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the walk. It struck him as odd how this crowd saw him but didn't see him.
They made way for him, but never looked at him. They shouted across him, but
not to him.
He moved to the first boat in the line, untied its painter and prepared to get
into it. Jenny was swimming some fifty feet out, a slow, smooth crawl that
took her diagonally away from the float.
Dasein stood up, moved to step into the boat. As he stepped, something pushed
him in the middle of the back. His foot kicked the gunwale, thrusting the
boat out into the water. He saw he was going to fall into the lake, thought:
Oh, damn! I'll get my clothes all wet. The stern of the boat was turning
toward him and he thought of trying to reach for it, but his left foot on the
dock slipped in a patch of wet wood. Dasein found himself turning sideways
without any control over his motion.
The edge of the boat, seen out of the corner of an eye, rushed toward him. He
tried to reach up, but that was the side of his bad shoulder. His arm
wouldn't move fast enough.
There was an explosion of blackness in his head. Dasein felt himself sinking
into an enveloping cold, soundless, all dark and inviting.
A part of his mind screamed: Beauty! Menace!
He thought that an odd combination.
There was a distant ache in his lungs and it was cold -- terrifyingly cold.
He felt pressure . . . and the cold . . . all distant and unimportant.
I'm drowning, he thought.
It was an unexciting thought -- something that concerned another person.
They won't see me . . . and I'll drown.
The cold grew more immediate -- wet.
Something turned him violently.
Still, everything remained remote -- all happening to that other being which
he knew to be himself, but which could not concern him.
Jenny's voice broke on him like a thunderclap: "Help me! Please! Someone
help me! Oh, God! Won't someone help me? I love him! Please help me!"
He grew aware suddenly of other hands, other voices.
"All right, Jen. We've got him."
"Please save him!" Her voice carried a sobbing intensity.
Dasein felt himself draped across something hard that pressed into his
abdomen. Warmth gushed from his mouth. There was a blinding, terrible pain
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in his chest.
Abruptly, he began to cough -- gasping, the pain tearing at his throat and
bronchia.
"He swallowed a lot of water." It was a man's voice, almost vacant of
emotion.
Jenny's voice came pleading beside Dasein's ear: "Is he breathing? Please
don't let anything happen to him." Dasein felt wetness on his neck, and still
Jenny's voice pleading there beside him: "I love him. Please save him."
That same unemotional male voice answered: "We understand, Jenny."
And another voice, husky, feminine: "There's only one thing to do, of
course."
"We're doing it!" Jenny screamed. "Don't you understand?"
Even as hands picked Dasein up, began carrying him, Dasein wondered: Doing
what?
His coughing had subsided, but the pain in his chest remained. It hurt when
he breathed.
Presently, there was grass under his back. Something warm and confining was
wrapped around him. It was an oddly womblike sensation.
Dasein opened his eyes, found himself staring up at Jenny, her dark hair
framed by blue sky. She managed a trembling smile.
"Oh, thank God," she whispered.
Hands lifted his shoulders. Jenny's face went away. A cup full of steaming
brown liquid was pressed against his lips. Dasein experienced the almost
overpowering smell of Jaspers, felt hot coffee burn down his throat.
Immediately, a sense of warmth and well-being began to seep outward through
his body. The cup was pulled away, returned when he moved his mouth toward
it.
Someone laughed, said something that Dasein couldn't quite catch. It sounded
like, "Take a full load." But that didn't make sense and he rejected it.
The hands eased him gently back to the grass. That vacant masculine voice
said: "Keep him warm and quiet for awhile. He's okay."
Jenny's face returned. Her hand stroked his head.
"Oh, darling," she said. "I looked at the dock and you were gone. I didn't
see you fall, but I knew. And no one was paying any attention. It took me so
long to get there. Oh, your poor head. Such a bruise."
Dasein felt the throbbing then as though her words had turned it on -- a
pulsing ache at the temple and across his ear. A blow like that -- shouldn't
I have X-rays? he wondered. How do they know I haven't a fractured skull . .
. or concussion?
"Cal says the boat must've been tipping away from you as you hit it," Jenny
said. "I don't think you've broken anything."
Pain shot through him as she touched the bruise.
"It's just a bad bruise."
Just a bad bruise! he thought. He was filled with abrupt anger at her. How
could they be so casual?
Still, that feeling of warmth spread out through him, and he thought: Of
course I'm all right. I'm young, healthy. I'll heal. And I have Jenny to
protect me. She loves me.
Something about this train of thought struck him as profoundly wrong then. He
blinked. As though that were the creative mechanism, his vision blurred,
resolved into flashes of gemlike light, red, orange, yellow, brown, green,
violet, blue light with offshooting crystal shards.
The light resolved into a membranous inward sensation, a perception of
perception that reached out through his mind. He saw then strong pulses of
his own heart, the tender brain sheathing that rose and fell with the pulse,
the damaged area -- just a bruise, skull intact.
Dasein grew aware then why the Santarogans showed so little concern for his
injury. They knew the injury through him. If he were like them, he would
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tell them when he needed help.
Then why didn't they try to rescue me until Jenny came? Dasein asked himself.
And the answer lay there to wonder at: Because I didn't cry out for help in
my thoughts!
"You shouldn't sleep now, I don't think," Jenny said.
She found his left hand, gripped it. "Isn't there something about not
sleeping after a head injury?"
Dasein stared up at her, seeing the dark wings of her hair disarrayed from
rescuing him, the way her eyes seemed to touch him, so intense was her
concentration. There was dampness on her lashes and he felt that he might
look behind her eyes and find the way to a magic land.
"I love you," he whispered.
She pressed a finger against his lips. "I know."
I am a Santarogan now, Dasein thought.
He lay there rolling the thought in his mind, filled by this odd awareness
that let him reach out to Jenny even when she released his hand and left him
alone there on the grass. There was nothing of telepathy in this awareness.
It was more knowledge of mood in those around him. It was a lake in which
they all swam. When one disturbed the water, the others knew it.
My God! What this Jaspers could do for the world! Dasein thought.
But this thought sent roiling waves through the lake of mutual awareness.
There was storm in this thought. It was dangerous. Dasein recoiled from it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]