A Borrowed Man (24 page)

And it was coming right at me.

It was not moving very fast, but as it got closer and closer I could see the little wave at the front where it was pushing through the water. I kept watching it and backing away from the place where it would come to land and telling myself I had the rifle now—which was right—and that I could run off into the jungle. Which was right, too.

Only I kept getting scareder and scareder just the same.

When there were at least three meters of it sticking up out of the water, I caught on that it was not really swimming like I had thought. It was walking on the bottom, and there could not be as much of it under the water as I was seeing above it. Something that waded on the bottom could probably walk on the beach, too; so I kept backing off and telling myself that it could not chase me if I ran between the big trees a little way inland. They were pretty close together, and it looked way too big to have gotten through.

All that was dumb as it turned out, but if you had been there you might have thought the same thing.

About then I saw something smaller and flatter but still pretty big out in front of it. It was there for sure, but every so often it disappeared under the water for half a minute and then came back. It was black, too, or maybe just dark gray. When whatever it was, was still about thirty meters out, the whole thing began to heave up out of the water. It must have been eight or ten meters across and five or six high, meaning two or three times as high as a tall man. And that was just the part that was above the water.

By then I was pretty sure it was an animal of some kind. I did not want to shoot it; for one thing the idea of killing something just for the fun of it always makes me want to hit somebody. For another I was not one darn bit sure that I could kill something as big as that with what was basically a deer rifle.

Back when people still killed elephants, there were a few who could kill an elephant with a deer rifle, and did; but those guys were dead shots, and they knew a heck of a lot about killing elephants. The first me had shot with a rifle some, but I had never actually done it myself. When it came to killing elephants—well, maybe you could tickle them to death.

The sky was getting pretty dim by the time the animal I had been watching heaved completely up out of the water. It was still lumpy bumpy, and it looked about the size of a small house. It also looked like it had no head at all, so I told myself that just because our animals on Earth had heads it was dumb for me to think that animals here needed them. That was not really all that dumb, but what I did next was; in fact, it was maybe the dumbest thing I have ever done in my whole life. I got a little closer so I could see it better.

When I did, all the lumps and bumps started moving. I would have watched them better if I had not been watching something else. The head was coming out, a flat stone-ugly head that only looked small because the rest of the animal was so big, but was really about the size of a washing machine. If it had eyes, I never saw them; but it had a beak sort of like a hawk's or an eagle's, and it was white on the inside—so white that it practically glowed in the dim light.

One of the lumps dropped off onto the sand. Then another and another. One that had been high up slid all the way down. By that time, those that had dropped off first were coming for me.

No, I did not shoot. I ran, and fast. Forget what I said about the trees being too close together; these things were small enough to go between them. So I ran, and once I ran into a tree, hard. I dropped my rifle and fell down, and it hurt like all hell and just about knocked me out. When I sat up, I scrambled around and found the rifle. By that time, one of the lumps was almost close enough to touch.

It opened its mouth, and that was what really let me see it. I had found the safety back when I was looking at buttons and levers, a sliding button where the stock curved down. When the trigger would not move, I remembered the button and shoved it forward fast, and that beak and white mouth were about ten centimeters in front of the muzzle when I fired.

Maybe the recoil was bad and maybe the noise was—I would not know. I only know I rolled to one side without dropping the rifle, and one of the little monster's feet sort of brushed me. Then I was up and running again. I think it was the light gravity that saved me; on Earth I would have been meat.

For a while I could hear them coming after me, then everything got quiet. I kept running for another minute or two, then I slowed down, gasping for air. I trotted for a little bit, stumbling a lot, and after that I trotted out onto the beach and waited.

The way I figured it, I had two big advantages. One was the rifle and the other was that I could outrun them. There was more light out on the beach, so I would be able to shoot better. What was more, the beach was perfect for running. I would not bump into trees or find anything to trip over worse than a few sticks of driftwood. All right, maybe the beach was perfect for them, too. Or they could swim faster than they could run; but they were going to have to prove it to me.

So I got out onto the beach again and jogged along for quite a while, looking behind me a lot. Nothing seemed to be chasing me, so after a while I slowed down to a walk. I want to say a brisk walk, but the truth is that there was nothing brisk about it. Maybe I have told you how I used to run up and down the stairs and do exercises after the library closed. All right, when I was walking down that beach I felt like I had gotten enough exercise to last me for a week.

Pretty soon I realized I did not know where the heck I was. Had I gone past the place where we had talked? Well, maybe. Had I not gotten to it yet? I liked that one a whole lot better, but what if it was not true? What if I walked clear around the island looking for it, and stumbled right into mama snapping turtle or whatever she was, and all her dear little bumps and lumps?

Then the moon, or whatever you want to call it, came up. It looked even whiter than ours, and when it was still on the horizon it looked bigger than a cloud bank at sundown. Just seeing it got me wondering about it, and I finally decided that the reason for that bright white had to be ice. So their moon has enough gravity to hold on to quite a bit of water (this is what I decided) but it is too cold for that water to be liquid. It is ice, in other words, and that ice makes the moon look white—and bright, too. There probably is not a whole lot of air. Since the ice reflects heat and there is no air to warm, the ice stays frozen. All that may be wrong, but it seems to me that it explains what I saw up there.

Here in the library, one day when the library was closed and I had nothing to do, I quizzed one of our screens about temperatures on our own moon. The screen said it can get over 120 degrees in full sun. That sounds really hot until you find out that when the moon is dark it gets colder than 180 below zero. And oh my gosh! Guess what? There's surface ice on our moon, too. Not much but some.

Naturally I did not know all that then, but it was the stuff I wondered about when I was staring up at that big bright moon, and I figure I might as well put it down here so you will know.

Finally I got so tired I sat down on a big piece of driftwood, naturally facing back the way I had come. I pulled off my shoes and socks and rubbed my feet, and thought of wading out a little way, and finally decided not to because I would have to stand up. You know. When I had put my shoes back on and had been sitting there for twenty minutes at least, mostly thinking about mama and her brood, and how much my cheek hurt, and how close I had come to dying, and how little I had liked it, all that got mixed up with thinking about the fire. By that I mean the one they burn you in when you are just about worn out or if you live on your shelf day after day and hardly ever get consulted or borrowed. I have never really been in it, but I know that it is in a special room in the basement. And I have seen it on a screen. I researched it, you know I did, and there was a neat little piece about it with some old worn-out guy getting burned. They had doped him so that he thought he was asleep, only he was really on this moving chain-belt. He was not tied down or anything because he was so out of it they had not had to tie him.

You go in headfirst, and I saw one of his legs move just a little.

 

15

S
OME
E
RRANDS
IN
N
EW
D
ELPHI

You have already figured out that the piece of driftwood I sat on was the one I had hidden the book in, right? So I am not going to tell about that. Besides, it took me quite a while, and it is embarrassing to be that dumb. And, no, I did not take the rifle back into the mine. I brought it home to Earth and New America and stood it in a corner of my room. I guess I should have gone back to bed then, but I did not. For one thing, it was light outside already. For another, I was not sleepy. Just tired and starting to get hungry.

So after I had shaved and finished sneering at this old face they have pinned on me (something I do every time I see myself in a mirror), I went downstairs and told the maid 'bot to make kafe, and talked to it about what the three of us might like for breakfast. I am a big fruit eater whenever there is good fruit to be eaten, so by the time Georges and Mahala came downstairs for breakfast I was eating peaches in cream and drinking kafe. Also running through all the stuff I wanted to get done. For one thing, I wanted to get an eephone.

After Georges sat down, I said, “If you've got an eephone on you, they can find out exactly where you are, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Mostly, yes. It depends.”

“Tell me.”

“If you get a regular one, you sign a contract and show identity and leave a thumbprint. Then they know who's got that phone and what the number is. They can monitor any calls you make—that's done on screens—and get a fix on the phone's location. Your friend Colette had an eephone, right?”

I nodded.

“So if the cops started looking, they could find out where her phone was. No sweat.”

It had been in our suite, in her shaping bag; but I just nodded again. Then I said, “Let's say that I want one, but I don't want anybody to use it to find me. How would I do that?”

“Piece of cake. You go to any store that sells that kind of stuff and say you want a temp. They give you one—it's free—and you have to pay for so many minutes, maybe a hundred or two hundred. Three hundred. Whatever; it depends on the store. The clerk shows you how to code it with your number. Are you thinking you'll put somebody else's number on there and get their calls?”

I shook my head.

“That's good, because you can't. If you try, it'll tell you to try again.”

Mahala touched my arm and pointed to herself.

“She means she can get on a screen and find you an unused number. It'll be a lot quicker than you trying to find one on a phone.”

I said, “How will people know to use that number if they want me? Will the screens have it? Is there a directory?”

“They won't, not unless you tell them. But once you call them, they'll have the number.”

I was thinking of watching mama monster come up out of the sea. “Suppose we went through into that world where we saw the scarecrows. Would an eephone still receive calls? Could I make calls from there? What do you think?”

“I don't think, I know,” Georges told me. “It would if we left the door open, but not if we shut it. And it wouldn't matter whether it was locked or not. That door's steel. Do you want your eephone to work in there? If you do, change doors. Take that one off the hinges and put in a polymer door or a wooden one. A steel door with a slot would work, too, but not solid metal, which is what we've got now.”

“I see. What happens when I've used up my hundred minutes?”

“You throw it away. At that point, your eephone's junk. It can't be loaded again.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. They used to make them reloadable, but some smart hackers figured out how to do it and make hundreds of free calls. So you can't. Could you take one apart and use some of the parts to build your own eephone? Sure, if you were a genius—but you'd need some other parts, too. Maybe you could buy those. I don't know.”

Georges paused; when I did not ask another question, he said, “Suppose I wanted to know what you want an eephone for. Would you tell me?”

“Yes, certainly.” I chewed and swallowed a chunk of fresh peach while I formulated my answer. “Here I can use Colette's screens to make my calls, but I'm not going to be here forever.”

“Right. Also you're afraid the cops will be looking for you.”

I smiled. “They and others. Those others will be looking for me already, I'm afraid. The police may be looking for me, too. I really can't say. Let's just say I'm not where I'm supposed to be.”

Mahala held up her pad. NO MORE?

I said, “If that means no more questions, no. If it means no more on that topic, yes. I've told you as much about it as I intend to.”

She folded back the sheet. WHAT?

“What should we talk about? What we plan to do today. I intend to buy one of those temporary eephones Georges told me about, for one thing. Another—which should probably have been the first—is to return the ground car Colette rented. My reasons for wanting to do that should be pretty obvious.”

“She rented it just a few days ago,” Georges told me. “They don't start looking until you've had one for two weeks.”

I nodded like I had known that all along. “But the longer we keep it, the higher the bill will be, and if we find Colette, she'll be stuck with that bill. I'd rather pay it myself and be done with it—that's if there are ground cars in the garage here, and we can use those instead.”

There were, and we could—a classy limo, a sleek red convertible, and a big alterrain. I told Georges that since he would be driving he could take whichever one he wanted, expecting him to choose the alterrain. He surprised me by picking the convertible.