The gladiator turned to seize her but she was swept past him. For a moment or two the air trapped in her robes would hold her to the surface. He saw her hand, the robes falling from it, lifted. “Master!” she screamed. He left the side of the capsule and plunged after her, wading, but she was already yards away. He then began to swim toward a point at which he hoped to intercept her. But she was not there. So swift was the current. He saw her then, in a flash of lightning, yards downstream, clinging to a rock, the waters rushing about it. But when he reached the rock she had been swept from it. He pushed away from the rock, slipping, and hastened downstream. He turned in a minute, fighting the current. Might she not be near? Something struck his leg and he reached down, but it was a branch. “Master! Master!” he heard, and once more he hastened downstream, lashing the water. He saw, in another flash of lightning, her head disappear under the roiling surface of the dark waters. As he swam he tried to judge the feel of the current on his body, its turnings, its deflections, as it was shaped by the contour of the banks, the irregularities of the riverbed. At times the water rushed over his head, and he rose, shaking his head, looking wildly about. He saw the capsule moving downstream, to his right, tipped, awry in the current. A scream was before him in the darkness to the left. Again he sped toward a projected rendezvous, the location dictated by an instant’s calculation of the physics of time and current. But, of course, she was not an inert object, but one which moved, and straggled, and the robes, too, clinging about her, influenced her movements. How could one judge such things, and in the darkness, the turbulence? She was, again, not at the projected point of rendezvous, or, if she was, it was in the darkness, or perhaps even momentarily beneath the surface, eluding his grasp, perhaps by inches. “Master!” he heard, a scream half choked with water. Then he sped directly downstream, anything to be somewhere ahead of her. He crested the current and rushed before it, half borne by it, half racing it. Then he turned about in the water, fighting against the current. “Scream!” he cried. “Cry out!” He wondered if she were under the water, perhaps feet away, speeding toward him. He wondered if she was drowned. Then, in a flash of lightning, he saw a fold of garment, and, in another stroke of lightning, he got his hand on it. He jerked her head out of the water. Then, swept downstream, he struck against something. In the center of the stream, temporarily arrested there, caught on a rock, was the large branch, almost a tree in itself, which must have washed away from some bank, and which had passed them earlier. They were then, in the pouring rain, enmeshed in the smaller branches. He reached for branches, and they broke off. He steadied himself against the wet, black trunklike main branch. He gasped for breath. Her head was back, her eyes wild. “I have you, slave,” he said. “Master!” she cried, her face streaming with water. The branch then, pressed in the current, suddenly, unexpectedly, awkwardly, moved, slipping away from the rock. It was then loose in the current, and spinning downstream. Then it rolled and the smaller branches, like a barrel of spokes, forced them both under the water. The gladiator reached up, partly climbing, partly tearing through branches. His fingernails were bloodied from tearing at the bark. Then he emerged into the storm again, his left arm about the slave’s neck. In a flash of lightning he saw the escape capsule, far downstream, deep in the water, listing. The river churned inches from the opened hatch. He did not doubt, from its depth in the water, that the capsule had already shipped a considerable amount of water. He was afraid to release the branch. He did not know if he could reach the shore. An uprooted tree swept past. “Look!” he cried, clinging to the branch. Downstream, in the darkness, there was a sudden bluish glow, and then the escape capsule, its entire large, oval surface, began to crackle with sparks and flame. Then again there was darkness. “Beware!” he said, and braced himself, for the trunk of a tree, like a spear, smote into the branch to which they clung, spinning it about.
“Are you all right?” asked the gladiator.
“Yes, Master,” cried the slave.
There was now, under the roar of the storm, another roar, somewhere ahead, a roar which grew progressively louder. The gladiator tried to peer through the darkness and rain. He fought for breath. The water must have reached yet another system in the escape capsule, for, far downstream, it began again to glow, but this time with an orangish color. And then, suddenly, it was dark. It was as though the glow had been suddenly snapped off, like a light. A part of a tree swept by, a catlike beast clinging to its trunk. Its fur was sleek with rain. The branch to which the gladiator and the slave clung caught for a moment on another rock. “What is the noise, not the storm?” the gladiator asked himself, confused. “Is it a thousand beasts? Is it thunder from afar?” “Too,” he asked himself, “what of the capsule? How did it cease so suddenly to glow?” The roar was now becoming even louder. It competed with the wind, the storm. Suddenly he heard a wild screech of terror from ahead, which then faded suddenly. It had to be the animal which they had seen, but moments before. Now the roaring was deafening. In the darkness the gladiator, as the slave cried out in terror, in protest, thrust away from the branch, and, with one arm, as he could, fought for the shore. He was swept muchly downstream, but twice caught against rocks. Then, when the roar was unmistakable, even to one confused in the darkness, one wrought with titanic strain, one exhausted from physical effort, he got the mud and gravel of the riverbed beneath his feet, and, the slave terrified and bedraggled in his arms, made his way to the bank. In the next flash of lightning he saw, holding the slave, the edge of the falls, some yards away. Curious he went to its brink. The drop was something in the nature of a hundred feet. He saw the sopped, catlike beast slide through the water, its ears back, and scratch its way up to the shore. It was possible, he thought, that they might have survived the fall. To be sure, it is difficult to make judgments on such matters. He did not see the capsule. He did not know if it were still afloat or not. After resting for a time, he once again lifted the slave in his arms, who was trembling, and began to make his way back upstream, to where they had salvaged some of their goods. After a time the rains stopped. He had then managed to build a small fire. This was managed with leaves and brush from rain-sheltered places. The fire was lit with the lighter, from the survival kit, one of the objects removed earlier from the capsule. They had then stripped and set about drying their clothes. His had dried first, easily, as they were lighter, less voluminous, less cumbersome. Janina had been kneeling near the fire, drying her hair, when they first heard the horns.
“There are several horns now,” said Janina.
“They are on this side of the river,” said the gladiator. “We will cross.”
“Not the river!” said Janina.
“The level is much subsided,” said the gladiator.
“I fear the river!” said Janina.
“This,” said the gladiator, “will prevent you from being swept away.”
He knotted a rope about her neck.
“That is its only purpose, is it not, Master?” she asked.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She looked down, shyly, smiling. Janina, in the arms of strong masters, had learned her womanhood.
The remains of the armor he had cast into the river. Its utility was grievously impaired, it having been muchly damaged on the Alaria, and he feared, too, that on this world it would constitute little more than a clumsy, weighty encumbrance. Could one manage edged or pointed weapons, even staves or clubs, well, if one were so housed? Might one not be tripped, or caught, or be for most practical purposes helpless in such garb? Would it turn the blow of an ax, for example, or be of much service if one were caught in a noose, cast from a tree? Too, men seen in such things might be taken to be the barbarians of the ships, and he doubted that such would be likely to be popular with primitively armed rustic or sylvan populations, if they knew of them, at all. The armor, of this sort, which weighed in the vicinity of a hundred pounds, had its place, surely, in a world of fire pistols, and weapons of a similar sort, but it did not seem that it would be of great value in a primitive, natural, savage world, one where survival was more likely to be a function of speed and agility, and will, intelligence and ferocity, than an arrangement of relative impenetrabilities.