And Ryeland's guess, based on Algol's cycle and a careful recollection of how they had slept and eaten, was that no less than six months had already passed.
Chiquita was now terribly sick.
The great claw-gashes had begun to heal, but her fever was high. She seemed thirsty, but she would not drink; she seemed in pain, but she hardly moved. Only a low whimpering mew came from the little bower they had made for her.
Ryeland made a decision and went out onto the shell of their Reef to put it into practice. It was only a matter of moments before Donna followed. "What are you doing?" she demanded sharply. He stopped, caught working over the equipment the spacelings had transported from the ship for him—the equipment that he had not used and now was proposing to put to a use completely unconnected with his original intention.
He said, "How's Chiquita?" But she would not be diverted.
"What are you doing?"
Ryeland said, "Rigging up a radio. I've got all the parts. I—I thought I might be able to reach Quiveras and ask him to hurry—"
"Or maybe you thought you might reach that Plan cruiser?"
Ryeland said strongly: "All right. Why not? Maybe we pushed our luck too far! Things weren't so bad back in the B—back on Earth, I mean. The Plan of Man is reasonable. They'll take us back if I surrender, and even at worst, it can't be worse than waiting here to die."
"Steven!" She reached up to stare into his eyes. "I won't have you going back!"
"Who the devil," he yelled in a cold counterfeit of rage, "do you think you're ordering—" But she stopped his lips.
"Don't say it," she whispered. "I won't let you. And anyway, I'm afraid it's too late."
It took him a second to react. "Chiquita!"
He raced far ahead of her down to the dying spaceling. Chiquita had sunk into a sort of coma, motionless, barely breathing. Her belly was more and more misshapen, as with terminal malnutrition—or whatever might correspond to it in the structure of a creature from space—and the rest of her body as wasted as the gaunt, starved babies of Oriental famines of old times.
Ryeland reached out a hand to her—
And drew it back.
It was too late; it was all over. The spaceling had stopped breathing entirely.
Absently Ryeland brushed the dull fur on her cooling neck. Dead, yes. No matter what secrets her alien metabolism held, there was no doubt that life had gone.
And now . . . how long would the field that contained their air persist?
Ryeland had no idea. In a firefly, he remembered, the biolu-minescence lingered for hours after death. Was this a related effect? Probably not. The strange force that drove the spaceling was something far removed from a mere greenish glow. It might last for a few minutes. It might—at any split second it might—disappear, and kill them instantly in a soundless explosion of released air.
Donna said softly, "Steven. Let's go outside where we can see the stars."
The Reef was a small hollowed planet, wheeling slowly now, perhaps because of some dying convulsion from Chiquita. From the mouth of the cave the whole stardusted splendor of the heavens was revealed. The sun itself, yellow and distant, came up through tangled vines to look at them, like the headlight of a far-off locomotive.
"The sun," whispered Ryeland. "Still the brightest star. We haven't come so far."
They looked out at the mighty constellations, strange in their powdery mask of lesser stars but still identifiable—mighty Orion, the misty cluster of the Pleiades, the vast silvery sweep of the galaxy. There it was, thought Ryeland soberly, the terrible, wonderful new empire that they had hoped to help claim for Man. And they had failed.
It was very strange and wonderful, but he felt almost at peace. They were still alive. It was a fact that brought with it a sense of unbounded wealth. As everything had been lost with the death of the spaceling, now each tiny moment that they were somehow spared was a treasure. Each second was a joy.
Ryeland anchored himself to a ledge of space coral, all silver and ruby, with Donna very light in his arms. They talked, not consecutively. There were things each had to say.
The one central fact—the fact that they were clinging to life by only the feeblest of grips—they did not mention.
Donna said:
"Father's probably still on Earth. He can't have got my message. He'd have followed if he did. He's a busy, a driving man, Steven, and I used to hate him, but—Oh, Steven! Now I am only sorry for him."
Ryeland said:
"You wouldn't remember. You were bathing, and I blundered in. I was embarrassed. I guess you were, too. No, you probably weren't. And you had the Peace Dove. It nearly killed—what was his name? Oporto." Cloudily it struck him as odd: he had almost forgotten the man who had been the nearest thing he had to a friend.
Donna said:
"That was Father's idea, the Peace Dove. If you hate black . . . call it white, and love it. So he took that murdering thing and called it 'Peace'. He always boasted: The Planner is the first ruler in all Earth's history who has never needed a bodyguard.' But what would you call those things? My Peace Doves. His Hawks."
Ryeland said, with a sudden rush of amazement:
"Donna! We're still alive!"
18
They looked at each other in wonderment, for sure enough, it was true. They had not died of air-strangulation. Around them their little world was still intact.
"But surely the spaceling was dead!" Donna cried.
"No doubt of that. I don't understand this."
They looked around anxiously. The stars blazed down on them, and that was all there was to be seen beyond the confines of the tiny air bubble that made their world.
"Look!" cried Ryeland. "Something's happening." At the edge of the reeflet, suddenly, like a vanishing ghost.... puff! There was a soundless explosion of faint, misty fog. And a colony of flying fish, a lacy pattern of vines, a clump of blossoms with liquid gold in their cups— they fluttered, shook, flung madly away; and then that corner, too, was still; but it was dead.
The shape of the bubble had changed. One corner of their little world had lost its air—poof!—like the winking of an eye. For one eternal moment Ryeland thought that this was what they had been waiting for. The spaceling, Chiquita, had died at last; the strange forces that allowed her to hold air about her, and them, had loosened their grasp, and they were face to face with death. Donna, who felt the abrupt clutch of fear, clung to him tightly.
But Ryeland whispered thoughtfully. "It isn't right, Donna. Something's happening, but not what we expected at all. If the field went, it should go all at once."
"But what could it be, then, Steven?"
"Let's go see!" Like biped spacelings themselves, they turned and dove into the cavern. Quickly, quickly. Crazed, confused thoughts floated through Ryeland's mind: Their dying little world ... all worlds, dying ... all the planets of the sun, doomed to death, doomed because
Ryeland had failed to give them inertialess travel in time . . . doomed to die without giving seed to space.
They stopped, clutching at palely glowing vines.