“True enough. But—sure, I’ll do my best. Find some way of magnifying a reel so you can read it up against that light.”
“Great,” Andrew said. “Now you go back to sleep, or fix your breakfast, or whatever you want. I’ll be okay until this shot wears off. And I’ll try and be okay until a good while afterwards. Just as long as I can honestly stand the pain.”
Fantastic! Pavel kept thinking as he burrowed deeper and deeper into the accessible regions of the ship. To have found that degree of guts when he must be in agony!
It helped—helped enormously—to know that he had a companion in adversity after all, someone he could talk to instead of a burden on his time, a constant worry. He did in fact locate a scratched and broken piece of transpex with a high magnifying factor, and some data reels and a few scorched books whose pages had to be turned very carefully in order to prevent them crumbling, and Andrew, propped up just a little on his pillow, somehow contrived to read a few of them by the portable lamp. There were only passing references to Quasimodo IV—it never having been a planet of much interest to spacemen—but what little he gleaned confirmed that that was where they were, and moreover that they were currently on the same side of the local sun as Carteret.
But in that case . . .
Why haven’t we been rescued already?
The fourth, fifth, eighth day melted into the past, almost featureless. Now, the long strain of working in low oxygen was weakening Pavel; he hated waking up, and often his digging reduced to the mindless act of a machine, so that he had already shovelled aside a piece of potentially useful equipment before his sluggish brain recognized it. Then he had to go scrabble for it with bare hands in the pile of sand behind him. And, of course, all the time he kept finding dead bodies.
For a brief while, following Andrew’s remarkable discovery of courage, the cupboard where he had stored the EWO held no threat to Pavel. A day, two days, later, and the blisters on his hands and the grit in his mouth and the redness of his eyes and the endless, incurable thirst he suffered from, conspired to reawaken its spectre in his memory. Instead of being here, victim of harsh reality, he could be in a lovely imaginary world, enjoying himself in any way he chose, picturing the most beautiful girls, the smoothest lawns, the finest beaches, the—
Stop it!
But the supply of drugs dwindled, though he hoarded them carefully, and so did the protein concentrates and glucose-and-vitamin solutions which were all the food he could offer Andrew. Luckily, he had had just enough of a substance which triggered the body’s use of stored fat—a short-cut for overindulgent passengers, basically, who now and then realized at the end of a long space flight that they had put on two kilos while they were shut up in the metal shell of the ship and wanted to revert to normal before landing. He had never expected to make practical use of what he ordinarily regarded as a cosmetic drug. The two injections of it which he had given to Andrew, however, had worked well, and though his skin was now deflated over his premature paunch, like a partly shrunk balloon, he was able to utilise what long over-indulgence had stored between his muscles and his skin.
Pavel took more and more frequently to going outside and staring up at the sky, knowing it was ridiculous to do so. One couldn’t see an orbiting rescue ship by day, and if it arrived during the night it would no doubt fire signal flares and perhaps sonic missiles to wake survivors up and provoke them into lighting fires, or somehow revealing their presence.
Fires!
That idea should have come to him much earlier; in fact, it didn’t strike him until finally he had to concede that further digging was useless. The part of the ship he hadn’t yet cleared of sand was collapsed, and he lacked the strength, and the tools, to force aside the strong metal girders now blocking his progress.
He had been aimlessly postponing the admission that there was nothing else constructive he could do, when the notion of making a fire occurred to him. At night, in particular, a fire could be spotted a long way off under such a clear sky. He had seen clouds only once since the crash, and they had been on the horizon around the setting sun. Presumably there was ocean in that direction, but a rise in the ground—a range of hills or mountains—filtered all the moisture from the wind before it blew this far inland.
Andrew had found scant reference to the meterological pattern of Quasimodo IV in the charred books Pavel brought him. So many page-edges were burned away, so many details that might have been useful had gone up in smoke!
But was there anything left which would flame brightly in this thin air? Pavel made tests, cautiously, with flammable liquids from his surgery: alcohol, ether, some otherwise useless tinctures and suspensions which bore fire warnings on their labels. Satisfied that it might indeed be possible to light a fire if the fuel were first soaked with everything he had which burned, he set about re-sifting the great mounds of rubbish he had thrown aside, dividing them into two new categories: things that would catch alight, and things that wouldn’t.
That occupied a day or two more. .
Little by little, however, he began to find himself obsessed with the passage of time. He kept saying under his breath, “Now if we can last out
