My mind?
But he didn’t want to think about that. He had dreamed about it.
When he returned to Andrew’s cabin he heard, from several metres away, a helpless moaning noise. He hurried his last few steps, and there indeed was Andrew with his hands over his face, weeping.
“Okay, okay!” Pavel said, and touched the younger man’s arm reassuringly. “I’m here, and I have my—”
“Turn it on!” Andrew repeated, his hands muffling the words.
“I’ve taken the EWO away,” Pavel said, and waited.
“What?” The hands dropped from Andrew’s tear-wet face. “But it’s mine! If I tell you to turn it on you’ve got to turn it on! I can’t bear to lie here and suffer this pain!”
“Would you rather throw away the rest of your life,” Pavel said after a moment to ponder the right form of words, “than survive to enjoy all these things you kept boasting about on the trip—all the money, the luxury, the power your family’s possessions will bring you?”
“I . . .”
Andrew hesitated, letting his arms fall to his sides. He looked with fear-filled eyes at the medical equipment enclosing his body from the waist down.
Pavel went on waiting.
Abruptly—and unexpectedly—Andrew said, “I guess if you don’t have too much anesthetic left you’d better save it for when I start to scream. But do you have a tranquilizing shot?”
A wave of relief swept over Pavel. He had never heard Andrew speak in such a reasonable tone before. He said, “Sure. Not much of that is left, either, though. My whole stock of drug phials was thrown through the surgery bulkhead along with me, and even if some of them were saved from breaking by landing in the furs it’ll take a while for me to dig them out. Here’s something to be going on with, at least.”
He selected the right injector from the mixed batch he had brought, and applied it.
“Thank you,” Andrew said, even before it had taken effect. “I—I guess I should apologise for shouting at you, hm?”
Pavel shrugged.
“How are you?”
“Me?” Pavel’s surprise showed in his voice. “Oh . . . oh, I’m not too bad.”
“I asked you a question! Don’t I deserve an answer?”
“Well. . .” Pavel licked his lips. “My head aches like fury, but I guess yours does too. It’s the air. My throat is sore, but that’s the air too—it’s very dry. When the crash came I acquired a gang of bruises and a twisted ankle. Now you know. And as a doctor I can promise you I’m in far better shape than you are.”
“Obviously.” A ghost of a smile showed on Andrew’s pale plump face. “I’m in the kind of mess it would take a major hospital to cope with, aren’t I?”
Pavel nodded. There was no point in trying to conceal the truth.
“Then why the hell won’t you turn on the EWO?” Andrew blasted.
Pavel froze. He said at last, “You spoiled brat. You—you . . . oh, I don’t know a name bad enough for you!”
“Now look here!” Andrew began, but Pavel plunged on.
“Before you try any more of your tricks, get this into your solid plasteel head, will you? I want to stay alive even if you don’t! You’ve been pampered all your life so much that even a hint of pain makes you want to give up forever. You can’t con me into doing what you want, you can’t threaten me into doing what you want, you can’t wheedle me into doing what you want. For once in your life you are simply going to have to do what someone else wants!”
There was a dead silence. Since Pavel had woken, the whole ship had been silent, apart from the soughing of a light wind across the gaps in the hull. The trickling noise he had heard yesterday in the surgery, the sifting noise of sand filling a few remaining spaces in the after part of the ship, the creaking of the girders as they cooled—all that had come to an end. The only items in operation, the medical equipment, were too efficiently designed to make a noise even after the punishment they had taken.
Then the artificial calm of the last shot he had been given overspread Andrew’s face. He said, “Well, if you’re so determined to keep me alive, you might as well make me comfortable too. I’m in pain, you know.”
“All right,” Pavel conceded. “But I’ll have to make it a short dose. I’ll have to accustom you gradually to supporting some of your pain, I’m afraid. There’s no way of estimating how long it will be before we’re rescued.” He produced and applied the correct injector.
“And I’m afraid I can’t be absolutely certain how badly your internal organs are affected,” he went on. “To be on the safe side, I’ll have to keep you hydrated with an intravenous transfusion rather than letting you drink.”
“But I’m very thirsty,” Andrew said in a dull tone, his eyes drifting shut.
“I guess you must be. I have some tablets you can suck to keep your mouth and throat moist, but they’ll have to be rationed out, too.”
“Because we may be stuck here a long time,” Andrew murmured. “What make you so sure we are going to be rescued, hm?”
“Look, we’re in the same system as Carteret,” Pavel said. “We’re going to be reported overdue. If there was a live detector anywhere in the vicinity, it will have picked up our blip. It might even have tracked us to impact.”
“Hell, if it tracked us to impact, no one will bother to come searching,” Andrew said. “Everyone was killed but us, right? If they calculate the speed we had when we broached air, they’ll take it for granted we just burned up!”
Pavel was half-convinced of that himself, but he put on his most reassuring manner.
“Not if I can dig out something to make a beacon with,” he said. “I’m not an engineer, but I hope to find a solid-state transmitter sooner or later, and a capacitor
