He turned away. The cell door clicked closed its lock behind him; and Hal was left alone.
He lay still, trying to control his shivering and little by little the effort of doing so became less; not so much because his control was strengthening, as because his fever was once more starting to assert itself and his body temperature beginning again to rise. As he warmed, the need to control his reflexes relaxed; and he drifted once more into sleep.
But it was a light, uneasy sleep, from which he roused suddenly to find his throat so dry and sore it felt as if it would crack open with the simple effort of swallowing. The demand of the thirst upon him was so great that he managed to summon the strength to pull himself up off the bed and on to his feet. He staggered across the room to the washstand anchored to the wall next to the stool. Turning on the single tap there he lowered his head and gulped at the stream of icy water that poured down.
But after only a few swallows he found he could drink no more. The water he had already taken in seemed to fill his gullet full and threaten to nauseate him. He stumbled back to the cot, fell on it and was asleep again instantly - only to wake, it seemed, in minutes; and with the raging thirst that had roused him before once more driving him back to the water tap.
Once more, he made his unsteady pilgrimage to it; and once more he was able to drink only a few swallows before it seemed he could swallow no more. Warned now by his fading strength, he went back to the cot he had been lying on and struggled to pull it across the room until it stood next to the washstand.
The effort of moving the light cot was inconceivable. His head rang and his muscles had the strength of half-melted wax. Jerking the cot first this way, and then that, like an ant trying to move a dead beetle many times its weight, he managed at last to get it next to the washstand and fell back on it exhausted, to sleep immediately.
In some indeterminable time - it seemed only a matter of seconds, though it could have been much longer - he woke again, drank, and fell back to uneasy sleep!
So began a feverish, dream-ridden period which, on the one hand, seemed to encompass no time at all but which, looked at only a little differently, stretched out through an eternity. He woke and drank, drank and slept, woke again to drink and sleep… over and over again. While about him there was only stillness; the eternally lighted cell and the silent corridor beyond produced neither the appearance of any watcher nor any change.
He was aware now that the sickness in him was raging with a violence greater than any such he had felt in his life before, and an uneasiness unknown until now stirred deep in him. Periods of fever were alternating with periods of deep chill, with the fever gradually predominating. Little by little, the unnatural states of his body took him over, first the great shuddering chills, then the wild demand of the thirst in him that choked on only a few mouthfuls of water at a time, the ringing headaches and the wakeful periods alternating with snatches of uneasy and nightmare-torn sleep.
He could feel the infection in him gaining on his life-force. The chills gave way at last completely to a light-headed unnaturalness that would have been almost pleasant by comparison if it had not also been ominous. He took it to be one of high fever - but of how high a fever, he had no way of telling. The headaches lessened, temporarily, but his breathing was becoming more and more difficult, as if his lower chest was being slowly stuffed full with some heavy material, forcing him to breathe with only a small space that remained open at the top of his lungs. Gradually, he pulled himself into a sitting position in which breathing was easier, upright at one end of the cot with his back against the rough wall to which the washstand was attached, the washstand on one side of him, the stool on the other.
Somewhere about this time, also, the ability to sleep was lost to him. His head rang and pounded, he breathed painfully in tiny gasps, and a fiery awakeness shut out any possibility of further slumber. The minutes passed as slowly as caterpillars humping their way along a tree limb, but they came endlessly, measuring out hours followed by hours that went on forever. Time itself stretched out endlessly, and still no one appeared at the barred door of his cell.
For the first time he remembered the Coby-built miner's chronometer he normally wore on his wrist, that had been given back to him, among his other belongings, when he and Jason Rowe had been turned loose from the Militia Headquarters in Citadel after Bleys had spoken to them. He had worn it all through the time he had been with the Command. He looked automatically for it at his left wrist now; and, with some surprise, saw the instrument had not been taken from him this time. The current reading of its outer ring of numerals glowed against its metal face like ghost figures of flame to tell him that, somewhere outside this cell, it was eleven twenty-three of the Harmony evening, local time.
There was no telling how long it had been since he had been brought here. But perhaps he could make an estimate. Struggling with his fevered mind to think back, he remembered that it had not yet been noon when he had been captured in the spaceport terminal. He could hardly have been here less than one full day of the twenty-three point sixteen Interstellar Standard Hours that made up the calendar day on Harmony. From that noon, then, to noon of the day following, plus the hours necessary to bring him now almost to midnight of a second day, would make a total of a day and a half since he had been carried in here. Fumbling in his pockets, he came up with everything that had been in his possession when he had been captured, but nothing that could mark on the smooth-painted wall behind him. With the metal case of the watch, finally, he managed to scratch a single vertical line, low down under the washstand, where the shadow of that utility would hide the mark.
They had not brought him food at any time since he had gotten here; but he did not miss it. In the heat of the fever his stomach seemed to have shrunken and contorted upon itself like a clenched fist. The only appetite he had was for water; and, after a swallow or two, that continued to choke him. His single greatest desire now was merely to breathe easily and normally, with the full capacity of his lungs. But his body was denying him that.
The struggle to breathe began to wake all his instincts for survival. On the wings of the fever in him, his total being cranked itself up; his heart hammered in his chest, faster and faster, his mind leaped and dodged and sought for a way out - a way to open his lungs to great gulps of air, to set himself loose from this place. But the lack of oxygen made any additional effort beyond mere existence too great to attempt. Seated bolt-upright, with his back against the cell wall, struggling for air, he was at once physically immobilized and mentally on emergency alert; as his body tuned itself ever higher in an attempt to fight the slow suffocation that was threatening him.
He knew too little of medicine to build a full picture of what was happening inside him. But clearly his struggle to breathe against the congestion of his lungs was triggering off all the instincts and reflexes of his body that could be marshalled against it. He was barely able now to spare breath for the extra physical effort of leaning over to drink from the water tap, but his mind raced at its greatest capacity like a creature afire. Immobilized, but thinking now at life-and-death speed, he sat facing the slow, continuous movement of the hours.
There was no one to help him. Barbage had promised that none would come; and, slowly, he was beginning to understand that, barring another visit from Bleys himself, that promise would be kept. For the first time it came to him that Barbage, in his fanaticism, must actually be hoping for his death and doing everything possible within the limits of Bleys' commands to bring it about. If things as they now were with him continued to worsen, then, uncared-for - eventually - he must die.