He looked like a fish. Was Grawl playing charades? Why now? They could have done this weeks and weeks ago, to pass the time.
“A fish?” said Norton.
Grawl nodded his head. He was holding the cup in his right hand, and he started making circular movements with his left arm, rotating it over his head.
“Swimming?” said Norton. “A fish swimming?”
But what else did fish do except swim?
Grawl nodded again.
Norton kept looking at him, wondering what all this was supposed to mean. He shrugged his bewilderment.
Which was when Grawl threw the contents of his cup at him.
“Water?”
Again, Grawl nodded.
“Oh, yeah, water!”
Again again.
“We’re in the water? No. On the water? No. You mean… under the water?”
The lifeboat hadn’t landed. Not exactly. Because it wasn’t on the land. It was in the sea. Beneath the sea.
Norton remembered shutting his eyes before the capsule came down. Grawl must have kept his open, which was how he knew they had fallen into the ocean.
“Can you swim?”
Grawl shook his head.
“Neither can I. How far down are we?”
Grawl shrugged.
“Ohhhhh,” said Norton, “nohhhhh…”
But if they couldn’t swim, it didn’t matter how deep they were. They might as well still be out in space, a hundred parsecs from the planet. Norton had no idea how far a “parsec” was, it was just another unfathomable measurement. Unfathomable! How many fathoms beneath the surface was the lifeboat? He had no idea how far a fathom was, either.
“When I was a kid, my favourite movie was 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Did you ever see that? I don’t suppose you did. Long before your time. Two-dimensional, non-interactive. Very primitive. A league can’t be much. How deep is it to the bottom of the sea? Earth’s deepest sea. Two or three miles? More? I don’t know. Say it’s as deep as Everest is high. Five and a half miles. Call it five. That’s… what?… four thousand leagues to a mile. So a league can’t be much more than a foot? About sixteen inches. Hardly anything. How many leagues deep are we? However many, it’s too many. I wish I’d been born in California. On the coast. Southern California. I’d have grown up surfing. I’d have been able to swim. Could have swum out of here. Nevada? Middle of a desert. No chance. Did anyone learn to swim in the Hoover Dam? But I guess if I’d never been in Las Vegas my whole life would have been totally different and I wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t need to swim, would I?”
Grawl raised an index finger and put it to his lips.
Norton shut up.
Grawl started to move his finger away from his face, then paused, gazing at it. Then he touched his finger with his other hand. It was his right finger, it was his left hand, and both were gloved in the same strange fabric which covered the rest of his body, except for his face.
Norton was clad in exactly the same way, except that he didn’t have a right index finger. His outfit fitted him better than any glove. A seamless overall, it was as comfortable as a second skin.
Having been in space before, Grawl knew the proper lifeboat drill, and it was he who had found the clothes. The things looked like paper bags at first, but Norton was glad of anything to cover his nudity.
The garment never needed washing, and neither did he. The water Grawl had thrown at him had already been absorbed into the colourless cloth. The material seemed to assimilate every drop of sweat, to neutralise every odour. The gloves prevented his fingernails from growing, and the hood kept his hair nice and short.
Because the lifeboat had no shaving facilities, Norton’s stubble had started to grow. One morning there was a finger-shaped shaven patch on his cheek, and he guessed his finger had been pressed against his face while he slept. As an experiment, he held his palm against his chin for a long while. When he took it away, his skin was smooth. The glove had absorbed all the hair. After that, he was able to keep his face stubble-free.
Norton hadn’t touched his own water yet, and Grawl grabbed the cup, thrusting his right index finger inside, swirling it around. Then he raised the gloved finger. It was dry.
Grawl nodded slowly, then looked up.
Norton also looked up, imagining all the water above the lifeboat.
Lifeboat! The word was a joke. A boat which had sunk to the bottom of an alien ocean.
Grawl walked toward the end of the capsule, the end where the hatch was.
“No!” yelled Norton.
Grawl reached for the controls.
Norton reached for Grawl.
“Don’t!”
Grawl grabbed hold of Norton.
Then the hatch burst open.
And in flooded the water.
Water! The one thing Norton dreaded most in the world. In the universe. He hated water. He feared water. It was so… so wet. He’d always imagined this would be the worst way to die. Mouth and throat filling with liquid. Choking. Unable to breathe. Unable to resist. No air. Lungs saturated. Struggling, struggling, struggling. Drowning slowly. Slowly drowning.
Slowly dying.
“Ahhhhhhh!!!!”
Grawl’s hand went over Norton’s mouth, cutting off his scream of terror.
The capsule filled with water, totally engulfing them. Norton waited to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Time to come out,” said the voice.
They knew where she was hiding.
Kiru felt her heart sink, and in the heavier gravity of the Xyzian spaceship it dropped even faster.
The aliens had been so entranced at the sight of her throwing up, so interested in what her half-digested food told them about her diet, that Kiru had seized the chance and fled through the bizarre contours of their spacecraft.
When she escaped, every step had seemed to be in slow motion. The aliens’ legs had been faster than hers, but they were shorter, which was how she outdistanced them. But they knew the layout of their vessel, which she didn’t, and they almost caught her, until she finally found a hiding place.
She moved several times, always looking for a safer lair, sliding through gaps which were too narrow for the spherical aliens, and hiding away in the deepest, darkest recesses.
It was warm within the ship, but some of the pipes which criss-crossed the wall panels were ice cold, which meant that water condensed on the surface and dripped into pools beneath. Without these, the heat and the water, she could not have survived.
As time slowly went by, the Xyzians tried to lure her out with promises of food. At first, this was easy to resist; but as her hunger grew, the bait seemed far more tempting. She tried convincing herself that whatever they offered would be inedible; but as more time passed by, her empty stomach began to win the argument over her almost equally empty brain.
She lay hidden, keeping still in case they could trace her movements. Her mind had become nearly as immobile as her body. There was nothing else to do but think, but her thoughts led her nowhere. She switched her brain to standby and spent most of her time sleeping. It was never a deep sleep, because she was always on edge, listening for the fat aliens. Even when she lay awake she was dreaming, hallucinating. It was better than calculating how long it would take to starve to death.
Now she listened, wondering if she’d imagined the voice.
“Come out, Kiru.”
They knew where she was. They also knew who she was.
Although she’d tried to work out the geometry of the ship, she had lost all sense of direction during her escape. The voice was like a whisper, but it seemed to come from a distance, echoing through the depths of the vessel.
Then she thought of something: How did they know her real name?