He plunged on. If he could find snug shelter, he might be able to survive even with no fire. A hole beneath the roots of a tipped-over tree, perhaps, or a hollow tree into which he could squeeze himself — any confined space where he’d be sheltered from the wind, where his body’s heat might have a chance to partially dry out his clothing and be held in to warm him.
There were no trees. There was nothing but the everlasting willows, whipping like demented things in the gusty wind.
He stumbled on, slipping and falling, tripping over unseen chunks of driftwood left stranded by high water. He was covered with mud from his many falls, his clothes were freezing stiff, and still he blundered on. He had to keep on moving; he must find a place in which to hide; if he stood still, if he failed to move, he would freeze to death.
He stumbled again and pulled himself to his knees and there, at the water’s edge, jammed in among the willows, floated a swamped canoe, rocking heavily in the storm-driven wash of water.
A canoe!
He wiped his face with a muddy hand to try to clear his vision.
It was the same canoe, for there would be no other!
It was the canoe he’d left to beat his way along the shore.
And here he was, back at it again!
He fought with his muddled brain to find an answer — and there was an answer, the only answer that was possible.
He was trapped on a tiny willow island!
There was nothing here but willows. There were no honest trees, tipped-over, hollow, or in any other wise. He had no matches, and even if he had, there was no fuel except the scattered driftwood and not too much of that.
His trousers were like boards, frozen stiff and crackling as he bent his knees. Every minute, it seemed to him, the temperature was dropping — although there was no way to know; he was too cold to tell.
He came slowly to his feet and stood straight, faced into the cutting wind, with the hiss of snow driving through the willows, with the angry growl of the storm-lashed river and the falling dark, and there was another answer to a question yet unasked.
He could not live the night on this island and there was no way to leave it. It might be, for all he knew, no more than a hundred feet from shore, but even if it were, what difference would it make? Ten to one he’d be little better off on shore than he was right here.
There had to be a way, he insisted to himself. He could not die on this stinking little dot of real estate, this crummy little island. Not that his life was worth so much — perhaps not even to himself. But he was the one man who could get to Pierre for help.
And that was a laugh. For he’d never get to Pierre. He’d not get off the island. In the end, he’d simply stay right where he was and it was more than likely that he’d not be found.
When the spring floods came, he’d go down the river with all the other debris that the stream would collect and carry in its raging torrent.
He turned and went back a ways from the water’s edge. He found a place where he was partially shielded from the wind by the thickness of the willows and deliberately sat down, with his legs stuck out straight before him. He turned up the collar of his jacket and it was a gesture only, for it did no good. He folded his arms tight across his chest and pinched half-frozen hands into the feeble warmth of armpits and stared straight ahead into the ghostly twilight.
This was wrong, he knew. When a man got caught in a fix like this, he kept on the move. He kept the blood flowing in his veins. He fought off sleep. He beat and flailed his arms. He stamped his feet. He fought to keep alive.
But it was no use, he thought. A man could go through all the misery of the fight and still die in the end.
There must be another way, a better way than that.
A real smart man would think of a better way than that.
The problem, he told himself, trying to divorce himself from the situation for the sake of objectivity — the problem was to get himself, his body, off this island and not only off this island, but to a place of safety.
But there was no place of safety.
Although suddenly there was.
There was a place that he could go. He could go back to that bright-blue living room where the Pinkness dwelled.
But no! That would be no better than staying on the island, for if he went he’d only go in mind and leave his body here. When he returned, the body, more than likely, would be unfit for use.
If he could take his body there, it would be all right.
But he couldn’t take his body.
And even if he could, it might be very wrong and very likely deadly.
He tried to recall the data on that distant planet and it had escaped him. So he went digging after it and hauled it up from the deep recesses where he had buried it and regarded it with horror.
He’d not live a minute if he went there in his body!
It was pure and simple poison for his kind of life.
But there must be other places. There would be other places if only he could go there — if all of him could go there.
He sat hunched against the cold and wet and didn’t even feel the cold and wet.
He sought the Pinkness in him and he called it and there was no answer.
He called again and yet again and there was no answer. He probed and searched and hunted and he found no sign of it and he knew, almost as if a voice had spoken out and told him, that there was no use of further call or hunting, for he would not find it. He would never find it now, for he was a part of it. The two of them had run together and there was no longer either a Pinkness or a human, but some strange alloy that was the two of them.
To go on hunting for it would be like hunting for himself.
Whatever he would do, he must do himself, by the total power of whatever he’d become.
There were data and ideas, there was knowledge, there was know-how and there was a certain dirtiness that was Lambert Finn.
He went down into his mind, into the shelves and pigeon-holes, into the barrels and bins and boxes, into the still incredible junk heap that was as yet unsorted, the tangled billions of odds and ends that had been dumped helter-skelter into him by a helter-skelter being.
He found items that startled him and some that disgusted him and others that were swell ideas, but which in no way applied to his present problem.
And all the time, like some persistent busybody, running underfoot, the mind of Lambert Finn, unabsorbed as yet, perhaps never to be absorbed but always to remain dodging in and out of corners, kept getting in the way.
He pushed it to one side, he shoved it from his path, he swept it under rugs and he kept on searching — but the dirty thoughts and concepts and ideas, the thoughts of Finn, the unraveling subject matter of that core of raging horror from Finn’s nightmare of a planet, still kept popping up.
And as, for the hundredth time, he swept the dirtiness away, he caught a hint of what he wanted and went scrabbling after it — scrabbling after it through all the obscenity and evil of that core of writhing horror which he had wrested from Finn’s mind. For it was there he found it — not in the bright array of junk he’d inherited from the Pinkness, but in the mass of garbage he had stole away from Finn.
It was an alien knowledge and a crooked, slimy knowledge, and he knew it had its origin on the planet that had sent Finn home a maniac and as he held it in his mental hands and saw the way it worked, how simply it worked, how logical the concepts, he grasped at least a corner of the guilt and fear which had sent Finn in raging hate up and down the land.
For with this kind of know-how the stars lay open, physically open, to all the life in the universe. And to Finn’s unbalanced mind that could mean one thing only — that Earth lay open, too. And most specifically that it lay open to the planet which had held the knowledge. Not thinking of how other races might make use of it, not recognizing it as a tool the human race could use to its benefit, he’d seen it simply as a bridge between the place he’d found and the planet he called home. And he had fought with all he had to pull the old home planet back to is former smallness, to break its contact with the stars, to starve and strangle Fishhook by wiping out the parries who in the future might be drafted or invited to carry on the work of Fishhook.