, and we figured we’d better come in under our own power, instead of registering in on the regular jet liner and tipping the Lithians off-just in case there’d been any dirty work afloat-”
“Stop jawing him,” Michelis said, appearing suddenly, magically in the doorway. “He’s got a bug, that’s obvious. I don’t like to feel pleased about misery, but I’m glad it’s that instead of the Lithians.”
The rangy, long-jawed chemist helped Agronski lift Cleaver to his feet. Tentatively, despite the pain, Cleaver got his mouth open again. Nothing came out but a hoarse croak.
“Shut up,” Michelis said, not unkindly. “Let’s get him back into the hammock. Where’s the Father, I wonder? He’s the only one capable of dealing with sickness here.”
“I’ll bet he’s dead,” Agronski burst out suddenly, his face glistening with alarm. “He’d be here if he could. It must be catching, Mike.”
“I didn’t bring my mitt,” Michelis said drily. “Cleaver, lie still or I’ll have to clobber you. Agronski, you seem to have dumped his water bottle; better go get him some more, he needs it. And see if the Father left anything in the lab that looks like medicine.”
Agronski went out, and, maddeningly, so did Michelis- at least out of Cleaver’s field of vision. Setting his every muscle against the pain, Cleaver pulled his lips apart once more.
“Mike.”
Instantly, Michelis was there. He had a pad of cotton between thumb and forefinger, wet with some solution, with which he gently cleaned Cleaver’s lips and chin.
“Easy. Agronski’s getting you a drink. We’ll let you talk in a little while, Paul. Don’t rush it.”
Cleaver relaxed a little. He could trust Michelis. Nevertheless, the vivid and absurd insult of having to be swabbed like a baby was more than he could bear; he felt tears of helpless rage swelling on either side of his nose. With two deft, non-committal swipes, Michelis removed them.
Agronski came back, holding out one hand tentatively, palm up.
“I found these,” he said. “There’s more in the lab, and the Father’s pill press is still out. So are his mortar and pestle, though they’ve been cleaned.”
“All right, let’s have ’em,” Michelis said. “Anything else?”
“No. Well, there’s a syringe cooking in the sterilizer, if that means anything.”
Michelis swore briefly and to the point.
“It means that there’s a pertinent antitoxin in the shop someplace,” he added. “But unless Ramon left notes, we’ll not have a prayer of figuring out which one it is.”
As he spoke, he lifted Cleaver’s head and tipped the pills into his mouth, onto his tongue. The water which followed was cold at the first contact, but a split second later it was liquid fire. Cleaver choked, and at that precise instant Michelis pinched his nostrils shut. The pills went down with a gulp.
“There’s no sign of the Father?” Michelis said.
“Not a one, Mike. Everything’s in good order, and his gear’s still here. Both jungle suits are in the locker.”
“Maybe he went visiting,” Michelis said thoughtfully. “He must have gotten to know quite a few of the Lithians by now. He liked them.”
“With a sick man on his hands? That’s not like him, Mike. Not unless there was some kind of emergency. Or maybe he went on a routine errand, expected to be back in just a few minutes, and-”
“And was set upon by trolls, for forgetting to stamp his foot three times before crossing a bridge.”
“All right, laugh.”
“I’m not laughing, believe me. That’s just the kind of damn fool thing that can kill a man in a strange culture. But somehow I can’t see it happening to Ramon.”
“Mike…”
Michelis took a step and looked down at Cleaver. His face was drifting as if detached through a haze of tears. He said: “All right, Paul. Tell us what it is. We’re listening.”
But it was too late. The doubled sedative dose had gotten to Cleaver first. He could only shake his head, and with the motion Michelis seemed to go reeling away into a whirlpool of fuzzy rainbows.
Curiously, he did not quite go to sleep. He had had nearly a normal night’s sleep, and he had started out his enormously long day a powerful and healthy man. The conversation of the two commissioners, and an obsessive consciousness of his need to speak to them before Ruiz-Sanchez returned, helped to keep him, if not totally awake, at least not far below a state of light trance. In addition, the presence in his system of thirty grains of acetylsalicylic acid had seriously raised his oxygen consumption, bringing with it not only dizziness but also a precarious, emotionally untethered alertness. That the fuel which was being burned to maintain it was in part the protein substrate of his own cells he did not know, and it could not have alarmed him had he known it. The voices continued to reach him, and to convey a little meaning. With them were mixed fleeting, fragmentary dreams, so slightly removed from the surface of his waking life as to seem peculiarly real, yet at the same time peculiarly pointless and depressing. In the semiconscious intervals there came plans, a whole succession of them, all simple and grandiose at once, for taking command of the expedition, for communicating with the authorities on Earth, for bringing forward secret papers proving that Lithia was uninhabitable, for digging a tunnel under Mexico to Peru, for detonating Lithia in one single mighty fusion of all its lightweight atoms into one single atom of cleaverium, the element of which the monobloc had been made, whose cardinal number was Aleph-Null…
AGRONSKI: Mike, come here and look at this; you read Lithian.
There’s a mark on the front door, on the message tablet.
(Footsteps.)
MICHELIS: It says “Sickness inside.” The strokes aren’t casual or deft enough to be the work of the natives. Ideograms are hard to write rapidly without long practice. Ramon must have written it there.
AGRONSKI: I wish we knew where he went afterwards. Funny we didn’t see it when we came in.
MICHELIS: I don’t think so. It was dark, and we weren’t looking for it.
(Footsteps. Door shutting, not loudly. Footsteps. Hassock creaking.)
AGRONSKI: Well, we’d better start thinking about getting up a report. Unless this damn twenty-hour day has me thrown completely off, our time’s just about up. Are you still set on opening up the planet?
MICHELIS: Yes. I’ve seen nothing to convince me that there’s anything on Lithia that’s dangerous to us. Except maybe Cleaver in there, and I’m not prepared to say that the Father would have left him if he were in any
