One more crawling up his leg, toward his groin. He felt it moving quickly backward - she was pulling it out by the tail!
"Jesus, careful - "
The snake was out, flung over her shoulder.
"You can get up, Norman," she said.
He jumped to his feet, and promptly vomited.
0700 HOURS
He had a murderous, pounding headache. It made the habitat lights seem unpleasantly bright. And he was cold. Beth had wrapped him in blankets and had moved him next to the big space heaters in D Cyl, so close that the hum of the electrical elements was very loud in his ears, but he was still cold. He looked down at her now, as she bandaged his cut knee.
"How is it?" he said.
"Not good," she said. "It's right down to the bone. But you'll be all right. It's only a few more hours now."
"Yes, I - ouch!"
"Sorry. Almost done." Beth was following first-aid directions from the computer. To distract his mind from the pain, he read the screen.
MINOR MEDICAL (NON-LETHAL) COMPLICATIONS
7.113 Trauma
7.115 Microsleep
7.118 Helium Tremor
7.119 Otitis
7.121 Toxic Contaminants
7.143 Synovial Pain
Choose one:
"That's what I need," he said. "Some microsleep. Or better yet, some serious macrosleep."
"Yes, we all do."
A thought occurred to him. "Beth, remember when you were pulling the snakes off me? What was all that you were saying about the time of day?"
"Sea snakes are diurnal," Beth said. "Many poisonous snakes are alternately aggressive and passive in twelve-hour cycles, corresponding to day and night. During the day, when they're passive, you can handle them and they will never bite. For example, in India, the highly poisonous banded krait has never been known to bite during the day, even when children play with them. But at night, watch out. So I was trying to determine which cycle the sea snakes were on, until I decided that this must be their passive daytime cycle."
"How'd you figure that?"
"Because you were still alive." Then she had used her bare hands to remove the snakes, knowing that they wouldn't bite her, either.
"With your hands full of snakes, you looked like Medusa."
"What is that, a rock star?"
"No, it's a mythological figure."
"The one who killed her children?" she asked, with a quick suspicious glance. Beth, ever alert to a veiled insult.
"No, that's somebody else. That was Medea. Medusa was a mythical woman with a head full of snakes who turned men to stone if they looked at her. Perseus killed her by looking at her reflection in his polished shield."
"Sorry, Norman. Not my field."
It was remarkable, he thought, that at one time every educated Western person knew these figures from mythology and the stories behind them intimately - as intimately as they knew the stories of families and friends. Myths had once represented the common knowledge of humanity, and they served as a kind of map of consciousness.
But now a well-educated person such as Beth knew nothing of myths at all. It was as if men had decided that the map of human consciousness had changed. But had it really changed? He shivered.
"Still cold, Norman?"
"Yeah. But the worst thing is the headache."
"You're probably dehydrated. Let's see if I can find something for you to drink." She went to the first-aid box on the wall.
"You know, that was a hell of a thing you did," Beth said. "Jumping in like that without a suit. That water's only a couple of degrees above freezing. It was very brave. Stupid, but brave." She smiled. "You saved my life, Norman."
"I didn't think," Norman said. "I just did it." And then he told her how, when he had seen her outside, with the churning cloud of sediment approaching her, he had felt an old and childish horror, something from distant memory.
"You know what it was?" he said. "It reminded me of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. That tornado scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid. I just didn't want to see it happen again."
And then he thought, Perhaps these are our new myths. Dorothy and Toto and the Wicked Witch, Captain Nemo and the giant squid ...
"Well," Beth said, "whatever the reason, you saved my life. Thank you."
"Any time," Norman said. He smiled. "Just don't do it again."
"No, I won't be going out again."
She brought back a drink in a paper cup. It was syrupy and sweet.
"What is this?"
"Isotonic glucose supplement. Drink it."
He sipped it again, but it was unpleasantly sweet. Across the room, the console screen still said I WILL KILL YOU NOW. He looked at Harry, still unconscious, with the intravenous line running into his arm.
Harry had been unconscious all this time.
He hadn't faced the implications of that. It was time to do it now. He didn't want to do it, but he had to. He said, "Beth, why do you think all this is happening?"
"All what?"
"The screen, printing words. And another manifestation coming to attack us."
Beth looked at him in a flat, neutral way. "What do you think, Norman?"
"It's not Harry."
"No. It's not."
"Then why is it happening?" Norman said. He got up, pulling the blankets tighter around him. He flexed his bandaged knee; it hurt, but not too badly. Norman moved to the porthole and looked out the window. In the distance he could see the string of red lights, from the explosives Beth had set and armed. He had never understood why she had wanted to do that. She had acted so strangely about the whole thing. He looked down toward the base of the habitat.