There was no trace of blood at his mouth, which indicated— though it did not prove—that his lungs were intact. But his left shoulder was dislocated, and there was a cut on his scalp which had soaked his pillow with blood.
Trivia like that he could take care of with water, any sterile dressing he could find in an untorn package, and his own strength. Otherwise, though, there was literally nothing he could do except make Andrew comfortable until help arrived. Taking a spine to bits and rebuilding it was a job for a modern hospital, and he half-doubted whether even the facilities on Carteret would be up to the task.
Since Andrew was currently unconscious, the best thing to do for the moment was to leave him that way while he determined whether any other survivors had lived through the crash, and sorted through the mess in his surgery to salvage what he could.
He crept very softly back into the corridor.
It took him only a few minutes to become convinced that there was no hope of any other survivor. On top of his other irritating habits, Andrew was ostentatiously “liberated from the tyranny of clocks.” He invariably slept until late in the ship’s artificial day, fourteen or fifteen hours, and then made merry until the small hours regardless of the people he inconvenienced, whether by his loud drunken laughter, his insistence on playing music at maximum volume, or the stamping dances he had learned on some planet or other earlier in his trip. In particular Hans, the ship’s steward, hated him, because he felt he was entitled to human service despite the perfectly good automatics everyone else relied on, and during most of the voyage had kept Hans dancing attendance on him for so much of the “night” the poor man had to make do with three or four hours’ sleep.
And it was this which had saved Andrew’s miserable life. Everybody else had been up and about in the after part of the ship, and that was full of sand, poured in by the ton when the hull broke apart. There wasn’t a chance in a million of recovering someone alive from that mass of grit and gravel. It was going to be tough unearthing from it food, water, and other essentials for their survival. Pavel suspected he might have to tear loose a hull-plate to use as a shovel.
It was a gloomy consolation that his guess about their location was being proved correct at every step he took. Despite the ache in his head, which was now growing almost intolerable, and the leaden heaviness of his limbs, when he had completed his survey of the reachable areas of the ship he postponed his return to the surgery for the sake of scrambling up one of the heaps of whitish sand and grit beside the cracks in the hull and peered out, having to steady himself by clinging tightly to the edges of the hole because the footing he had was so precarious.
Overhead, the sky was a uniform dark blue, close to indigo. The sun, slanting low in the sky, was small and very yellow. The air was cool, though not cold; perhaps the high proportion of unreduced CO2 in it was enhancing the greenhouse effect and producing a disproportionately high daytime temperature. But on the other hand it was dry and harsh in his throat. They must be a long way from open water.
With a supreme effort he hoisted himself up far enough to look over the scarred and battered hull-plates in the direction away from the sun, and instantly realised how it had come about that the ship had not simply been smashed to fragments. There was a vast furrow in the sandy plain, dotted with boulders, on that side, and the level of the ground seemed to slant slightly upward, though the strain of holding himself on his arms was blurring his vision and it was difficult to make out details. Nonetheless, the pattern fitted: the glancing angle at which the ship had struck the ground must have been parallel to the slope, and instead of stopping dead (he wished he hadn’t thought of that metaphor) it had gone skidding and grinding onwards for mile after mile. Until it had shed its initial velocity and piled into the dune.
Well, it was comforting to know he could still think, reason, solve puzzles. He let himself drop back into the heap of sand and headed wearily for the surgery.
Quasimodo IV, he thought. Perhaps I’m the first human to see it from ground level in a hundred years.
But there was nothing in the least exciting about that.
Almost the first thing he came on in the surgery which was intact enough to be of any use was a box of stimulant injectors, one out of a stock of perhaps forty or fifty which had been crushed into glass-prickly ruin. He tried to decide whether it was wise to give himself a shot, found he couldn’t make his mind up, and did so.
At once his head cleared, and an artificial clarity informed his thoughts. New energy came to him, and rediscovered appetite. But as yet he had not located any food, and he was sure that when he did it would be after long burrowing into the sand dune. He repressed all thought of eating with a violent act of will, and went on hunting vigorously through the tangle of instruments and the stocks of drugs.
Within half an hour he had
