by Fred Hoyle
The boat plodded steadily on for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes. When they got further out they ran into a slight swell, and dipped and wallowed a little, but the snow stopped and the night seemed a few shades less dark. Fleming wondered if they were far enough from the cliff to be a trace on someone’s radar screen, and he wondered, too, what was going on behind them at the camp, and what lay ahead of them in the empty dark. His eyes ached, and his head and his back — in fact every part of him — and he had to think constantly of the girl’s burnt and throbbing hands in order to feel better about himself.
After about forty minutes she called back to him. He eased the throttle and let the boat glide towards a darker shape that lay in front, and then spun the wheel so that they were running alongside the smooth rock-face of the island. They went on very slowly, almost feeling their way, and listening for the sound of breakers ahead of them until, some ten minutes later, the rock wall sloped away and they could hear the gentle splash of waves on a beach.
Fleming ran the boat aground and carried the girl through bitter knee-high water to the sand. There was a definite lightness in the sky now, not dawn but possibly the moon, and he could recognise the narrow sandy cove as the one he had found with Judy that early spring afternoon so long ago when they had discovered Bridger’s papers in the cave. It was a sad but at the same time a comforting memory; he felt, in an irrational way, that he could hold his own here.
He looked around for somewhere to rest. It was too cold to risk sleeping in the open, even if they could, so he led the way into the cave-mouth and along the tunnel he had explored with Judy. He could no longer hold on to Andre, but he went ahead slowly and talked back over his shoulder to encourage her.
“I feel like Orpheus,” he said to himself. “I’m getting my legends mixed — it was Perseus earlier on.”
He felt light-headed and slightly dizzy with fatigue, and mistook his way twice in the dark tunnels. He was looking for the tall chamber where they had found the pool, for he remembered it had a sandy floor where they could rest; but after a while he realised he had gone the wrong way. He turned, swinging his torch round, to tell Andre. But she was no longer behind him.
In sudden panic, he ran stumbling back the way he had come, calling her name and flashing the torch from side to side of the tunnel. His voice echoed back to him eerily, and that was all the sound there was except for his shoes on the boulders. At the cliff entrance he stopped and turned back again. This was absurd, he told himself, for they had not gone very far. For the first time he felt resentment against the girl, which was quite illogical; but logic was having less and less concern for him.
As he went down the tunnel again he noticed that there were more branches than he had remembered: it seemed to be a part of the sly madness of the place that they should multiply silently in the dark. He explored some of them but had to retrace his steps, for they became, in one way or another, impassable; and then, suddenly, he found himself in the high chamber that he had missed.
He stood and called again and swung his torch slowly from side to side. Surely, he decided, she must be here: she could not have gone much further, exhausted, in darkness. He swung the beam of his torch to the sandy floor and saw her footmarks. The prints led him to the middle of the cave, and there he stopped short while a shiver of horror ran from his scalp right down his body. The last imprint was in the slime on the rocks by the side of the pool, and floating at the edge of the water was one of his gauntlets. Nothing more.
He never found anything more. They had taught her so much, he thought grimly, but they had never taught her to swim. He was stricken by a great pang of sorrow and remorse; he spent the next hour in a morbid and hopeless examination of the cave, and then went wearily back to the beach where he propped himself between two rocks until dawn. He had no fear of sleeping; he had a greater, half-delirious fear of something unspeakable coming out of the tunnel mouth — something unquenchable from a thousand million million miles away — something that had spoken to him first on a dark night such as this.
Nothing came, and after the first hour or so of daylight a naval launch swept in from seaward. He made no attempt to move, even after the launch reached the island, and the crew found him staring out over the ever-changing pattern of the sea.
FRED HOYLE
Professor Fred Hoyle, F.R.S., at the age of forty-six, is a distinguished astronomer, astrophysicist, mathematician, and writer whose work has made a major contribution to our knowledge of outer space. Since 1958 he has been Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and a staff member of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. Between 1945-1958 he was a university lecturer in mathematics. He has been recently engaged on a computer program for recalculating the age of stars.
JOHN ELLIOT
John Elliot, three years younger than Professor Hoyle, left film making to join BBC television in 1949 and helped to pioneer the development of television films. In 1954 he wrote and produced the series War in the Air. He spent the following year on the staff of the United Nations in New York, returning to Television Centre, London, in 1956 as a writer and producer of dramatized documentaries, the most notable of which was probably The Golden Egg, a portrait of an advertising campaign. In addition, he has had four plays performed on television and has received a special award from the Guild of Television Producers and Directors.