Panic!

He moved his head, looking at Jana. She had slept—passed out?—the moment she was prone in the sand, and she lay motionless now, her face somehow pale beneath the dust and the sweat and the sunburned mosaic of red and brown patches, and for a moment he had the feeling that she was dead. He sat up convulsively, leaning toward her. One of her hands twitched then, like the slim paw of a sleeping kitten, and he knew a sense of relief. The protectiveness, the responsibility, he felt toward her was an odd sort of thing; he had never really committed himself, he thought with a kind of detached and yet vivid insight, to anyone but himself in all his thirty-three years—not even to Phyllis in the beginning, when he had loved her intensely, not even to Humber Realty except where it could further his own ends. Jack Lennox had been his entire life, his sole purpose—Jack Lennox’s feelings, needs, triumphs, and defeats, pleasures and pains. No one else had ever really mattered, witness that poor old man in the bus depot, witness him. And now, inexplicably, a girl he barely knew, a girl who might die because of him, a girl who shared his pain and his loneliness, this girl mattered. She had, unwittingly, broken through to touch the core of him, and there was suddenly an awareness in him of his own self-centeredness, of his limitations and his failings, a vague understanding of what he was and why he was what he was. The revelation was not a pleasant one, but the sluggishness of his mind, while it refused to allow him to dwell on it, also refused to allow him to reject it.

Sitting with his legs splayed out in front of him, his hands folded between his knees, Lennox stared out at the bright, stark desert world. A line of ancient, element-carved rocks stretched away to the north—he had learned to read the sun like a compass in the past two days; interesting, the little tricks a running man picks up—and when he and Jana were able to move again, those rocks would serve as cover.

He became gradually aware, as he looked out at the silent emptiness, of a large cylindrical cactus, crowned with small scarlet flowers, growing just beyond the blanket of shade cast by the stone arch overhead. He gave it his attention, studying the striated, thorn-covered trunk, the greenness of it, and something—a scrap of knowledge, read or heard at some time in his life and then filed away in the archives of his brain—nudged at his consciousness, evanescent and yet demanding. He groped at it, retrieved it, held it grimly.

There was a kind of cactus which stored moisture in its pulp, enabling it to stay green longer than any of the other varieties. You could get liquid, drinkable liquid, from that pulp. Barrel cactus, that was the name of it. You sliced off the top of the barrel and the pulp was there inside ...

Lennox pulled his legs under him and staggered to his feet, staring at the cactus growing that short distance away. It was barrel-shaped, all right, it looked like a barrel, all right, and he stumbled toward it, coming into the direct glare of the sun again, wincing as the furnacelike air struck him savagely across the face and neck. He fumbled at his belt and got the knife-contoured piece of granite free and stepped up to the cactus; he drove the pointed end into the barrel’s trunk a few inches below the crown, plunging it deeply, sawing with it, unmindful of the needle-sharp spines jabbing at his hands and wrist and forearm, sweat streaming down into his eyes, his mind blank. The trunk was thick, but its fibers yielded to the desperate hackings and finally the top broke free and dropped to the sandy earth, resembling a fresh scalp with a vividly festooned bonnet, the flowers like splashes of blood in the brilliant light.

Lennox dropped the granite knife and reached inside the cactus with his hand cupped, touched cool wet pulp, seized it, pulled it out and up to his face, squeezing the juice past his parted and eroded lips. It was bitter, it was ambrosial, it dripped into the back of his throat and soothed the constricted passage and returned feeling to the swollen blob that was his tongue. Again and again he dipped out handfuls of the heavy pulp, and after a time he could swallow again, there was less complaint from the contracted muscles of his stomach.

He scooped out a double handful, then, and hurried back to where Jana lay prone in the shade. Using his knee, he turned her and held the barrel pulp low over her mouth, squeezing lightly, letting a few droplets fall on lips that were almost as deeply split as his own. She stirred immediately, her eyes fluttering open, and he said gently, “Open your mouth, Jana. I’ve found something we can drink.”