"Eye."
"Thuyo."
"Finger."
"Zurath."
"Head."
The Drac laughed. "Lode."
"Ho, ho, very funny."
"Ho, ho."
It was when the talking stopped and the sleeping was to begin that I would find myself inside my own head, behind enemy lines. It’d be right there, a few centimeters away, a Drac. Yellow, loathsome, slick-skinned, noseless, toad face.
The rolls on my ship had a lot of blank spaces because of the pilots the Dracs had whacked. I knew a lot of the names: Ozawa, Chandler, the Starov twins: Mikhail and Whatsisname.
Whatsisname.
I knew a lot of names, I could remember a lot of faces. I didn’t know anyone, though. I felt bad when my fellow pilots went down, but only because it meant my team had taken a hit. It wasn’t as though any friends had taken one.
Friends. Who were my friends?
That one group commander, Dunlap, the one before Santos, used to say, "If you have to ask questions like Who are my friends, you are in trouble."
Dunlap was trying to get us to hang together, rely on each other, work as a team—no. Work as a family.
I asked the question, who are my friends, and still didn’t have an answer an hour later. I wondered how much trouble Dunlap would say I was in.
In the dim green glow of one of the capsule’s fading battery lights, I looked at the Drac and realized that I had spent more time in close contact with this thing than I had with any human, except my parents.
Trouble. Dunlap didn’t know what trouble was.
At dawn on the second day, we rolled and pushed the capsule into the center of the rise and wedged it between two large rocks, one of which had an overhang that we hoped would hold down the capsule when one of those big soakers hit. Around the rocks and capsule, we laid a foundation of large stones and filled in the cracks with smaller stones. ' By the time the wall was knee high, we discovered that building with those smooth, round stones and no mortar wasn’t going to work. After some experimentation, we figured out how to break the stones to give us flat sides with which to work. It’s done by picking up one stone and slamming it down on top of another.
We took turns, one slamming and one building. The stone was almost a volcanic glass, and we also took turns extracting rock splinters from each other. It took nine of those endless days and nights to complete the walls, during which waves came close many times and once washed us ankle deep. For six of those nine days, it rained. ; The capsule’s survival equipment included a plastic blanket, and that became our roof. It sagged in at the center, and the hole we put in it there allowed the water to run out, keeping us almost dry and giving us a supply of fresh water. If a wave of any determination came along, we could kiss the roof goodbye; but we both had confidence in the walls, which were almost two meters thick at the bottom and at least a meter thick at the top.
After we finished, we sat inside and admired our work for about an hour, until it dawned on us that we had just worked ourselves out of jobs.
"What now, Jerry?"
"Ess?"
"What do we do now?"
The Drac looked at the shelter, then up at the gloomy sky. "Now wait, we." The Drac shrugged. "Else what, ne?"
I nodded. "Gavey."
I got to my feet and walked to the passageway we had built. With no wood for a door, where the walls would have met, we bent one out and extended it about three meters around the other wall with the opening away from the prevailing winds.
The never-ending winds were still at it, but the rain had stopped. The shack wasn’t much to look at, but looking at it stuck there in the center of that deserted island made me feel good. As Shizumaat observed, "Intelligent life making its stand against the universe." Or, at least, that’s the sense I could make out of Jerry’s hamburger of English. I shrugged and picked up a sharp splinter of stone and made another mark in the large standing rock that served as my log. Ten scratches in all, and under the seventh, a small x to indicate the big wave that just covered the top of the island.
I threw down the splinter. "Damn, I hate this place!"
"Ess?" Jerry’s head poked around the edge of the opening. "Who talking at, Davidge?"
I glared at the Drac, then waved my hand at it. "Nobody."
"Ess vanobody?"
"Nobody. Nothing."
"Ne gavey, Davidge."
I poked at my chest with my finger. "Me! I’m talking to myself! You gavey that stuff, toad face!"
Jerry shook its head. "Davidge, now I sleep. Talk not so much nobody, ne?" It disappeared back into the opening.
"And so’s your mother!" I turned and walked down the slope. Except, strictly speaking, toad face, you don’t have a mother—or father. "If you had your choice, who would you like to be trapped on a desert island with?" I wondered if anyone ever picked a wet freezing corner of Hell shacked up with a hermaphrodite.
Half of the way down the slope, I followed the path I had marked with rocks until I came to my tidal pool that I had named "Rancho Sluggo." Around the pool were many of the water-worn rocks, and underneath those rocks, below the pool’s waterline, lived the fattest orange slugs either of us had ever seen. I made the discovery during a break from house building and showed them to Jerry.
Jerry shrugged. "And so?"
"And so what? Look, Jerry, those ration bars aren’t going to last forever. What are we going to eat when they’re all gone?"
"Eat?" Jerry looked at the wriggling pocket of insect life and grimaced. "Ne, Davidge. Before then pickup. Search us find, then pickup."
"What if they don’t find us? What then?"
Jerry grimaced again and turned back to the half-completed house. "Water we drink, then until pickup." He had muttered something about kiz excrement and my tastebuds, then walked out of sight.
Since then I had built up the pool’s walls, hoping the increased protection from the harsh environment would increase the herd. I looked under several rocks, but no increase was apparent. And, again, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow one of the things. I replaced the rock I was looking under, stood and looked out to the sea. Although the eternal cloud cover still denied the surface the drying rays of Fyrine, there was no rain and the usual haze had lifted.
In the direction past where I had pulled myself up on the beach, the sea continued to the horizon. In the spaces between the whitecaps, the water was as grey as a loan officer’s heart. Parallel lines of rollers formed approximately five kilometers from the island. The center, from where I was standing, would smash on the island, while the remainder steamed on. To my right, in line with the breakers, I could just make out another small island perhaps ten kilometers away. Following the path of the rollers, I looked far to my right, and where the grey-white of the sea should have met the lighter grey of the sky, there was a black line on the horizon.
The harder I tried to remember the briefing charts on Fyrine IV’s land masses, the less clear it became. Jerry couldn’t remember anything either—at least nothing it would tell me. Why should we remember? The battle was supposed to be in space, each one trying to deny the other an orbital staging area in the Fyrine system. Neither side wanted to set foot on Fyrine, much less fight a battle there. Still, whatever it was called, it was land and considerably larger than the sand and rock bar we were occupying.