Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

A six-foot bluff loomed in his path, black volcanic rock shining like wet glass. He hit it at full speed. He almost walked up its face and in the instant when his momentum was gone caught a root and yanked himself to the top. Again he was out of their sight. He sprang around another hulk of stone and skidded to a halt. At his feet, a sheer cliff dropped nearly a hundred feet to a white smother of surf.

Dalgetty gulped air, working his lungs like a bellows. A long jump down, he thought dizzily. If he didn’t crack his skull open on a reef he might well be clawed under by the sea. But there was no other place for him to go.

He made a swift estimate. He had run the upward two miles in a little over nine minutes, surely a record for such terrain. It would take the pursuit another ten or fifteen to reach him. But he couldn’t double back without being seen and this time they’d be close enough to fill him with lead.

Okay, son, he told himself. You’re going to duck now, in more than one sense.

His light waterproof clothes, tattered by the island growth, would be no hindrance down there, but he took off his sandals and stuck them in his belt pouch. Praise all gods, the physical side of his training had included water sports. He moved along the cliff edge, looking for a place to dive. The wind whined at his feet.

There⁠—down there. No visible rocks though the surf boiled and smoked. He willed full energy back into himself, bent his knees, jackknifed into the air.

The sea was a hammer blow against his body. He came up threshing and tumbling, gasped a mouthful of air that was half salt spray, was pulled under again. A rock scraped his ribs. He took long strokes, always upward to the blind white shimmer of light. He got to the crest of one wave and rode it in, surfing over a razorback reef.

Shallow water. Blinded by the steady rain of salt mist, deafened by the roar and crash of the sea, he groped toward shore. A narrow pebbly beach ran along the foot of the cliff. He moved along it, hunting a place to hide.

There⁠—a sea-worn cave, some ten feet inward, with a yard or so of fairly quiet water covering its bottom. He splashed inside and lay down, exhaustion clamping a hand on him.

It was noisy. The hollow resonance of sound filled the cave like the inside of a drum but he didn’t notice. He lay on the rocks and sand, his mind spiraling toward unconsciousness, and let his body make its own recovery.

Presently he regained awareness and looked about him. The cave was dim, with only a filtered greenish light to pick out black wall’s and slowly swirling water. Nobody could see much below the surface⁠—good. He studied himself. Lacerated clothes, bruised flesh and a long bleeding gash in one side. That was not good. A stain of blood on the water would give him away like a shout.

Grimacing, he pressed the edges of the wound together and willed that the bleeding stop. By the time a good enough clot was formed for him to relax his concentration the guards were scrambling down to find him. He didn’t have many minutes left. Now he had to do the opposite of energizing. He had to slow metabolism down, ease his heartbeat, lower his body temperature, dull his racing brain.

He began to move his hands, swaying back and forth, muttering the autohypnotic formulas. His incantations, Tighe had called them. But they were only stylized gestures leading to conditioned reflexes deep in the medulla. Now I lay me down to sleep.⁠ ⁠…

Heavy, heavy⁠—his eyelids were drooping; the wet walls receding into a great darkness, a hand cradling his head. The noise of surf dimmed, became a rustle, the skirts of the mother he had never known, come in to bid him goodnight. Coolness stole over him like veils dropping one by one inside his head. There was winter outside and his bed was snug.

When Dalgetty heard the nearing rattle of boots⁠—just barely through the ocean and his own drowsiness⁠—he almost forgot what he had to do. No, yes, now he knew. Take several long, deep breaths, oxygenate the bloodstream, then fill the lungs once and slide down under the surface.

He lay there in darkness hardly conscious of the voices, dimly perceived.

“A cave here⁠—a place for him to hide.”

“Nah, I don’t see nothing.”

Scrunch of feet on stone. “Ouch! Stubbed my damn toe. Nah, it’s a closed cave. He ain’t in here.”

“Hm? Look at this, then. Bloodstains on this rock, right? He’s been here, at least.”

“Under water?” Rifle butts probed but could not sound the inlet.

The woman’s voice. “If he is hiding down below he’ll have to come up for air.”

“When? We gotta search this whole damn beach. Here, I’ll just give the water a burst.”

Casimir, sharply⁠—“Don’t be a fool. You won’t even know if you hit him. Nobody can hold his breath more than three minutes.”

“Yeah, that’s right, Joe. How long we been in here?”

“One minute, I guess. Give him a couple more. Cripes! D’ja see how he ran? He ain’t human!”

“He’s killable, though. Me, I think he’s just rolling around in the surf out there. This could be fish blood. A ’cuda chased another fish in here and bit it.”

Casimir: “Or if his body drifted in, it’s safely under. Got a cigarette?”

“Here y’are, Miss. But say, I never thought to ask. How come you come with us?”

Casimir: “I’m as good a shot as you are, buster, and I want to be sure this job’s done right.”

Pause.

Casimir: “Almost five minutes. If he can come up now he’s a seal. Especially with his body oxygen-starved after all that running.”

In the slowness of Dalgetty’s brain there was a chill wonder about the woman. He had read her thought, she