TWO
At noon the next day three big fighter-bombers split the sky with their roaring and passed over to the south. After that craft streaked across the sky for hours, high and soundless.
He had rounded the island in the dark and put up his worn sail and then run before the wind to get distance. He had the map from Tseng. The fishing lines were still on the raft with their hooks. The rifle had no rounds left in its clip but with the bayonet it made a good gaff.
He had a strike at dawn from a small tuna. It got away as he hauled it in. He hoped there would be more now that the Swarmers were going to land and not taking them.
He got a small fish at noon and another near sunset. He slept most of the day, beneath a pale and heatless wafer disk of a sun. Welts and broken blisters made it hard to lie on his back.
In the night there was a sudden distant glare of orange reflected off clouds near the horizon. It eased into a glow as the color seeped out of it and then it was gone. Afterward a rolling hammer blow of sound came. There were more bursts of light, fainter.
High up, silvery specks coasted smoothly across the dark. One by one they vanished in bright firefly sparks—yellow, hard blue. Satellite warfare. Soon they were gone.
At dawn he woke and searched the sky to find the thin silver thread that reached up into the dark bowl overhead.
Now it curled about itself. Warren looked down the sky toward the dawn, shielding his eyes, and found another pale streak far below, where nothing should be.
The Skyhook was broken. Part of it was turning upward while the other fell. Somebody had blown it in two.
For long moments he watched the faint band come down. Finally he lost it in the glare as the sun rose. There had been men and women working on the lower tip of the Skyhook, engineers, and he tried to imagine what it was to fall hopeless that far and that long and then burn quick and high in the air like a shooting star.
His knee had swollen up and be could not stand so he lay in the sail’s shadow. The wound in his neck throbbed and had a crusted blue scab. He didn’t touch it.
A fever came and he sweated, delirious. He saw his wife walking toward him across the sloping waves, called out to her with a caked tongue. Then he was in the lagoon, floating lazily, staring up at the cascading sunbeams that played on him while a motor’s rrrrrrr purred in his ear.
There was nothing to fear, he saw. A little time swimming like this in the bright water and then some rest and a cool drink, with ice cubes in it, and food, hot crisp toast, butter running on it, and steak well marbled with fat and then corned beef hash with the potatoes well browned, and iced tea, plenty of tea, pitchers of it, drinking it in the shade.
Then the sweating passed and he rested. A school of fish passed and he got one, gutted and skinned it and ate it whole inside a minute. A little while later he got another and could start to think.
He would ask the Skimmers about the larvae, he thought, but probably it would be no use. He was sure they were not natural to the Swarmers.
He remembered the sheets he had written on long ago, the tangled thoughts. The Skimmers hated the machines that had intruded into their home waters. They had learned about them in the long years of voyaging, moved and fed and poked at by things that hummed and jerked and yet had no true life. Not like life that arose from nothing at all, flowering wherever chemicals met and sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.
Their hate had brought them through a long journey. So when they saw the simple, noisy ships of men they hated those, too.
The machines would have known that. Planned that. Easy. So easy.
He fished more but caught nothing.
That night there were more orange flashes to the west.
Then, in the hours before dawn, things moved in the sky. Shapes glided through the black, catching the sunlight as they came out of Earth’s shadow.
They were close in, moving fast, their orbits repeating in less than an hour. Huge, irregular, their surfaces grainy and blotched. For Warren to be able to see the features on them they had to be far bigger than the ships that had brought the Swarmers and Skimmers. Asteroid-sized.
No defenses rose to meet the shapes. There were no military satellites left. No high-energy lasers. No particle-beam weapons. None of the apparatus that had kept the nuclear peace between humans for half a century.
The ships absorbed the sunlight and gave back a strange glowing gray. As Warren watched they began to split. Chunks broke away and fell, separating again and again as they streaked across the sky.
With dawn the light came back into the sky. The ocean was discolored around the raft. Nearby the water was pale, with a border, more than a hundred meters away, where the water got dark blue again.
There was something under him. It didn’t move.
Warren stayed silent, peering down.
A machine? From the gray ships?
But it did nothing.
He probed down with a stick. No resistance. The chop was low and after a while he could tell the raft was not moving any, not following the steady pressure of waves.
The thing below was holding him in place.
He had to risk it. He leaned quickly over the side and put his head under. A line ran from the middle of the raft, down to something white. Something solid. Amber phosphorescence rippled through it.
He watched it for an hour and it did not move, did not rise closer or drift off.
No fish ventured near. If he stayed here like this he would starve.
The rifle was useless but he took the knife. He dove in and swam down rapidly. He felt less vulnerable below the surface.
Refraction misled the eye. It was deeper than he thought, bigger, and he nearly failed to reach it.
His lungs already burned. Patterns raced across the faces of pearly walls. Twisting, he looked through them and saw floors and levels beyond. Nothing moved inside.
There was a hole lower down and he swam toward it, throat constricting. He had to get a look at the underside, some glimpse of the engine or driving screw or whatever moved it. As he turned under the sharp edge of the hole he flexed upward, peering toward a refracting edge of light, and his face broke through into air.
He gasped. It was a stale pocket, trapped between levels. He floated for a moment, trying to make structure out of the fuzzy images around him, confused by the liquid interplay of water and light. Translucent walls blended silvery wads of air with rippling shafts of green sunlight.
