I folded my arms and leaned back.
We were getting to look awfully lean by the eighth day. I wasn’t even trying to fix the ship any more; the hunger was starting to get me. But I saw Davison puttering around with my solderbeam.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to repair the drive,” he said. “You don’t want to, but we can’t just sit around, you know.” His nose was deep in my repair guide, and he was fumbling with the release on the solderbeam.
I shrugged. “Go ahead, if you want to.” I didn’t care what he did. All I cared about was the gaping emptiness in my stomach, and about the dimly grasped fact that somehow we were stuck here for good.
“Gus?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s time I told you something. I’ve been eating the manna for four days. It’s good. It’s nourishing stuff.”
“You’ve been eating—the manna? Something that grows on an alien world? You crazy?”
“What else can we do? Starve?”
I smiled feebly, admitting that he was right. From somewhere in the back of the ship came the sounds of Holdreth moving around. Holdreth had taken this thing worse than any of us. He had a family back on Earth, and he was beginning to realize that he wasn’t ever going to see them again.
“Why don’t you get Holdreth?” Davison suggested. “Go out there and stuff yourselves with the manna. You’ve got to eat something.”
“Yeah. What can I lose?” Moving like a mechanical man, I headed towards Holdreth’s cabin. We would go out and eat the manna and cease being hungry, one way or another.
“Clyde?” I called. “Clyde?”
I entered his cabin. He was sitting at his desk, shaking convulsively, staring at the two streams of blood that trickled in red spurts from his slashed wrists.
“Clyde!”
He made no protest as I dragged him towards the infirmary cabin and got tourniquets around his arms, cutting off the bleeding. He just stared dully ahead, sobbing.
I slapped him and he came around. He shook his head dizzily, as if he didn’t know where he was.
“Easy, Clyde. Everything’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” he said hollowly. “I’m still alive. Why didn’t you let me die? Why didn’t you—”
Davison entered the cabin. “What’s been happening, Gus?”
“It’s Clyde. The pressure’s getting him. He tried to kill himself, but I think he’s all right now. Get him something to eat, will you?”
We had Holdreth straightened around by evening. Davison gathered as much of the manna as he could find, and we held a feast.
“I wish we had nerve enough to kill some of the local fauna,” Davison said. “Then we’d have a feast—steaks and everything!”
“The bacteria,” Holdreth pointed out quietly. “We don’t dare.”
“I know. But it’s a thought.”
“No more thoughts,” I said sharply. “Tomorrow morning we start work on the drive panel again. Maybe with some food in our bellies we’ll be able to keep awake and see what’s happening here.”
Holdreth smiled. “Good. I can’t wait to get out of this ship and back to a normal existence. God, I just can’t wait!”
“Let’s get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll give it another try. We’ll get back,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.
The following morning I rose early and got my tool-kit. My head was clear, and I was trying to put the pieces together without much luck. I started towards the control cabin.
And stopped.
And looked out the viewport.
I went back and awoke Holdreth and Davison. “Take a look out the port,” I said hoarsely.
They looked. They gaped.
“It looks just like my house,” Holdreth said. “My house on Earth.”
“With all the comforts of home inside, I’ll bet.” I walked forward uneasily and lowered myself through the hatch. “Let’s go look at it.”
We approached it, while the animals frolicked around us. The big giraffe came near and shook its head gravely. The house stood in the middle of the clearing, small and neat and freshly painted.
I saw it now. During the night, invisible hands had put it there. Had assembled and built a cosy little Earth-type house and dropped it next to our ship for us to live in.
“Just like my house,” Holdreth repeated in wonderment.
“It should be,” I said. “They grabbed the model from your mind, as soon as they found out we couldn’t live on the ship indefinitely.”
Holdreth and Davison asked as one, “What do you mean?”
“You mean you haven’t figured this place out yet?” I licked my lips, getting myself used to the fact that I was going to spend the rest of my life here. “You mean you don’t realize what this house is intended to be?”
They shook their heads, baffled. I glanced around, from the house to the useless ship to the jungle to the plain to the little pond. It all made sense now.
“They want to keep us happy,” I said. “They know we weren’t thriving aboard the ship, so they—they built us something a little more like home.”
“They? The giraffes?”
“Forget the giraffes. They tried to warn us, but it’s too late. They’re intelligent beings, but they’re prisoners just like us. I’m talking about the ones who run this place. The super-aliens who make us sabotage our own ship and not even know we’re doing it, who stand someplace up there and gape at us. The ones who dredged together this motley assortment of beasts from all over the galaxy. Now we’ve been collected too. This whole damned place is just a zoo—a zoo for aliens so far ahead of us we don’t dare dream what they’re like.”
I looked up at the shimmering blue-green sky, where invisible bars seemed to restrain us, and sank down dismally on the porch of our new home. I was resigned. There wasn’t any sense in struggling against them.
I could see the neat little placard now:
EARTHMEN. Native Habitat, Sol III.