It was only then that Zara began to realize that she might share that same fate herself.
She struggled to turn over, free her mouth from the choking sand. The golden coils punished her, but gasping and panting she managed to flop onto her side. "Please!" she begged. "I mean you no harm! Give me that metal thing there—it will let us talk to each other." And she tried, at terrible cost of agony as the golden coils remorselessly fought her movements, to point to the Pmal translator, whispering away to itself on the sand.
The hideous mask-faces thrust themselves at her, hooting and whistling. She knew what they said was a language of a sort, and it was frustration to know that a few yards away the Pmal was surely translating faithfully every word—but inaudibly, because she had set the sound so low lest they hear her. "Please!" she screamed as one came near her with a great curved cleaver. It paused, seeming to enjoy her fear. The gabbling whistles and honks burst like laughter around her.
She closed her eyes, and tried to remember her brief training. What were her options? Talking was useless, with the Pmal gone. Her laser weapon was long since taken away. They had left her only the other instruments strapped to her arms—medicpac, chronometer, communicator . . .
Communicator!
She took a deep breath, and forced herself to relax. She lay still as stone for long seconds, remembering where the transmit switch was on the communicator, feeling with her body-image senses where her hands were, where the switch was. There would not be much freedom of action.
Then she flung herself onto her back, forcing her hands together, clawing with the fingers of her right hand for the forearm of her left.
The golden coils responded at once by tightening so violently that she thought she felt bones snap; but she had touched the switch! "Help!" she screamed. "This is Zara Doy Gentry calling! Help! Please! Help me!"
A hundred-odd degrees of arc around the great bulk of Cuckoo, Ben Line Pertin was talking to himself.
On his watch duty, desolately killing time while trying to solve the insoluble problem of what to do about the wife that was not his, he had observed a curiosity. The comm frequency that had been abandoned because no transmissions had been received and its owner, that other avatar of himself named Ben Tom Pertin, was presumed dead had suddenly come back to life.
When he first beheld himself he was aghast. This devastated face, harried, sick, and in pain, was himself! "Ben Tom!" he cried. "What's the matter?"
The face in the stereostage reflected annoyance. "I'm not Ben Tom," it snapped. "And I don't know what you mean. What's the matter with you people? I've been trying to call for—I don't know, days!"
"Sorry," Ben Line Pertin said. "But what do you mean, you're not Ben Tom?"
The ravaged face split in an unpleasant smile. "Glad I'm not," he said. "Ben Tom's dead. I'm Ben Yale. Remember? When you—we—volunteered for the sixth time? Well, that's me. I lost my ship, nearly lost my life. I've been through hell, Ben Line! But at that I'm better off than Ben Tom, because his bones are twenty feet away from me. This is his ship I've found; my own was destroyed, communications and all."
"You look as if you've been through hell," Ben Line agreed fervently. "What are those bandages?"
The walking skeleton looked incuriously at his arms and legs. "Oh, some sort of fungus, I think," he said. "It itches. It hurts, too, but I've blocked it with stuff from the medicpac. But I imagine I'll need treatment."
"Well," cried Ben Line, finding something to be cheerful about for the first time in some days, "I think I've got good news for you, Ben Yale. We've just been transmitting a new model exploring ship to the ground station. This one's armed and armored, ready for anything, and it's got full ground-to-space capability! We can get it over to you and have you up here in orbit in jig time—as soon as it's ready."
"Fine," Ben Yale said—strangely, thought his duplicate; why wasn't he more excited? But he was looking narrowly at Ben Line. He said at last tangentially, "Have you heard anything from Zara?"
Ben Line shook his head. Then he corrected himself. "Yes, as a matter of fact I did," he said. "I don't remember—did you split off before I got her message about not coming because she was pregnant?"
"Pregnant?" Ben Yale demanded. "I don't believe it!"
"Well, it's true. That is—it's true of our Zara. But there's another copy of her—" He stopped. He was not sure how much he wanted to say.
"On Cuckoo, right?" Ben Yale cried. "I knew it! I saw her, Ben Line! She's in trouble. Not more than five thousand yards from here!"
"Trouble? No, I don't think so . . ." Ben Line started.
"Don't be a fool, Ben Line!" his avatar cried. "I tell you, I saw her!"
Ben Line Pertin hesitated, filled with confusion and a painful mixture of hope and fear. Another Zara, so close? But in danger?
"Stand by," he said. "I'll scan that vector." And his fingers danced over his console to FARLINK, ordering a search for transmissions from a point five thousand yards at twenty-seven degrees from Ben Yale's signal.
From her perch across the console from him, Venus sat quietly regarding Ben Line Pertin. "What is the matter?" she asked, spraying a tiny violet cloudlet from her atomizer.
He shook his head as the rich menthol scent reached him. "It's Zara," he said. "Something I don't understand. And one of my replicates down there, looking— well, I don't know what's keeping him alive."
"I ache with your pains," Venus said softly. Though her stare had always seemed blankly opaque, he felt her compassion through it. "So difficult for you, to see yourself. I have at least been spared that. I have no contact with my replicates, save one or two—and then, for one of us to die in this edited form would not be bad."
Distracted, Ben Line scowled at the console. There was no response to the search, although he could see that the program was functioning. Lately he had found it more and more difficult to distinguish sleep from waking. His sleep was filled with troubled dreams, and his waking life was a nightmare.
The dreams lingered with him, even when he was awake. He shivered, remembering one dream—
"SCAN UNSUCCESSFUL," FARLINK'S screen reported. "NO UNIDENTIFIED TRANSMISSIONS FROM AREA."
"Continue," snapped Ben Line, reinforcing the verbal order with his keyboard.
And he stared into space, remembering that one dream. In it he had been a child again. On Earth. Not the Earth he had left—so many replications before!— but the Earth he imagined, as it had been before the first contact with the Galactic civilizations. He had been sitting at a child's desk, in an upstairs room with an open window, looking out over a sunny yard, reading a book, when something had come in from outside. It had fluttered through the window, lit on the page in front of him. When he raised his hand to slap it it had leaped away, and he saw it was no common fly but a tiny five-eyed bat shape with bright butterfly wings. When he heard it squeaking, and caught its faint vinegar scent, he knew it was a T'Worlie—incongruously there in that pregalactic age, but somehow Earth's first visitor from deep space.
He seized a flyswatter to kill it. Its shrill scream of protest hurt his ears, and its fear was a carrion reek. Wings whirring, it rose to fly away, but he smashed it on the open page.
For a moment he felt secure in that dream . . .
And then he heard a droning roar from outside. The sun darkened. Shadows filled the window. When he looked out he saw that the sky had turned black with alien beings descending—T'Worlie and Sheliaks, Boaty-Bits and Scorpians, endless processions of a thousand shapes and sizes all arrowing down upon him . . .