The Hunter decided to waste a little of Maeta's blood, and began to permit clots to form over her in juries. She might have to hold the rest of it in by her-self for a while.
Bob was back in a minute or two with a large fish which seemed to have been washed through the reef and stranded. It was in very unappetizing condition for a human being, but quite usable for the Hunter. He set it down beside the still, unconscious girl; the alien extruded tissue from her skin, enveloped the fish, and began salvaging amino adds and carbohydrates. It massed ten or twelve pounds, quite enough for immediate needs. The Hunter concentrated on his job, but tried to keep aware of the other two.
They found enough food to keep them going, though Bob was not at all fond of shellfish; but as the day wore on, the far more serious question of water began to loom.
There was no spring or rivulet on the little island. The few pools which existed had been filled by the spray, and were rapidly vanishing in any case. Bob considered complaining to be beneath him, but the child did not, and his whines about his thirst alternated with questions about when they could expect to be rescued.
Bob was optimistic about this. "They know we were out in Mae's canoe, or they could have found out soon enough when we didn't show up for supper. They'd know which way the wind would send us. The Dumbo was at Tahiti, but they'd call it down by radio this morning, and this island will be about the first place they'll look. If you want to be useful in stead of noisy, go and make a great big "S O S" on the beach-as big as you can fit between the coral and the lagoon. I expect they'll see us easily enough anyway, since there's nothing to hide us, but that would catch an eye from farther away."
The Hunter took Bob's words at their face value, since they seemed reasonable, and stopped worrying about water as far as the males were concerned; they could last for a day or so. Maeta, however, could not; she had lost far too much blood. She regained consciousness about noon, and the symbiont explained the situation to her, vibrating her hearing apparatus as he normally did Bob's. She took it calmly enough, but her first words were also about water. The Hunter admitted that none was available.
"Are you sure you can't do anything about that?" she asked. "I don't want to sound like a crybaby, but I don't know all about your powers. I know you can do funny things with body chemistry, and I wondered if you could take the salt out of sea water if I drank it, or maybe filter it out of the water before it got into us? Or could a person dip an arm or a leg into the sea, and have you bring in just water through the skin andleave the salt outside?"
The Hunter admitted that this might be possible; there were organisms on his world which possessed desalting organs, though he knew only in a very general way how these worked.
"It will certainly take energy," the detective pointed out. "It's a pity that you, who need the water most be-cause of your blood loss, have such a poor food reserve. I did feed you a lot from the fish Bob brought, but most of it's already gone to repair and reconstruction. I'm not really sure I can do this desalting trick, since I've never had to do it before, but I'll try. Ask Bob to get you into the water."
"Even if you can't do it," she said, "it will be more comfortable there. It's pretty hot here on the sand. I remember long ago when I was working out on one of the reef islets at Ell, and the people who were sup posed to pick me up were late, I felt a lot better just by lying in the water while I waited. Maybe a person's skin can take water out of the ocean anyway."
The Hunter assured her that it could not-that water would normally tend to flow the other way, if at all, osmosis being what it was. To his surprise, she knew what he was talking about, and conceded the point, theoretically.
"But then I should have gotten thirstier that day, and not felt better," she remarked. The Hunter, willing to prolong any discussion to keep the girl's mind off her very genuine thirst, pointed out that the human species seemed to him a very suggestible one. She did not answer this; Bob had approached, and she was telling him what the Hunter had said about getting her into the water. Bob, of course, knew the osmosis situation equally well and rather doubted the practicality of the attempt, but decided not to argue with the Hunter. The water, fortunately, was only a few feet away, and with a little help from the girl her self he got her legs and feet immersed as much as the very shallow slope of the beach allowed. The Hunter sent out his own tissue through her skin, and tried to remember what he had learned about desalting glands.
It was a difficult job. His chemical senses operated essentially on large molecules such as proteins and polysaccharides; he could identify and distinguish these by means most nearly analogous to the human sense of touch. It was intuitively obvious to him why many of them behaved as they did in a human organism-or any other living thing-just as a simple gear train is obvious in its operation to most human beings. However, if the same human being, who had no training in complex mechanics, were suddenly to be con fronted with the maintenance of a twenty-eight cylinder "corncob" airplane engine, he would be in somewhat the Hunter's situation faced with the up keep of a living body from a planet his people had not visited before.
The salt problem looked simpler, but actually branched out into another field. It was a little like asking a mechanic who had been trained on the air plane engine to work on a television set. The sodium and chloride ions, as well as the magnesium and other chemical species in sea water, were very different from proteins-far smaller, and too uniformly charged to offer a handle to most of the alien's sensing and manipulating powers. He knew that all living cells had selective permeability to such things by nature of their chemical architecture. He knew some of the ways in which this was done, but by no means all of them; even to him, a cell was a very complex structure. On a scale which represents a water molecule by a fairly large pea, a human red blood cell is over half a mile across, and has much detail to be learned by anyone proposing to repair or alter its structure-or even imitate it.
There were many members of the Hunter's species to whom the construction of an effective desalting gland would have been a trivial matter, but the highly experienced detective was not among them.
He tried, butt asking Maeta occasionally how she felt was superfluous. He knew that he was getting very little deionized water through her skin.
Bob kept feeding them, and of course a certain amount of waterwas available from the oxidized foods, but it was not enough to keep the girl comfort able. The Hunter could, and did, block the nerves which would have been transmitting excruciating pain from her injuries, but the thirst sensation was far more subtle in origin, and he could do nothing about it.
Maeta did not complain, but sometimes she could not help saying something which showed how she felt. She never blamed the Hunter or anyone else, except once to comment on her own poor judgment in putting to sea when she had. But to the detective the whole situation was obviously his own fault. His feelings of guilt never wavered. He wished she would not talk at all, but could not bring himself to ask her not to.