Nothing you can do about it, don’t think about it.
He moved his torso slightly, yelped. Another wave foamed around him. Yes. Rising tide. Had to move. But two, maybe three ribs cracked, maybe broken. He’d had those before, lot of pain but nothing to worry about unless they were broken right through: then a splinter of bone might puncture a lung with his moving. But he could do nothing about them, so forget them.
Worse, a terribly sprained or badly fractured left ankle. Looked like a grapefruit.
Couldn’t even hobble on it without a cane or a crutch. Okay, driftwood; he was sure he could find something suitable.
Until then, he could crawl.
Danny ever so slowly twisted, breathing shallowly, yipping every now and then with the pain, until he was in a crawling stance. Waves were sloshing up and around him now regularly. Had to crawl north, find a little triangle of sand above high-tide line. Maybe a little water-hollowed cave cut back into the rocks. Why a cave? Build a fire. Rest. Sleep. Until he could find a way up the bluffs to the road.
He crawled. The Big Bang occurred, our sun was formed, still he crawled.
Liabilities: Ribs, head, ankle. Disorientation, memory loss, but those would pass if the concussion was just that and nothing worse.
The earth spun itself into a recognizable shape, but still Danny crawled. No more waves splashing over him now. Progress.
Needs: Fresh water to drink — food would be no problem, always plenty to eat on a wave-washed beach. Dry driftwood, one piece suitable for a cane or crutch. The rest for a fire to dry his clothes, keep him warm so he wouldn’t go into hypothermia or get pneumonia.
Life appeared on earth. Danny Marenne crawled. He knew what turtles knew. That crawling is a damn tough way to get around. No wonder they took it so slow.
Try to remember: don’t take off the left shoe. He’d never get it back on again, not with that ankle.
Assets: Still had his jacket on. In a Velcro’d pocket, dry matches wrapped in plastic. Also, in his hip pocket, his knife. And just ahead, two good-sized large-mouth glass jars, half-buried in sand. And...
He paused in his laborious inching forward, rested, raised his head. Could see some grasses growing from ancient fissures in the tumbled rocks of the cliffs. And still four hours of blessed golden light from the westering spring sun.
Things were looking up.
Enough time to strip down and dry his clothes over rocks or driftwood. Hump dry driftwood to a sheltered spot for a fire. Light it with his matches when the time came. What else?
With the plastic that wrapped the matches, some of the clumps of grass from the cliffside, and the glass jars, he could fashion miniature greenhouses for the sun’s heat to create water vapor from the wilting plants. In four hours, perhaps as much as a cup... He’d make it. Dammit, Danny Marenne was a survivor.
Meanwhile, amphibians were crawling up out of the ooze. Soon the therapsids and the thecodonts would appear, terrestrial life would be on its way.
Jesus, though, what a long time until man appeared to screw it all up...
Danny Marenne crawled.
Chapter Twenty-four
Kearny had flaked out on Giselle before breakfast, the cops had dropped around at midday and had left when nobody had anything to report, and now the Rochemonts were about to pour afternoon tea in the solarium and Ken Warren still hadn’t gotten back after taking the night off to see Maybelle. Giselle looked up sourly as Inga swept into the solarium in the gown she had been buying the day before.
She was suddenly quite stunning. Her eyes sparkled. She wore mascara and pale pink lipstick that made her prim mouth seem sensual. The gown showed she’d been hiding a striking figure under all her flowy sundresses. She turned around in the center of the room for Paul and Giselle to admire.
“What do you think?”
“Hubba hubba,” said Paul. Obviously retro-’50s this afternoon. That brain was worth half a billion dollars?
“Very striking,” said Giselle.
“Just trying it on.” Inga bent to give Paul a quick peck on the mouth, whirled away through the doorway. “I’ll get out of it and be right back.”
Paul rang the silver handbell on the low wicker coffee table. The solarium itself had once been a side porch facing south, but had been given double-glazed windows to replace screened porch walls on the three external sides. The floor had been covered with sod and clumps of odd-looking grasses and the solarium filled with exotic tropical plants. Taking tea there was like taking tea in the midst of a steamy African jungle, as if they were characters from an Evelyn Waugh novel dressing formally deep in the bush for their foursies.
Maybe Johnny Weismuller in a loincloth would serve them tea. Or Cheetah the chimpanzee. Me Jane, you Tarzan.
Better not bring anything like that up. Paul probably had all the Tarzan first editions, the pop-up books and big-little books from the 1930s, the original art by Alex Raymond and Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth from the earliest comic strip versions.
Giselle wondered how she even knew all this stuff. Rushing in upon her came a dim pre-teen memory that her dad, before he had walked out for cigarettes one night to never come back, had been an avid Tarzan nut. So had Giselle, but she had never fantasied herself as Jane, Tarzan’s mate; rather as a female Tarzan — as fierce, as strong, as quick, as the ape-man himself.
It must be this place, bringing up old memories like that. She was getting as goofy as everyone else.
She leaned back and crossed wickedly long and shapely legs (worthy of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, another of her teenage favorites) as a uniformed maid wheeled in an old-fashioned tea table that had a shelf underneath crammed with cucumber sandwiches, crusts off; digestive biscuits; and cream cakes. Very British.
Giselle thought about pouring tea, then decided to use her time alone with Paul to see if it was possible to have a sane conversation with the scion of the Rochemonts — God, she was starting to think in Edgar Rice Burroughs style. She already knew he was a man full of anomalies and contradictions. Which, if he really was in danger as she believed and Kearny maybe didn’t, made him that much more difficult to guard.
“So, Paul, tell me, when you have wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, what are you going to do to celebrate?”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought, Giselle,” he said seriously. “First I’m going to fill out all the gaps in my Action and Detective comic book runs, and complete my Lionel train collection. But the really boss thing, I’m taking out the miniature golf course — I could see you thought it was ridiculous, and you were right, miniature golf is childish.
“Once I perfect my photoreactive polymer, I’ll be replacing it with a full-size live-action Jurassic Park. The dinos will be holograms, but I’ll hire live actors on a permanent basis for all the characters and devise new scenarios that will really put them in mortal jeopardy. Scary for the actors, maybe sometimes fatal, but I’ll be paying them enough to—”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” burst out Giselle, startled into sincerity by the madness of his vision.
“Of course I am.”
He said it so normally it took her a second. “You are?”
He waved long-fingered hands around vaguely. “Everybody expects far-out wacko stuff from me, so that’s what I give ’em.”
Giselle waved her own hand around at the miniature jungle.
“You mean all of this is a massive put-on?”
“No. I’m just immature enough to really love this stuff. I just ham it up a bit... The problem is Mother.”