But that was a minor matter. He had biological clocks in his body which were more important, and the loudest-chiming one was in his belly. He was sure that by now his increasing weakness was due less to lack of oxygen and his many bruises than to simple hunger. And, inescapably, thirst.
Accordingly he directed his first efforts at digging towards where he knew the ship’s restaurant had been located, on the side of the hull opposite his surgery. But this had been crushed far worse than the other side, and the sand was piled high and spilled down to replace whatever he scrabbled away. He was on the brink of despair when he recognized something shining in the beam of the torch.
Sand-scraped, the label told him plainly: WHOLE MILK.
He seized the bulbous can and raised it to his lips, ignoring the sand which clogged the outlet. The sand was presumably sterile, and if it wasn’t, he’d already been exposed over and over to whatever minor life-forms it bore. He gulped the milk down in huge draughts, thinking with a detached portion of his mind that there was—or should have been—something symbolic in this action.
But this planet was not one which he could envisage substituting for Mother Earth.
After that he found a whole group of similar containers, apparently the contents of a shelf which had been slammed through a bulkhead in the crash. Many of them were crushed and had leaked their contents, but he recovered more milk, various types of consomme and broth, and five or six types of puree. Beyond, there was a mess of fresh fruit, including apples, papayas and a mutated citrus he was fond of, called yabanos, resembling a lime bloated to the size of an orange and with deep pink flesh. He eagerly tore at its peel, and had already set a chunk of it to his lips when he realized what his sense of touch had been trying to warn him about: the crash had hurled this fruit into something made of glass, and the glass had smashed. The whole of it was permeated with tiny sharp spikes.
He spat it out and threw it away in fury. If this was what was going to happen everywhere, he might as well—
NO! NO! At least this time he didn’t shout it aloud, but he said it inside his head, very forcibly: I am not going to take the Easy Way Out! I am not! I am NOT!
And then honesty which he detested compelled him to add: At least. . . I don’t think I am.
He took one final look at Andrew, who was still unconscious, and gave him an injectorful of glucose-and-vitamin booster. He had found a few phials of that intact, and there were also some high-protein concentrates and other life-supports. But Andrew was carrying enough fat on his belly to last him several days, and he certainly wasn’t going to become dehydrated overnight . . . or whatever the equivalent of “overnight” might be, measured in terms of how long it took Pavel to wake up after he collapsed on his pile of furs. His own cabin, far astern in the crew’s quarters, was unreachable, but a dozen furs in the corridor afforded a soft bed within earshot of Andrew if he recovered consciousness.
The rest . . .
could wait. . .
until later. . . .
“Turn it on! Damn you—damn you! Turn it on!”
Pavel came awake in a second. The cry, eerie in the echoing corridor, had seemed a continuation of the dream he had been suffering, a vision of endless wandering over a vast bare desert. He forced himself to his feet, aware of the nasty clinging of his clothes to his body—normally, he changed them twice a day and threw the worn ones in the recycler, but that was smashed. At least during the night a breeze must have blown away the stench left by the fires inside the ship; the air now, although still very dry and oxygen-poor, smelled of nothing at all.
When he lay down to sleep, he had set the torch and a number of flasks and medical phials nearby. Now, though, he did not need artificial light—the sun must be well up in the sky and pouring in through all the cracks in the hull—and he was too dazed to worry about the other things. He stumbled into Andrew’s cabin rubbing his eyes.
Calm overtook him as he saw the medical equipment he had rigged yesterday. Being self-powered, against failure of the ship’s power, its state-of-operation lights continued to gleam like little reptile’s eyes. And indicated no change worth noticing in Andrew’s condition: metabolism survival-prone, skeletal structure paralysis-prone, nervous system pain-prone. . . .
“That! That thing!”
Andrew shouted, as loudly as he could, and raised his right arm to point at the shelf where Pavel had set the EWO.
“Turn it on!”
Pavel drew a deep breath. His head felt as though it had been stuffed with sand from outside, his mouth as dry and harsh as though the sand had been inserted by that route, and his stomach was full of gas-bloat. Also his ankle seemed to have become worse during his sleep, not better, and when he rested his weight on it he winced.
Reaching out, he took the EWO off the shelf and wordlessly carried it from the cabin. Behind him, Andrew screamed and howled.
It occurred to Pavel that he should pitch the EWO out of the ship altogether, into the sand, where night wind would cover it and make it impossible to find again. But even as he was tensing his muscles to toss the thing away, he relented. Rescue, after all, might not come. . . .
Of the many cupboards in his surgery, all had been flung open in the crash, but one had not had its doors torn off the hinges. He put the EWO inside and slammed the doors and twisted the lock shut,
