Short Fiction, Mack Reynolds [best book reader txt] 📗

that he⁠—who had been through so many dangers⁠—should find himself pinned by so commonplace a threat. A man, he told himself, could die of drowning anywhere. There was no need to go light-years from his place of birth to find such a death. It made all dying⁠—and all living⁠—seem small and futile and insignificant, and he did not like that feeling.

Calvin went back to the plant in its little hollow, tight-hugging to the ground and half-sheltered from the wind, and looked down on its dusky basketball-sized shape, the tough hide swollen and ready to burst with seeds.

“So you think there’s no way out,” he said roughly.

“There is none,” said the plant.

“Why don’t you just let yourself go if you think like that?” Calvin said. “Why try to keep down out of the wind, if the waves’ll get you anyway, later?”

The plant did not answer for a while.

“I do not want to die,” it said then. “As long as I am alive, there is the possibility of some great improbable chance saving me.”

“Oh,” said Calvin, and he himself was silent in turn. “I thought you’d given up.”

“I cannot give up,” said the plant. “I am still alive. But I know there is no way to safety.”

“You make a lot of sense.” Calvin straightened up to squint through the rain at the dark and distant line of the shore. “How much more time would you say we had before the water covers this rock?”

“The eighth part of a daylight period, perhaps more, perhaps less. The water can rise either faster or more slowly.”

“Any chance of it cresting and going down?”

“That would be a great improbable chance such as that of which I spoke,” said the plant.

Calvin rotated slowly, surveying the water around them. Bits and pieces of flotsam were streaming by them on their way before the wind, now angling toward the near bank. But none were close enough or large enough to do Calvin any good.

“Look,” said Calvin abruptly, “there’s a fisheries survey station upriver here, not too far. Now, I could dig up the soil holding your roots. If I did that, would you get to the survey station as fast as you could and tell them I’m stranded here?”

“I would be glad to,” said the plant. “But you cannot dig me up. My roots have penetrated into the rock. If you tried to dig me up, they would break off⁠—and I would die that much sooner.”

“You would, would you?” grunted Calvin. But the question was rhetorical. Already his mind was busy searching for some other way out. For the first time in his life, he felt the touch of cold about his heart. Could this be fear, he wondered. But he had never been afraid of death.

Crouching down again to be out of the wind and rain, he told himself that knowledge still remained a tool he could use. The plant must know something that was, perhaps, useless to it, but that could be twisted to a human’s advantage.

“What made you come to a place like this to seed?” he asked.

“Twenty nights and days ago, when I first took root here,” said the plant, “this land was safe. The signs were good for fair weather. And this place was easy of access from the water. I am not built to travel far on land.”

“How would you manage in a storm like this, if you were not rooted down?”

“I would go with the wind until I found shelter,” said the plant. “The wind and waves would not harm me then. They hurt only whatever stands firm and opposes them.”

“You can’t communicate with others of your people from here, can you?” asked Calvin.

“There are none close,” said the plant. “Anyway, what could they do?”

“They could get a message to the fisheries station, to get help out here for us.”

“What help could help me?” said the plant. “And in any case they could not go against the wind. They would have to be upwind of the station, even to help you.”

“We could try it.”

“We could try it,” agreed the plant. “But first one of my kind must come into speaking range. We still hunt our great improbable chance.”

There was a moment’s silence between them in the wind and rain. The river was noisy, working against the rock of the island.

“There must be something that would give us a better chance than just sitting here,” said Calvin.

The plant did not answer.

“What are you thinking about?” demanded Calvin.

“I am thinking of the irony of our situation,” said the plant. “You are free to wander the water, but cannot. I can wander the water, but I am not free to do so. This is death, and it is a strange thing.”

“I don’t get you.”

“I only mean that it makes no difference⁠—that I am what I am, or that you are what you are. We could be any things that would die when the waves finally cover the island.”

“Right enough,” said Calvin impatiently. “What about it?”

“Nothing about it, man,” said the plant. “I was only thinking.”

“Don’t waste your time on philosophy,” said Calvin harshly. “Use some of that brain power on a way to get loose and get off.”

“Perhaps that and philosophy are one and the same.”

“You’re not going to convince me of that,” said Calvin, getting up. “I’m going to take another look around the island.”

The island, as he walked around its short margin, showed itself to be definitely smaller. He paused again by the black rock. The moss was lost now, under the water, and the crack was all but under as well. He stood shielding his eyes against the wind-driven rain, peering across at the still visible shore. The waves, he noted, were not extreme⁠—some four or five feet in height⁠—which meant that the storm proper was probably paralleling the land some distance out in the gulf.

He clenched his fists in sudden frustration. If only he had hung on to the sailplane⁠—or any decent-sized chunk of it! At least going into the water