Darwinia

“Ah, Christ!” Tom dropped to his knees. He turned Sullivan over and searched his wrist for a pulse.

“He’s breathing,” the frontiersman said. “More or less.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t know. His skin’s cold and he’s ungodly pale. Sullivan! Wake Up, you son of a bitch! Work to do!”

Sullivan didn’t wake up. His head lolled to one side, limply. A trickle of blood escaped one nostril. He looks shrunken, Guilford thought dazedly. Like someone let the air out of him.

Tom stripped his pack and bunched it under the botanist’s head. “Stubborn fucker, wouldn’t slow down for love of life…”

“What do we do now?”

“Let me think.”

Despite their best efforts, Sullivan wouldn’t wake up.

Tom Compton rocked on his heels for a time, deep in thought. Then he hitched his pack over his shoulder and shrugged out of the rope harness. “Hell with it. Look, I’ll bring blankets and food from the sledge for both of you. After that you stay with him; I’ll go for help.”

“He’s wet and nearly freezing, Tom.”

“He’ll freeze faster in the open air. Might kill him to move him. Give me a day to reach camp, another day to get here with Keck and Farr. Farr will know what to do. You’ll be all right — I don’t know about Sullivan, poor bastard.” He frowned fiercely. “But you stay with him, Guilford. Don’t leave him alone.”

He might not wake up, Guilford thought. He might die. And then I’ll be alone, in this godforsaken hole in the ground.

“I’ll stay.”

The frontiersman nodded curtly. “If he dies, wait for me. We’re close enough to the top, you ought to be able to tell night from day. You understand? Keep your fucking wits about you.”

Guilford nodded.

“All right.” Tom bent over the unconscious shape of Sullivan with a tenderness Guilford had never seen in him, smoothed a strand of gray hair from the botanist’s dank forehead. “Hang on, you old cock-knocker! You damn stupid explorer.”

Guilford took the blankets Tom brought him and made a rough bed to shield Sullivan from cold air and cold stone. Compared to the atmosphere outside the temperature in the well was nearly balmy — above the freezing point; but the fog cut through clothing and chilled the skin.

When Tom vanished into the mist Guilford felt profoundly alone. No company now but his thoughts and Sullivan’s slow, labored breathing. He felt both bored and near panic. He found himself wishing stupidly for something to read. The only reading matter that had survived the Partisan attack was Digby’s pocket New Testament, and Diggs wouldn’t allow it out of his possession. Diggs thought the onion-leafed book had saved his life: it was his lucky charm. Argosy was long lost.

As if a person could read, in this arsenic-colored dusk.

He knew night had fallen when the light above him faded entirely and the moist air turned a deeper and more poisonous shade of green. Minute particles of dust and ice wafted out of the deeps, like diatoms in an ocean current. He rearranged the blankets around Dr. Sullivan, whose breathing had grown harsh as the rasp of a saw blade in wet pine, and ignited one of the two mosquewood torches Tom Compton had brought him. Without a blanket of his own, Guilford shivered uncontrollably. He stood up whenever his feet grew numb, careful to keep one hand on the rock wall. He propped the torch in a cairn of loose rocks and warmed his hands at the low flame. Mosquewood dipped in snake tallow, it would burn for six or eight hours, though not brightly.

He was afraid to sleep.

In the silence he was able to hear subtle sounds — a distant rumbling, unless that was the pulse of his own blood, amplified in the darkness. He remembered a novel by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, and its subterranean Morlocks, with their glowing eyes and terrible hungers. Not a welcome memory.

He talked to Sullivan to pass the time. Sullivan might be listening, Guilford thought, though his eyes were firmly closed and blood continued to ooze sluggishly from his nose. Periodically Guilford dipped the tail of his shirt into a trickle of meltwater and used it to wipe the blood from Sullivan’s face. He talked fondly about Caroline and Lily. He talked about his father, clubbed to death during the Boston food riots when he had doggedly tried to enter his print shop, as he had done every working day of his adult life. Dumb courage. Guilford wished he had some of that.

He wished Sullivan would wake up. Tell some stories of his own. Make his case for an ancient, evolved Darwinia; hammer the miraculous with the cold steel of reason. Hope you’re right about that, Guilford thought. Hope this continent is not some dream or, worse, a nightmare. Hope old and dead things remain old and dead.