Nate followed Jill’s glance behind them. It was a good thirty-foot drop to the desert floor and he was already cradling an injured arm. “Are you nuts? We’ll break something. We’ll break everything.”
But the insects were advancing, their flanks swinging in, and Jill had no intention of letting those things get any closer.
She grabbed Nate’s hand and launched herself off the cliff.
“Not that arm!” he screamed in pain as they fell through the air.
They landed hard on the sand—but not that hard.
“What the…?” Nate had even managed to keep his feet, his right arm protectively cupping his left. “Shouldn’t we be lunch meat? And weren’t we just in snow? You aren’t a figment of my imagination, are you?”
“Why can’t you be a figment of my imagination?”
“Good. It must be you; I’d never say that.”
Jill, who had three different kinds of Raid under her sink at home, was busy looking up. The insects had been peeking over the edge of the cliff at them, but now they retreated, presumably coming down the easy way. She took Nate’s good arm to get him walking.
“How’d you know we could make that jump?” he asked.
“Can’t you feel it? Low gravity.” There was a catch of excitement in her voice.
Nate waved his good arm, jumped up, and settled back down with magical sluggishness. “Jesus! I thought I was just light-headed. Jill, what the heck is going on? You don’t suppose we could be… You don’t think we’re…”
“Dead?”
“That’s the word I was looking for, yes.”
She shook her head firmly. “Not possible. There is no life after death.”
“Right,” Nate said ironically. “I forgot.”
The insects appeared around the bend at the base of the plateau, moving in formation. Jill pulled Nate forward, both of them stumbling over their floating feet.
They found the reason for their reception committee not far away. The plateau was near a colony of the giant insects. The structure was built from the reddish sand, hardened with saliva or water. It was the size of a football field, its walls folding upward in narrowing bands like a wedding cake. Round holes in the walls opened into tunnels. The entire thing had a mathematical precision and, seeing it, Jill thought the creatures must be intelligent. Then she realized that insect nests on Earth had this kind of logic, too—anthills, for example. She’d just never seen one on this scale.
Heads were popping out of the tunnels. Insects dropped down from the structure to approach them, and their vanguard was creeping in. Jill knew she should move instead of standing there staring, but for once in her life she was completely at a loss.
“Uh, I don’t think there’s a phone in there,” Nate said. “Can we go? Not that I want to rush you.”
She blinked. The insects were getting close enough that she could see herself in their eyes.
She and Nate backed away. A thousand eyes watched every move. After they’d put some distance between themselves and the colony they turned and began walking away as fast as they could in the resistanceless air. On all sides there was nothing but open desert. The insects, in stealthy movements, followed.
Jill’s watch had stopped. Nate didn’t have one. They walked for what felt like hours, saying little. There was too much to absorb to try to box it up, make it tidy enough for conversation. Although walking was disturbingly easy, it had to be over a hundred degrees and there was no shade to speak of. Shock kept Jill going. Her neck began to ache from turning to look behind her so often. Their escort fell away, little by little, until the last determined survivor of the regiment stood and watched them go. Long after it had faded from view, Jill couldn’t resist turning to look, just to be sure.
It was on one of these insect-checking rounds that she saw it—a sun rising on the far side of the desert. She looked back in front of her, where the sun that had cooked them all day was just starting to set, looked behind her, looked ahead, stopped walking.
A sound escaped her lips then—not so much his name as a sigh.
Nate turned and saw it, too. The second sun looked as though it would be huge. It peeked over the horizon, ripe as a plum, its egg-yolk gold filmed by a shimmering, hazy red.
“For god’s sake, Jill. Where are we?”
She shook her head mutely. I don’t know.
For a long while they stood there, marveling at the sunrise until the sun was high enough, and bright enough, to hurt their eyes. And then, finally, she looked at him, at poor Nate, and saw what she should have seen earlier, had she not been so lost in her own head. He was holding his left arm and trembling with fatigue. His olive face was pale and drawn with pain.
“God, Nate, I didn’t think. Let’s take a break.”
He didn’t argue—a sure sign that he was hurting pretty bad. She pointed the way to a jumble of rocks and hovered, concerned, while he settled himself on a baked dry boulder.
“How is it? We’d better take a look.”
He attempted to roll up his sleeve, but it was too tight. He unbuttoned his blue shirt and took some time in removing it. Jill waited, trying not to show her discomfort at the sight and texture of his skin. She squatted at his side and actually missed the sensation of heavy weightedness that normally came with resting. She was hot and sweaty and a deep sense of lethargy was settling into her bones, as if she were coming down with the flu. She noted all of this in a detached way, then noted the detachment. It was dangerous. The shock could undo them even if the terrain didn’t. She had to stay alert.
Whatever was wrong with the arm, it wasn’t visible from the outside. Blue shirt draped over his knees, Nate held the limb out for examination.
“Can you bend it?”
“Yeah. It’s not broken.” He touched the muscles tenderly with his fingertips. “It’s more like I pulled it. The muscles are really stiff.”
She reached out her hand to touch him as well but hesitated. Stupid. She wouldn’t be able to tell if his muscles were stiff just by feeling them.
“Look at that.” Nate pointed to her hand.
On the back of her right hand, aligned in a row, were deep purple bruises. Nate put his injured hand—moving his arm very slowly—into hers. His fingers lined up exactly with the stains. He met her eyes.
“Wild. You don’t remember it, do you?”
She shook her head. The feeling of his hand in hers, hot and moist, increased her nauseous sense of heatstroke.
“I had your hand and you went after the manuscript. I tried to pull you back and then—jeez, I thought it was a bomb—I felt this incredible force yanking you away, so I held on as tight as I could. I thought my arm was gonna come out of its socket.”
“Why didn’t you just let go?”
He shrugged, his eyes not meeting hers. “Dunno. Instinct, I guess.”
She extracted her hand and rubbed his moisture from her palm. “We ought to be able to make a sling from your sweatshirt.”
He’d removed it miles back and tied it around his waist. She knotted the wrists of the sweatshirt together and it made an adequate support. She caused him some pain getting him into it—awkward as ever at touching him—but he looked relieved when it was done.
Then they both sat numbly.
“What happened, Jill?” Nate started the inevitable conversation with some reluctance.
She looked back the way they’d come, anxiety and excitement roiling in her belly. She’d been thinking about it for hours but wasn’t quite ready to share those thoughts.
Nate said, in a half-mocking tone, “Remember that section of Kobinski’s manuscript Aharon read to us on the plane? That whole thing about ‘microscopic black holes’? You don’t suppose…”