Warren slowly put down the rifle, panting. He had not thought at all about killing Gijan but had just done it, not stopping for the instant of balancing the equation and seeing if it had to be that way, and that was what had saved him. If Gijan had gotten off another few rounds it would have been enough.

He peered shoreward again. Voices, near. There was some sea still running against the ebb but now the tide was taking hold and carrying him out. The pass was a dark patch in the snarling white of the combers.

He had to get away fast now because the men to the north would be coming toward the gunfire. Hoisting the sail would just give them a target. He had to wait for the slow steady draw to take him through.

Something thumped against the bottom of the raft. It came again. Warren stood and cradled the rifle. The boards worked against each other as they came into the chop near the pass. A big dark thing broke water and rolled hugely. Eyes looked at him and legs that had grown from fins kicked against the current. The Swarmer turned and wallowed in the wash from the passage and then sank, the great head turning toward shore. The lagoon swallowed it.

Warren used the oar to turn the raft free of the rocks. The surf broke to each side and the deep bands of current sucked the raft through with a sudden rush. Behind him Warren heard a cry, lonely and harsh and full of surprise. The warring rumbled beyond the ridge and was lost in the crashing of the waves running hard before an east wind, and he went out into the dark ocean, the raft rising fast and plunging as it came into the full sea swell.

A sharp crack. A motorboat was coming fast behind. Warren lay flat on the raft and groped for his rifle. Another shot whispered overhead.

They would get him out here for sure. He aimed at the place where the pilot would be but in the fast chop he knew he would miss. There came a short, stuttering bark of automatic weapons fire. He heard the shots go by, not close. They did not have to be accurate though if they had enough ammunition.

The raft slewed port and the boat turned to follow. Warren crawled to the edge of the raft, ready to slip overboard when they got too close. It would be better than getting cut down, even with the Swarmers in the water.

The boat whined and bounced on the swell, bearing down. He lifted the rifle to take aim and knew the odds were damn long against him. He saw a muzzle flash and the deck spat splinters at him where the shots hit.

Warren squeezed carefully and narrowed his eyes to frame the target and saw something leap suddenly across the bow of the boat. It was big and another followed, landing in front of the pilot and wriggling back over the windshield in one motion. It crashed into the men there. Shouts. A blue-white shape flicked a man overboard and knocked another sprawling. The boat veered to starboard. From this angle Warren could see the pilot, holding to the wheel and crouched to avoid the flicking tail of the Skimmer. The boat bucked and slewed in the chop and its engine roared.

A hammering of the automatic weapon. The Skimmer jumped and slashed at the man with its tail. Warren leaped up and rocked against the swell to improve his aim. He got off two quick shots at the man. The figure staggered and the Skimmer struck him solidly and he pitched over the side. The pilot glanced back and saw he was alone. The Skimmer stopped thrashing and went still. Warren did not give the man time to think. He fired at the dark splotch at the wheel until it was gone. The boat throttled into silence. Nothing moved.

Distant shouts came from shore but no sounds of another boat. The boat drifted away. Warren thought of the Skimmer who lay dead in it. He tried to reach the boat, but the currents separated them farther. In moments it was gone in the darkness and the island itself faded into a mere looming shadow on the sea.

Two

At noon the next day three big fighter-bombers split the sky with their roaring and passed over to the south. After that craft streaked across the sky for hours, high and soundless.

He had rounded the island in the dark and put up his worn sail and then run before the wind to get distance. He had the map from Tseng. The fishing lines were still on the raft with their hooks. The rifle had no rounds left in its clip but with the bayonet it made a good gaff.

He had a strike at dawn from a small tuna. It got away as he hauled it in. He hoped there would be more now that the Swarmers were going to land and not taking them.

He got a small fish at noon and another near sunset. He slept most of the day, beneath a pale and heatless wafer disk of a sun. Welts and broken blisters made it hard to lie on his back.

In the night there was a sudden distant glare of orange reflected off clouds near the horizon. It eased into a glow as the color seeped out of it and then it was gone. Afterward a rolling hammer blow of sound came. There were more bursts of light, fainter.

High up, silvery specks coasted smoothly across the dark. One by one they vanished in bright firefly sparks—yellow, hard blue. Satellite warfare. Soon they were gone.

At dawn he woke and searched the sky to find the thin silver thread that reached up into the dark bowl overhead.

Now it curled about itself. Warren looked down the sky toward the dawn, shielding his eyes, and found another pale streak far below, where nothing should be.

The Skyhook was broken. Part of it was turning upward while the other fell. Somebody had blown it in two.

For long moments he watched the faint band come down. Finally he lost it in the glare as the sun rose. There had been men and women working on the lower tip of the Skyhook, engineers, and he tried to imagine what it was to fall hopeless that far and that long and then burn quick and high in the air like a shooting star.

His knee had swollen up and be could not stand so he lay in the sail’s shadow. The wound in his neck throbbed and had a crusted blue scab. He didn’t touch it.

A fever came and he sweated, delirious. He saw his wife walking toward him across the sloping waves, called out to her with a caked tongue. Then he was in the lagoon, floating lazily, staring up at the cascading sunbeams that played on him while a motor’s rrrrrrr purred in his ear.

There was nothing to fear, he saw. A little time swimming like this in the bright water and then some rest and a cool drink, with ice cubes in it, and food, hot crisp toast, butter running on it, and steak well marbled with fat and then corned beef hash with the potatoes well browned, and iced tea, plenty of tea, pitchers of it, drinking it in the shade.

Then the sweating passed and he rested. A school of fish passed and he got one, gutted and skinned it and ate it whole inside a minute. A little while later he got another and could start to think.

He would ask the Skimmers about the larvae, he thought, but probably it would be no use. He was sure they were not natural to the Swarmers.

He remembered the sheets he had written on long ago, the tangled thoughts. The Skimmers hated the machines that had intruded into their home waters. They had learned about them in the long years of voyaging, moved and fed and poked at by things that hummed and jerked and yet had no true life. Not like life that arose from nothing at all, flowering wherever chemicals met and sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.

Their hate had brought them through a long journey. So when they saw the simple, noisy ships of men they hated those, too.

The machines would have known that. Planned that. Easy. So easy.

He fished more but caught nothing.

That night there were more orange flashes to the west.

Then, in the hours before dawn, things moved in the sky. Shapes glided through the black, catching the sunlight as they came out of Earth’s shadow.