Panic!

Lennox feels the welling of relief, but tempered by the dim reminder of mirage, of other possible explanations for the brilliant reflection, of shattered hope. He fights down the urge to fling himself in that direction; it is a half-mile or more to where he sees the glare and he cannot run a half-mile, not now. Steadily, that is how he has to move, steadily.

But it is no more than a hundred yards before he breaks into a staggering and painful run ...

Eleven

For Jana, it had been a quiet day.

Her sketch pad was now, in late afternoon, half full with charcoal and pencil drawings of the stark landscape which lay spread out before her, and she had made several notes and observations to be incorporated into the text of Desert Adventure. The intense heat had bothered her considerably after a while, and she had had to periodically relocate the blanket and her position in order to remain in one of the shifting patches of shade; but there had been nothing else to disturb her work—no inquisitive visitors, animal or human—and in spite of her mild aversion to her surroundings, she had immersed herself in the day’s project as completely as she had immersed herself in the outline yesterday.

Sitting now in the shadow of an oddly humped outcropping of granite, she laid the sketch pad aside and drank from the bottle of mineral water. Then she sat leaning back on her hands, feeling hot and drowsy, not quite ready to make the drive back into Cuenca Seco. She allowed her thoughts to drift, and when the image of Don Harper materialized, she did not recoil from it.

Detachedly, as if she were a disinterested third party clinically examining a relationship between two other people, she placed him mentally against a changing background of memories: Washington Square in the Village, gray sky, fluttering pigeons, leafless trees like skeletal fingers reaching upward, his cheeks flushed from the bitter-cold winter wind, laughing; an off-Broadway theatre with no name, a dramatic production with a forgotten title, sitting intently forward, brow creased, eyes shining, totally absorbed in the illusion being enacted under the floodlights below; the sparkling blue of Long Island Sound, streaked with silver afternoon light, cold salt spray flecking his cheeks as the bow of the sleek white sailboat glides through gentle swells, one large soft hand competent on the tiller, the other possessively on her hip, shouting merriment into the wind ...

It was good then, she thought, it was fine then, but only because I was in love then. I was in love with fun and with excitement and with handsomeness and with charm and with sophistication—but not with Don Harper, the real Don Harper, the man. I didn’t know him, then, and maybe I wouldn’t have cared if I had. But it could never have lasted, I can see that now, it could never have been for us. Don has no depth, he has a tremendous surface but it is only a thin, thin veneer laid across an empty vacuum. He loves being a hedonist, he loves being an important account executive, he loves things—but not people, I don’t think so. He doesn’t love his wife, his poor wife, he never once mentioned loving her even after he told me about her. No, it was his position that he did not want to jeopardize, his pursuit of pleasure. He cared for me only as a decoration, public on his arm and private in his bed; and when the decoration began to take root, he threw it coldly and carelessly back into the jungle where he had first discovered it.

Lord, she wished she had been able to analyze Don and herself and the affair as objectively then as she seemed to be able to do now. The bitterness might not have been as overwhelming inside her, she might not have been so utterly demoralized, she might not have been so susceptible to—

Jana roused herself sharply. All right now, girl, that’s enough of that. You’re having a quiet day and you don’t want to spoil it by slipping back into the dark caverns of the past and there you go again with those damned literary images you silly broad. Shape up, look at that desert out there, look at that man? man out there?

Startled, Jana pulled onto her knees, onto her feet, staring intently at the child-sized figure which seemed to be staggering toward her across the rocky ground. My God! she thought, and then she did not know what to think. She felt a vague apprehension, a tiny cold cube of fright beginning to form in her stomach. Who was he? What was he doing out there? What did he want?

Her first impulse was to conceal herself in the rocks, perhaps he wouldn’t see her; then she thought of gathering up the blanket and the other things and running to the car and driving away very quickly. And then it was too late to do any of those things, even if she had been able, because he was waving his arms awkwardly, loosely above his head—he had seen her, he was coming to her.