And it mattered. For though they had no timepiece, there was a process going on that was measuring time as surely as atomic decay: Valiha was making a baby Titanide.
She estimated she had been injured on the twelve hundredth rev of her pregnancy but admitted she could be off because she had no recollection of the climb down the Tethys stairway. She recalled little from Gaby's death to her own return to consciousness after her failed attempt to leap the crevasse which had cost her two broken legs. Chris translated 1,200 revs into about fifty days, turned that into one and two-thirds months, and felt a little better. He then asked her if she knew how long her legs should take to heal.
"I could probably walk on crutches in a kilorev," she said, adding helpfully, "That's forty-two days."
"You wouldn't get too far on crutches in here."
"Probably not, if there's climbing to be done."
"There's climbing to be done," said Robin, who had been exploring the area as far as two or three kilometers from the camp.
"Then the time for complete healing would be as much as five kilorevs. Possibly four. I doubt I'd be much good in as little as three."
"As much as seven months. Possibly five or six." Chris added it up and relaxed slightly. "It will be close, but I think we can get you out of here before your time."
Valiha looked puzzled; then her face cleared.
"I see your mistake," she said placidly. "You thought I would take nine of your months to get the job done. We do things more quickly than that."
Chris rubbed his palm over his eyes.
"How long?"
"I have often wondered why it takes human females so much longer to produce something not nearly so large and still so far from completion-no offense meant. Our own young are born able to-"
"How long?" Chris repeated.
"Five kilorevs," Valiha said. "Seven months. It's certain I'll birth him before I can hope to walk out of here."
The timelessness began to frighten Chris. One day he found himself trying to establish the sequence of events following their discovery of Valiha and found he could not. Some things he knew because they had followed each other during a particular waking period. He was sure he had set Valiha's legs soon after his talk with Robin because he recalled leaving her to prepare for the task. He knew when they had captured their first glowbird because that had happened after their first sleep.
The little luminescent animals were unafraid of them but avoided areas of activity. While they moved around in their camp, the glowbirds would not come near, but when they settled down to sleep, the creatures flew in and perched within meters of them.
Robin had been able to approach one that first "morning," even go so far as to reach out and touch it. They had been thankful for the light cast by the dozen or so glowbirds until a few minutes later they began to drift away. Robin caught the last one and tied it to a stake, where it fluttered all day, and the next morning another dozen had returned. She caught them all this time because they did not make any strong attempts to escape.
They were globular creatures puffed up with air. They had beady eyes with no heads to speak of, wings thin as soap bubbles, and a single two-toed foot. Try as he might, Chris could find nothing resembling a mouth, and all his efforts to feed them came to nothing. They died if kept captive more than two sleeps, so he and Robin used them only during one waking period, catching a fresh group every morning. A dead one had no more presence than a punctured balloon. If touched in the wrong place, they could give a nasty electrical shock. Chris had a theory that they contained neon-the orange light looked very much like it-but it was so wildly unlikely he kept it to himself.
He and Robin had moved Valiha one day fairly early in their stay. They all had grown tired of perching on a twenty-degree slope with a ten-meter drop below them. Chris had worried a long time about the best way to move her until Robin suggested they simply pick her up and carry her. To his surprise, it worked. They fashioned a stretcher and shifted her a few meters at a time until they had reached the plateau above. In the one-quarter gee the two of them could just lift the Titanide, though they could not carry her far.
It was on the plateau that they established their camp and settled in for the long wait. At the time of the move they were still far from optimistic about their chances for survival, for even with the most severe rationing they had food for no more than five or six hundred revs. But they went about making a home as though they expected to stay the six or seven months it would take Valiha to heal. They erected the tent and spent a lot of time in it, though there was no weather and the temperature was an even twenty-eight degrees. It simply felt good to get in from the echoing cavern.
Valiha began to carve things for them. She did so much of it that Robin was kept busy hunting for the scarce, stunted trees which had the only wood worth carving. The Titanide seemed the least affected by boredom; to her, this was simply an extended rest period. Chris thought it must be what a six-month sleep would be to a human.
They were in the west end of an irregular cavern that averaged one kilometer in width and stretched an unguessable distance to the east. The floor was a hopeless jumble of fallen rocks, crags, spires, pits, and slopes. They could deduce from the dimensionless points of light the glowbirds became when festooning the ceiling that it was at least a kilometer high, possibly more. To the north and south was a bewildering variety of openings. There were tunnel mouths that led to corridors much like the one they had fled through. Many of these looked as if they had been bored through the rock; some actually had timber shorings. Some went up, and others down. Some stayed level, but all of them branched within a hundred meters into two or three other tunnels, and if they were followed for any distance, the branch tunnels divided again. In addition, there were fissures in the rock walls of the sort found in natural caves. The environment beyond these cracks was so chaotic it seemed pointless to explore them. A promising path would dwindle to a passage so narrow even Robin could barely squeeze through, then open into a chamber the size of which she could only guess at.
At first Chris went with Robin on her explorations, but when he returned, he always found Valiha in such a state of despair that he soon stopped. After that Robin went alone, as often as she could talk Chris into agreeing.
Chris was impressed with the change in Robin. It was not a revolutionary one, but to anyone who knew her it was dramatic. She listened to him and would usually do as he said, even if it went contrary to what she wished to do. He was astonished at first; he had never expected that she would take orders from a man. On more careful reflection he decided that his being male was not the crux of the issue. Robin had functioned reasonably well as part of a group with first Gaby and then Cirocco as the leader, but Chris suspected that if either of them had told her to do something she strongly did not wish to do, she would have left them on the spot. She would never have done anything to harm the group-unless leaving it could be called harm-but she always had the option in her own mind of striking out on her own; she was not a team player.
Nor had she magically transformed herself into a follower under Chris's leadership. Yet there was a difference. She was more willing to listen to his arguments, to admit it when he was right. There had been no struggle. In a sense, there was little need for a leader when their group had been reduced to three, but Robin seldom initiated anything, and Valiha never did, so the role, such as it was, devolved on Chris. Robin was too self-centered to be a leader. At times it had made her insufferable to those around her. Now she had added something, which Chris thought was a little humility and a little responsibility. It was humility which allowed her to admit she might be wrong, to listen to his arguments before making up her mind. And it was responsibility to something larger than herself that made her stick with Chris and Valiha day after weary day instead of striking off on her own to bring back help, which was all she really wanted to do.