He hissed softly to himself as he confronted the fact that one of them seemed to want something more, at least from Oniko.
It was not a thought Sneezy could easily come to terms with. The concept of rape was strange to any Heechee, especially rape of an immature female. Ancestors, it was all but impossible! Not to mention thoroughly repugnant. He had heard theoretical discussions of such things—as related to human conduct, to be sure. He hadn’t believed any of them. Even among humans, such queer perversities were surely unreal.
But then, he had never before been in a situation like this.
No, he told himself, the risk was too great. Such things might after all be true! They would have to escape. Was it possible that Harold could get away and somehow summon help? He, at least, would have no difficulty swimming to shore—But Harold was wedged firmly beside the huge old black man at the tiller. Sneezy did not think it likely that Basingstoke would ever let himself be taken off guard. Weariness and depression settled in again, and once more Sneezy’s eyes began to droop.
The old black man was humming to himself as he skillfully guided the boat toward the exit channel. “Do you know, Beaupre,” he called to the other man, “I think we almost can succeed in this venture! Unfortunately I have no way of telling how much energy is stored in the flywheel of this contraption. It is possible we will run out of power before we reach Tahiti.”
“In that case,” said Heimat, “we’ll just hang these kids over the stern to be outboard motors and kick us in-two of them, anyway,” he added, patting Oniko’s bowed head.
Basingstoke chuckled. The possibility of running out of power didn’t seem to worry him, nor, Sneezy perceived, did he seem as concerned about Heimat’s plans for Oniko as he had been before. Sneezy felt his abdominal muscles writhe in apprehension. If only he weren’t so inexplicably fatigued! It was almost as though he were breathing oxygen-depleted air or had swallowed some enervating drug. In fact, it was almost like that deprivaton that no Heechee ever voluntarily permitted, as though he had stupidly left his pod somewhere and was lacking the life-giving radiation it provided—Sneezy hissed loudly in alarm.
Heimat turned from gazing fondly at Omko and snapped, “What’s the matter with you?”
But Sneezy could not answer. It was too frightening to talk about.
His pod was emitting nothing.
Heechee could survive for days, even for weeks, without the constant flow of microwave radiation from their pods. It was never a problem on their home worlds, for of course there was always a steady microwave flux in the environment they had evolved in: That was how they had come to evolve to need it, as humans needed sunlight and fish needed water. But survival was not all there was to life. After an hour or two without the microwave the lack began to be felt. It had now been more than that since the power went off and the pod stopped radiating. Sneezy was feeling the effects. It was a sensation like-what could you compare it to in human terms? Thirst? Exhaustion? A sensation of need, at least, as a human being on a desert might feel unmet needs after the same length of time. He could go on for quite a while without a drink of water .
But he could not go on forever.
As the shallow-draft boat passed through the gap in the reef, they struck the waves of the strait.
They were not huge waves, but the boat was now in the Pacific Ocean. Although it was not stormy, the swells that lifted the boat and set it down again had started as ripples five thousand kilometers away, and they had been growing as they traveled.
Oniko gasped and struggled to the gunwale, where she began to retch violently into the sea. After a short, hard struggle inside himseli Sneezy joined her. He was not subject to seasickness in the same way as a human boy would have been-the architecture of the Heechee inner ear was vastly different in design-but the motion, the stress, above all the draining of all energy with the loss of his pod’s radiation combined to make him physically ill.
From forward in the rocking boat Heimat laughed tolerantly. “You poor kids! I promise when we get to shore I’ll give you something to take your minds off it.”
“She is only frightened, Beau,” rumbled Basingstoke. “Throw it all up, Oniko; it will do you no harm.” The old black man seemed positively jubilant as he steered the boat into the waves. “When I was a boy,” he said, settling himself for a traveler’s tale to make the time pass, “we had storms around the island that you would not believe, children. Yet we must go out in them for the fish, because we were very poor. My father was an old man-not in years, but from breathing the hydrocarbons in the air. Petrochemicals. They made us all sick, and then when we went out in the fishing boats . . .”
Sneezy, having exhausted everything in his digestive system that could exit by mouth, lowered himself to the bottom of the boat, hardly listening. He pressed his face against the glass bottom, cooled by the water just on the other side, and felt Oniko slump beside him. He took her hand apathetically. He knew he must think and plan, but it was so hard!
“—and in the water,” Basingstoke rolled on, “there were great sharks—almost as huge and ferocious, yes, as the ones in the Pacific here-“Even in his fatigue, Sneezy’s hand tightened convulsively on Oniko’s.
Sharks? They were another nasty phenomenon of the human planet that he had heard of only in theory. He strained his huge eyes to peer into the black water, but of course there was nothing to see. Many times he had looked through that glass at glittering schools of tiny fish, wheel—lug in unison, and at creepy-crawly crustaceans on the shallow sand. Those things had been scary, too, but pleasingly scary, like one child jumping out of concealment to startle another.
But sharks!
Sneezy firmly stopped thinking about sharks. Instead he listened to the old black man going on with his interminable reminiscences: “—for fifty years they pumped the oil wells dry, stinking up the fresh, sweet air of our island. They said they needed it to grow protein so that no one would starve. But we did starve, you know. And it was that that made me turn to the struggle, for there was no other way to justice—”
Justice, Sneezy thought fuzzily. How strange for this terrorist, murderer, kidnaper, to speak of justice. How human.
As they neared the Tahiti side of the strait, Sneezy forced himself to sit up and look around.
There was a great black shape in the water ahead of them, moored and lighted, the size of a football field. Although Sneezy had known it was there, it took him a moment to recognize it as the floating CHONfood factory. Day and night it sucked oxygen and nitrogen from the air, hydrogen from the seawater of the strait, and carbon from the strait’s luckless inhabitants to feed the people of Tahiti and the neighbor islands. He wondered that old Basingstoke had dared pass so near it, and then realized that of course it was fully automated; no human being would be on it, and the workthings would be unlikely to pay attention to a small boat passing nearby.
And then Sneezy realized two other things.
The first was that the lighted Food Factory was lighted. There was power there! And the second was that spreading up from his loins was a warm, gentle wash of good feeling.
They were out of the power blackout zone, and his pod was operating once more.
As they skirted the shore the waves were choppier. There was no lagoon here, no reef to shelter them from the Pacific, and the glass-bottomed boat rolled worrisomely.
“Don’t drown us now, you old fool,” Heimat snarled at his partner, and Harold squawked in fear as water came in over the side. Sneezy understood the humans’ fear. As his head cleared, he began to share it. The little boat was broadside to the waves, and the risk of capsizing it was real. But their concern did not dampen his mood. The pod radiation was as refreshing as a cold drink on a hot day-no, better than that! As refreshing as a rum toddy after being out in a blizzard; warmth and pleasing numbness stole volition from him. The dreamy lassitude would last only a short time, until his body had soaked up enough microwave to be content again. But while it lasted he was simply too relaxed to worry.