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the booming peals of thunder, landscape strobe-lit by the snake-tongued flicks of lightning that threw everything into
COLONY " 261
sharp blue-white glare for an instant and then disappeared into blackness once again.
David could feel Bahjat shivering as she drove the elec-trobike. After a few kilometers he told her to pull over to the
road's shoulder. It was raining so hard they could barely see beyond the bike's headlamp rim.
"We've got to find some shelter," he yelled over the crashing thunder.
Her hair was plastered down over her face. Water dripped from her nose, her chin. Her clothes were stuck to her body,
molding every curve, outlining her navel, her nipples, her ribs.
"There is no shelter near here," she hollered back. "And we mustn't stop. They'll catch up with us."
"Not in this storm," David yelled.
"We can't stop," she insisted.
"Then at least let me drive."
He took over the handlebars and she clung to him, shivering, teeth chattering, as he leaned forward to peer through
the solid sheets of rain.
It was terrifying and exhilarating. David had read about storms, had seen tapes of hurricanes and tornadoes. But this
was real. He could feel the stinging cold of the raindrops lashing him, forcing him to close his eyes to slits. The
thunder was overpowering, awesome, earthshaking. The lightning seared every nerve in his body as it split the
darkness.
No wonder our ancestors worshipped them,David thought.Lightning and thunder. They reduce you to insignificance.
I'm an ant, a bacterium, a molecule scuttling across the landscape. Theirs is the power to terrify you into worship. The
power and the beauty. Gods, visible gods. So much bigger and more powerful than we are!
Then the more pragmatic part of his mind wondered if the lightning wouldn't be drawn to them, on this broad, flat,
treeless pampa.
We ought to stop and lie down alongside the shoulder of the road,he thought,and keep this metal bike a good
distance away from us.
BEN BOVA " 262
But instead he drove on, with Bahjat shuddering behind him.
The rain ended at last and the clouds scudded past, revealing a crystalline, star-filled night sky. David knew that the
bike's batteries wouldn't go all night without recharging, so he began to look for a town, a village, a solitary house in
the darkness. Nothing. Only darkness from horizon to horizon.
It was almost dawn when they saw a shack on a little rise far up off the road. In the gray early light David turned the
bike off the paved road and they started bouncing across the grass up toward the shack's sagging wooden door.
The battery chose that moment to give out, and David had to pedal teeth clenched, legs straining the rest of the
way to the shack.
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 "Bring ... the bike inside," Bahjat said, her voice terribly weary, her face gray with exhaustion. "Don't let * them ... see
it... from the air."
It was an oldvaquero line shack, where the cattleman's riders could shelter themselves overnight in the days before
helicopters and electrobikes. Apparently now it was still used by occasional campers, because the wooden one-room
structure was still standing, unpainted but weatherproofed. There were four bunks inside and even some canned food
on the shelves above the sink. The shack had been built over a well; the sink had an old-fashioned manual pump
standing at its side.
Bahjat was trembling uncontrollably and she started to cough as soon as she lay down on the bunk.
"You've caught a cold," David said, putting a hand to her forehead. It was hot. "Maybe worse."
"And you?" she asked between coughs.
"I'm all right," he replied.
"We can't stay here for long."
"You can't travel if you're sick."
"Yes ... I can."
David went to the stock of canned foods. Most of them were self-heating. He pulled the tops off two cans of soup
and one of meat stew. They started sizzling immediately. Sitting on the edge of her bunk, he helped Bahjat drink the
COLONY " 263
soup directly from the can. There were no dishes, no utensils, no glassware.
And no medicines.
"The road ..." Bahjat said. "We can hitch a ride.... There must be trucks...."
"With two-way radios and full descriptions of us from the police, or army, or whatever," David said. He helped her eat
part of the stew, and her eoughing abated. He finished the stew himself, despite her feeble warnings that he would
catch her germs by eating from the same can. Then he drank his soup, filled two of the cans with clear, cold water from
the pump, and left them both beside Bahjat.
"Get some sleep," he said. "That's what I'm going to do."
"I'm cold," she said.
David scanned the cabin carefully. There were no blankets, not even sheets. The sun coming through the window
was warm, but the sunlight wouldn't reach the bunk, which was built into the wall and couldn't be moved. So he
undressed her and laid her still-damp clothes in the square of sunlight on the planks of the floor. Then he undressed
himself and went back to her.
Like a baby sparrow,he thought, looking at her nude body,frail and beautiful.
He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms. She curled into his body, still shivering slightly. He held her
tightly, then started rubbing her bare back and buttocks with his hands. She coughed a few times, then fell asleep. He
did, too, with his last waking thought the realization that exhaustion is a stronger force than passion.
The sound of an engine awoke David. His eyes flicked open and he was instantly awake, alert. The wooden slats of
the ceiling. Bahjat nestled in his arms. And a heavy internal combustion engine droning toward their cabin. Not an
electrobike. Not a helicopter. A truck, maybe.
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 Carefully, he disengaged his arms from the sleeping girl. Her breathing was heavy, rasping, almost a wheeze. The
sunlight had moved across the floor from where he had laid their clothes. But they were dry now.
David quickly draped Bahjat's skirt and blouse over her
BEN BOVA " 264
naked body, then scooped up his own pants and shirt and pulled them on.
Through the cabin's window he could see the road arrowing straight out to the horizon. A big tractor-trailer rig was
puffing along the highway, the sign painted on its white flanks proclaiming that it carried don qutxote cervesa in its
refrigerated innards.
No way to get to the road and flag it down,David told himself.Probably a mistake to even try. But she needs a doctor,
or at least a pharmaceutical dispenser.
He glanced back toward the bunk. Bahjat was sitting up. One arm shielding her breasts, the hand gripping her
opposite shoulder, as if she were posing for a painting.
But David saw the dark circles beneath her eyes. She coughed and it sounded painful.
"We mustn't stay here," she said.
"I know."
"There will be other trucks."
"But they'll radio the police, won't they?"
She tried to smile. "Let me tell you how a properly trained guerrilla hitches a ride on a truck."
Crouched along the edge of the highway, David waited tensely. A dozen times he thought he heard the sound of a
truck motor. Each time it was only his eager imagination. Once a helicopter flew overhead and David hid himself and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]