“Stop!” Nick screamed. “Althea, you’ll kill yourself!”
The plane rolled on ahead of them on its big balloon tires, zigzagging to avoid the palms and a boulder like a big black knuckle, coming ever closer to the edge of the island and the ten-thousand-foot fall that waited there.
Perhaps Althea never really meant to escape; perhaps she had known all along that takeoff would have been impossible. The next moment a palm tree sliced halfway into the delicate wooden bonework of the wing, and the airplane, rotating on this pivot, ran head on into the largest palm on the island and came to an abrupt stop. The chattering of the engine ceased and the silence rang like the moment in a conversation when nobody can think of what to say.
Reaching the ship first, Hali climbed up the brackets and opened the hood of the cockpit. By the time Nick joined her she had her hands under Althea’s arms and was lifting her out of the wreckage. She was unconscious. Her face was badly bloodied where it had smacked against the instrument panel.
They carried her a short distance to the pond, Nick reflecting on how many near-deaths in this accidentless future were actually cries for love. There they made a bed of moss and laid her down. He tore a square from his cape, his fine turquoise cape with the Lifestylers embroidered all over it, and, dipping it in the water, cleaned the caked blood from her face.
A ragged cut, startlingly red, began at the corner of her chin, transversed the perfect white flesh of her cheek and stopped just short of her eye. Her faultless nose was smashed at the cartilage and swollen like an egg, turning purplish green as they watched.
“Oh God,” Nick whispered. “We don’t even have a bandage.”
“Yes,” Hali agreed, “it will be difficult. I must have a few minutes alone.”
And she walked away, leaving Nick kneeling by Althea’s side.
“Wait a minute,” he called after her. “Where are you going?”
But she didn’t answer.
“Shit,” he grumbled, “what a mess. How’d I ever get mixed up in this?”
“Nicky?” Althea was awake. “Nicky, my head hurts.”
“Shh, don’t worry, Althea. You’ll be fine.”
She raised herself on an elbow and groaned.
“Oh, I feel terrible. What happened? The airplane—I was going to take the airplane. But we’re still on the island.”
“You had an accident.”
“An accident? But is the airplane all right?”
Nick hesitated.
“We’ll never get out of here without the airplane. We’ll die here. Nicky, do something.”
“Relax. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He was reassuring himself as well as her. The cut across her face was bleeding lavishly and he was worried about infection. To be so far from medical machinery, so responsible for the situation, so helpless. He moistened the piece of cape and wiped her face with it.
“What’s on my face?” she asked. She leaned over the pool, which was still as glass. Her reflection was brilliant in the moonlight, the huge scar, the swollen nose. She gasped. She reached for her face and touched the surfaces gingerly, wincing from the pain, trying to disprove the reality of it.
“No,” she said, “no . . .”
“Just relax,” Nick said.
He put his arm around her but she pulled away, crying, “No/”
Frantically she began to splash water on her face and wait impatiently for the ripples to subside so she could examine her reflection again, as though the wounds were stage makeup that might be washed away. She was so involved with this she did not notice Hali’s return.
“Hold her down,” Hali whispered to Nick.
Nick grabbed Althea by the shoulders and forced her onto her back. She screamed and kicked and scratched Nick’s face with her nails. He sat on her, pinning her arms and legs as best he could. When Hali knelt by her head, she screamed, “Don’t touch me, you filthy alien!”
Hali’s four fingers grasped the crown of Althea’s head like a vise. With the other hand she gathered the edges of the cut and held them in place for a few seconds, the time required, apparently, for the flesh to knit. She moved systematically along the length of the cut until it was entirely healed and all that remained was a long pink welt, no more serious than the mark left by sleeping on the fold of a sheet. After that she began to mold Althea's nose as though it were clay. Althea screamed. Her eyes rolled up and she bit into her lower lip. Then she fainted.
Having restored the nose to a semblance of its former shape, Hali rested her fingers on it and the swelling shrank, the discoloration faded. Then she climbed wearily to her feet.
“You know,” Nick said, putting his arms around her, “you are the most truly generous person I have ever met in my life.”
Hali smiled and rubbed her beak softly across his face.
Althea groaned. She shifted position, then opened her eyes and rose unsteadily to face them.
“You filthy, sadistic alien,’’ she hissed, and slapped Hali across the face.
Nick snorted with disgust. He pushed her down to her knees and held her head a foot from the surface of the pool.
“Look at yourself,’’ he ordered. “Hali did that—she healed you. You were mangled and she made you beautiful again. Even though you’ve been treating her like dirt for the past week.’’
Althea ran her fingers back and forth across the scar like a blind man reading braille. She faced Hali and tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. She turned and ran.
Nick was grinning.
“I fail to see what is so amusing,” Hali said, with a trace of annoyance.
“I’m sorry,” Nick said, “but I can’t help it. That headache I’ve had for the past week—it’s gone.”
The genetic change, he knew, was now complete.
VI
That night Nick dreamed of the dungeon. He stood in front of the oak door, without the keyring; yet for once he had no sense of impotency or frustration. He knew precisely what to do—almost as though he were receiving orders from an unknown being, orders direct to the subconscious.
“Open, door,” he whispered, and with a wailing of hinges and rotting wood, the door swung wide.
What he saw then touched him like an icy hand: Nothingness.
His mind spun away from it like a top skimming the edge of a table, and he woke with a start. He lay awake in the dark, feeling the warmth of Hali’s body and taking strength in it; come dawn, he knew, there would be no turning back. The window would open for him and he would have to enter that frightening void.
VII
“Keep an eye on Althea,” Nick said, drawing the nerve gun from an inside pocket of his cape, “and if I don’t come back . .
“If you don’t come back,” Hali said, “I will spend the rest of my life in misery, so please plan to return!” Thus she skirted the unpleasant thoughts in the back of both their minds.
“I love you,” Nick said.
“And I, Nicholas—I would dare say, to hell with Alta-Tyberia! Let twenty million die so that the two of us can live out our lives together.”
“Yeah, well, you may feel that way today, but I don’t think you’d be so happy ten years from now.”
Nick sat down crosslegged, but before he could begin concentration Hali knelt in front of him and kissed him.
“Please be careful.”
“Nothing to it,” he said casually.
“Shall I watch?”
“Might be better if you didn’t.”
Obediently Hali turned away. Nick wanted to call her back, but he saw that the longer he put it off, the more difficult it became.