She wasn't the only one, though not for the same reason. Behind her Dannerman asked, "Think we can drink that river water?"
Rosaleen was limping after him. "What choice do we have?" she asked, painfully crouching over the stream for a closer look. Most of the others followed. At that point in its course the stream ran over a pebbly bottom, and, in the glory of starlight from that blazing sky, it looked crystal-clear. It also looked empty. If the stream held any population offish or insects-or of whatever would pass for either in this place-Patsy couldn't see them.
She put a finger in the water and quickly revised her thoughts of a quick bath; that water was cold. Next to her Dannerman hesitated, then dipped his cupped hands into the stream. He lifted the water to his nose to smell, then tasted it.
"It seems all right," he said judiciously. "Tastes good, in fact."
That was enough for Patsy. She cupped her hands in the stream, drank; and then realized how thirsty she was and drank more, and then more still. She wasn't the only one, either. Most of the others were following Dannerman's example, until Rosaleen said thoughtfully, "I wonder if we shouldn't have boiled it first."
"Boiled it how?" Pat asked, but Patsy wasn't listening. She was remembering what a case of violent diarrhea was like, learned well from some heavy-drinking and poorly sanitized picnics in her college days. What would that be like here, without any pink medicine waiting in the dorm dispensary to calm the outraged bowels down?
But it was a little late to think of that, and now everybody- no, she corrected herself: every one of the men; the women seemed less bossy-had a plan to offer. "We need to make a fire," Jimmy Lin was saying, and Martin was arguing, "First we must fix up some sleeping accommodations for Rosaleen," and Dannerman was urging that they check the woods out, in case there were surprises there.
"Fire first," Jimmy insisted. "To keep vermin away, and so we can cook some of this crap instead of eating it cold."
"Cook it in what?" Pat asked. It was a reasonable question. Patsy thought wistfully of the score or so of pots and kettles and asparagus cookers and omelette pans in her (seldom-used) kitchen in New York. Would they have to reinvent pottery? Dig out clay? Throw bowls on a wheel, the way she vaguely remembered from one of the less enjoyable courses she'd taken in high school? But Jimmy dismissed all questions. "Get me firewood," he ordered. "Preferably dead stuff that's fallen to the ground; let me worry about the rest of it." And, when there still were arguments, grandly: "Don't forget, I was an Eagle Scout at Kamehameha High."
It was Dannerman who lost out. Exploration, they decreed, would have to wait for daylight; meanwhile Martin and Jimmy Lin had their way. Patsy found herself carting wood from the edge of the forest-ears alert for any sound, eyes searching the dimness-while Dannerman cut it into quarter-meter lengths with the serrated blade from his belt, and Martin drafted Pat and Patrice to drag everything out of the yurts for inspection. Everything the yurts contained was old, fragile and decayed; but there had been things that could only have been pallets that still seemed useful. Well, maybe useful. Certainly not comfortable. They were sacks filled with powder that had once been leaves and grasses, along with brittle sticks that still had sharp edges; and they were more than three meters long and less than a meter wide.
They would do. Martin ordered four of them returned to the largest and cleanest of the yurts, three to another-why, Patsy thought, amused, they were doing sex-segregated dormitories! And when he had made sure Rosaleen was comfortable, or as comfortable as she could hope for, he emerged to help Jimmy Lin rasp deadwood into a kind of powder with the little files from Rosaleen's hair sticks. And then Jimmy did his Eagle Scout thing, spinning a stick between his palms against a rock, finally getting a smoldering glow from the friction. And ten minutes later he had his campfire going, throwing out orders in all directions. "Only put in small sticks," he commanded. "Not too much wood. What we want is an Indian campfire-small, so it won't use up our fuel too fast. And now-who's for a real home-cooked meal?"
But no one was. What they wanted was sleep. Exploration could wait, eating could wait- it had been a long day for everyone. For Patsy, too, but somehow she found herself volunteering to take the first watch to keep the fire fed. She had had some idea that, once everyone else was well and truly asleep, she might just dip herself into that brook and try to get at least the surface layers of grime and stench off her long-unwashed body. That notion didn't last; when she tried the water with one toe it was even colder than she had remembered.
Replenishing the fire was about the easiest job Patsy had ever had. Jimmy's orders had been explicit: no more than four or five sticks at a time, none at all until there were no more flames, just glowing coals, because you didn't want actual flames. Patsy debated what to do with the longest sticks, too long to fit in the tiny fire. She didn't want to try to break them for fear of waking the others up, wasn't sure she had the strength to do it, anyhow, and had no idea where Dannerman had left his glassy blade; but then she worked out a simple solution. She laid them across the fire until the middle sections had burned through, then picked up the ends and tossed them in. Nothing to it.
The hard part was staying awake. For the first hour or so little pinpricks of fear kept the adrenaline flowing. Distant whickerings in the wood, the gentle plop of something falling from a tree, a nearby growl (which turned out only to be Martin snoring)-every sound was an alarm. Almost anything, Patsy thought, could leap raging at her out of the trees; but then time passed and nothing did, and the fears, while not going away, changed character. Were they really going to try to take on the might of the Horch killing machines with a handful of popguns? Should they be doing that, anyhow? (Or was Dannerman right about the dangers of taking sides?) And, that biggest question of all, how much truth was there in the promise of eternal bliss (or otherwise) in this improbable eschaton? The questions revolved themselves through her tired brain-with, of course, no answers. She was fed up with the endless supply of unanswerable questions.
But then she had only to lift her eyes to the sky to see the kind of marvel she had never expected to behold. It was-there was only one word for it-magnificent. She noticed, as time went on, that the stars were appropriately wheeling across the heaven, just as they should do; that pair of blue-white beacons that had been low on the horizon when they arrived was now gone from view, and on the other side of the sky-she supposed she should call it the "east"-there was a whole new puzzle to gape at. Streamers of pale light stretched among the newly risen stars, some of them almost as bright as the stars themselves, almost enough to make her squint. She realized with a sudden shiver- part excitement, part wonder at being privileged to see such a thing with her own unaided eyes-that she was looking at stars in the very act of stealing gas from one another, a spectacle she had never before beheld except in plates from Starlab or the old Kecks.
She was so absorbed in the sight overhead that she wasn't aware Dannerman was coming up to her until he called her name, and then she jumped. "Jesus, Dan-Dan! What are you doing up?"
"Time to relieve you," he said, following her example and staring toward the east. "What the hell's that? It looks like something you'd see under a microscope?"
Well, it did; all filamentary and webby. But she was glad to be able to explain something at least, when so little was explainable. "They're exchanging matter. Stars can do that when they're close, and some of those are probably nearer each other than Pluto is to the Sun. So you're looking at the naked hearts of stars, Dan. If our models of star evolution are right," she went on, warming to the subject, "some of those stars used to be red giants, but when the gas was stripped away they were rejuvenated. They became what we call 'blue stragglers,' with surface temperatures five or six times as hot as our own Sun. The bad part of that," she began, but Dannerman held up his hand.