“Shrick!” Wesel was saying, “don’t fight! They will kill you, and I shall be alone. I shall have the world to myself. Let them do as they will with us, and we shall live through the End.”
At her words a tittering laugh rippled through the mob.
“They will live through the End! They will die as Big-Ears and his friends died!”
“I want your blade,” said Short-Tail.
“Give it to him,” cried Wesel. “You will get it back after the End!”
Shrick hesitated. The other made a sign. One of the throwing spears buried itself in the fleshy part of his arm. Had it not been for Wesel’s voice, pleading, insistent, he would have charged his tormenters and met his end in less than a single heartbeat. Reluctantly, he released his hold upon the weapon. Slowly — as though loath to leave its true owner — it floated away from him. And then the People were all around him almost suffocating him with pressure of their bodies.
The cave into which Shrick and Wesel were forced was their own dwelling place. They were in pitiable state when the mob retreated to the entrance — Wesel’s wounds had reopened and Shrick’s arm was bleeding freely. Somebody had wrenched out the spear — but the head had broken off.
Outside, Short-Tail was laying about him with the keen blade he had taken from his chief. Under its strokes great masses of the spongy stuff of the Outside were coming free, and many willing hands were stuffing this tight into the cave entrance.
“We will let you out after the End!” called somebody. There was a hoot of derision. Then: “I wonder which will eat the other first?”
“Never mind,” said Wesel softly. “We shall laugh last.”
“Perhaps. But… the People. My People. And you are barren. The Giants have won—”
Wesel was silent. Then he heard her voice again. She was whimpering to herself in the darkness. Shrick could guess her thoughts. All their grandiose dreams of world dominion had come to this — a tiny cramped space in which there was barely room for either of them to stir a finger.
And now they could no longer hear the voices of the People outside their prison. Shrick wondered if the Giants had already struck, then reassured himself with the memory of how the voices of those suffering from the sickness had grown fainter and fainter and then, at the finish, ceased altogether. And he wondered how he and Wesel would know when the End had come, and how they would know when it was safe to dig themselves out. It would be a long, slow task with only their teeth and claws with which to work.
But he had a tool.
The fingers of the hand of his uninjured arm went to the spearhead still buried in the other. He knew that by far the best way of extracting it would be one, quick pull — but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Slowly, painfully, he worked away at the sharp fragment of metal.
“Let me do it for you.”
“No.” His voice was rough. “Besides, there is no haste.”
Slowly, patiently, he worried at the wound. He was groaning a little, although he was not conscious of doing so. And then, suddenly, Wesel screamed. The sound was so unexpected, so dreadful in that confined space, that Shrick started violently. His hand jerked away from his upper arm, bringing with it the spearhead.
His first thought was that Wesel, telepath as she was, had chosen this way to help him. But he felt no gratitude, only a dull resentment.
“What did you do that for?” he demanded angrily.
She didn’t answer his question. She was oblivious of his presence.
“The People…” she whispered. “The People… I can feel their thoughts… I can feel what they are feeling. And they are gasping for air… they are gasping and dying… and the cave of Long-Fur the spearmaker… but they are dying, and the blood is coming out of their mouths and noses and ears… I can’t bear it… I can’t—”
And then a terrifying thing happened. The sides of the cave pressed in upon them. Throughout the world, throughout the ship, the air cells in the spongy insulation were expanding as the air pressure dropped to zero. It was this alone that saved Shrick and Wesel, although they never knew it. The rough plug sealing their cave that, otherwise, would have blown out swelled to meet the expanding walls of the entrance, making a near perfect airtight joint.
But the prisoners were in no state to appreciate this, even had they been in possession of the necessary knowledge. Panic seized them both. Claustophobia was unknown among the People — but walls that closed upon them were outside their experience.
Perhaps Wesel was the more level-headed of the pair. It was she who tried to restrain her mate as he clawed and bit savagely, madly, at the distended, bulging walls. He no longer knew what lay outside the cave, had he known it would have made no difference. His one desire was to get out.
At first he made little headway, then he bethought himself of the little blade still grasped in his hand. With it he attacked the pulpy mass. The walls of the cells were stretched thin, almost to bursting, and under his onslaught they put up no more resistance than so many soap bubbles. A space was cleared, and Shrick was able to work with even greater vigor.
“Stop! Stop, I tell you! There is only the choking death outside the cave. And you will kill us both!”
But Shrick paid no heed, went on stabbing and hacking. It was only slowly, now, that he was able to enlarge upon the original impression he had made. As the swollen surfaces burst and withered beneath his blade, so they bulged and bellied in fresh places.
“Stop!” cried Wesel again.
With her arms, her useless legs trailing behind her, she pulled herself toward her mate. And she grappled with him, desperation lending her strength. So for many heartbeats they fought — silent, savage, forgetful of all that each owed to the other. And yet, perhaps, Wesel never quite forgot. For all her blind, frantic will to survive, her telepathic powers were at no time entirely in abeyance. In spite of herself she, as always, shared the other’s mind. And this psychological factor gave her an advantage that offeset the paralysis of the lower half of her body — and at the same time inhibited her from pressing that advantage home to its logical conclusion.
But it did not save her when her fingers, inadvertently, dug into the wound in Shrick’s arm. His ear-splitting scream was compounded of pain and fury, and he drew upon reserves of strength that the other never even guessed that he possessed. And the hand gripping the blade came round with irresistible force.
For Wesel there was a heartbeat of pain, of sorrow for herself and Shrick, of blind anger against the Giants who, indirectly, had brought this thing to pass.
And then the beating of her heart was stilled forever.
With the death of Wesel, Shrick’s frenzy left him.
There, in the darkness, he ran his sensitive fingers over the lifeless form, hopelessly hoping for the faintest sign of life. He called her name, he shook her roughly. But at last the knowledge that she was dead crept into his brain — and stayed there. In his short life he had known many times this sense of loss, but never with such poignancy.
And worst of all was the knowledge that he had killed her.
He tried to shift the burden of blame. He told himself that she would have died, in any case, of the wounds received at the hands of the Giants. He tried to convince himself that, wounds or no wounds, the Giants were directly responsible for her death. And he knew that he was Wesel’s murderer, just as he knew that all that remained for him in life was to bring the slayers of his people to a reckoning.
This made him cautious.
For many heartbeats he lay there in the thick darkness, not daring to renew his assault on the walls of his prison. He told himself that, somehow, he would know when the Giants let the air back into the world. How he would know he could not say, but the conviction persisted.