The lifeboat landed.
There was a bump, that was all. The ship was down. Intact. Then silence. The voyage had seemed silent, but now the silence was absolute. No engine sound. No vibration. Nothing.
“We made it!” said Wayne Norton, as he finally opened his eyes. “Isn’t that great?”
Grawl was as silent as ever.
“Aren’t you pleased? Nod. Just one little nod.”
There was no hint of cranial movement.
After so long together, Norton thought he knew how far he could push Grawl. And this was far enough.
“How about breaking out the champagne?”
Norton poured two cups of water. Grawl allowed him to do this occasionally, although he kept the meals as his responsibility. The water was recycled, which Norton always tried to forget. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if the lifeboat had had two recyling units. In fact, it had three—and he and Grawl were two of them, with whatever they produced then passing through the capsule’s filtration system.
At least their food wasn’t recycled. When Norton had first considered the idea, just thinking of what he might already have eaten led to him skipping numerous meals. That was the trouble with thinking; it gave you too many thoughts.
Fortunately, in spite of spending at least one or two minutes preparing each meal, Grawl never seemed to care whether Norton ate or not. In the end, he convinced himself the food wasn’t produced via waste reprocessing. If it was, there would have been so many added flavours that it couldn’t possibly taste as bad as it did.
He handed one of the cups to Grawl, who accepted the water but didn’t drink.
Although he’d attempted to keep counting the days, Norton had lost track of time. If the voyage had gone on much longer, he would also have lost his mind. Then one day (or maybe one night, it was all the same) he noticed one of the stars visible on the viewscreen was slowly getting brighter, which meant it was getting nearer. The lifeboat was heading toward it.
That was when he realised the capsule was on autopilot. It would land on the nearest planet and they would be saved.
But not all planets were safe. Some worlds were too big, with an atmospheric pressure strong enough to crumple the lifeboat like a tin can. Assuming there was an atmosphere. And even if there was, it could be a lethal mixture of toxic gases.
For days, and nights, he had gazed out at the blackness, watching for an orbiting planet to come into view. Without success. It was the star which was pulling them closer, its gravity dragging them toward an inevitable fiery doom. But long before they were incinerated in the heart of the alien sun, the escape pod would become a stove and they’d be boiled alive.
Then at last he’d seen the planet, and it grew and grew as the capsule came nearer and nearer. It had to be habitable, or else the ship wouldn’t be heading there. But was it inhabited? If not, Norton would be stranded on an alien world with only Grawl for company. Which was a vast improvement on being trapped inside a lifeboat with him. At least he could have half the globe to himself.
“Let’s see where we are,” said Norton.
He went to check the screen. It was blank. For a moment he wondered if it was damaged. But it was still operational, and there was nothing on it because there was nothing to see. The screen was dark, darker than it had ever been, because there were not even any stars.
“Must be night outside,” he said.
Grawl shook his head.
Norton stared at him in amazement. This was almost the first positive response—okay, negative response, any response!—Grawl had made for weeks. Maybe even months.
“Shall we open the door?”
Grawl shook his head again.
“Is it too cold? Would we freeze out there?”
Again.
“Is it too hot? Would we fry out there?”
And again.
“Is the air poisonous?”
Again again.
“So why can’t we leave?”
Grawl opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it again.
“I don’t understand.”
Grawl’s mouth opened and closed in the same slow rhythm, but his lips didn’t move.
He looked like a fish. Was Grawl playing charades? Why now? They could have done this weeks and weeks ago, to pass the time.
“A fish?” said Norton.
Grawl nodded his head. He was holding the cup in his right hand, and he started making circular movements with his left arm, rotating it over his head.
“Swimming?” said Norton. “A fish swimming?”
But what else did fish do except swim?
Grawl nodded again.
Norton kept looking at him, wondering what all this was supposed to mean. He shrugged his bewilderment.
Which was when Grawl threw the contents of his cup at him.
“Water?”
Again, Grawl nodded.
“Oh, yeah, water!”
Again again.
“We’re in the water? No. On the water? No. You mean… under the water?”
The lifeboat hadn’t landed. Not exactly. Because it wasn’t on the land. It was in the sea. Beneath the sea.
Norton remembered shutting his eyes before the capsule came down. Grawl must have kept his open, which was how he knew they had fallen into the ocean.
“Can you swim?”
Grawl shook his head.
“Neither can I. How far down are we?”
Grawl shrugged.
“Ohhhhh,” said Norton, “nohhhhh…”
But if they couldn’t swim, it didn’t matter how deep they were. They might as well still be out in space, a hundred parsecs from the planet. Norton had no idea how far a “parsec” was, it was just another unfathomable measurement. Unfathomable! How many fathoms beneath the surface was the lifeboat? He had no idea how far a fathom was, either.
“When I was a kid, my favourite movie was 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Did you ever see that? I don’t suppose you did. Long before your time. Two-dimensional, non-interactive. Very primitive. A league can’t be much. How deep is it to the bottom of the sea? Earth’s deepest sea. Two or three miles? More? I don’t know. Say it’s as deep as Everest is high. Five and a half miles. Call it five. That’s… what?… four thousand leagues to a mile. So a league can’t be much more than a foot? About sixteen inches. Hardly anything. How many leagues deep are we? However many, it’s too many. I wish I’d been born in California. On the coast. Southern California. I’d have grown up surfing. I’d have been able to swim. Could have swum out of here. Nevada? Middle of a desert. No chance. Did anyone learn to swim in the Hoover Dam? But I guess if I’d never been in Las Vegas my whole life would have been totally different and I wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t need to swim, would I?”
Grawl raised an index finger and put it to his lips.
Norton shut up.
Grawl started to move his finger away from his face, then paused, gazing at it. Then he touched his finger with his other hand. It was his right finger, it was his left hand, and both were gloved in the same strange fabric which covered the rest of his body, except for his face.
Norton was clad in exactly the same way, except that he didn’t have a right index finger. His outfit fitted him better than any glove. A seamless overall, it was as comfortable as a second skin.
Having been in space before, Grawl knew the proper lifeboat drill, and it was he who had found the clothes. The things looked like paper bags at first, but Norton was glad of anything to cover his nudity.
The garment never needed washing, and neither did he. The water Grawl had thrown at him had already been absorbed into the colourless cloth. The material seemed to assimilate every drop of sweat, to neutralise every odour. The gloves prevented his fingernails from growing, and the hood kept his hair nice and short.
Because the lifeboat had no shaving facilities, Norton’s stubble had started to grow. One morning there was a finger-shaped shaven patch on his cheek, and he guessed his finger had been pressed against his face while he slept. As an experiment, he held his palm against his chin for a long while. When he took it away, his skin was smooth. The glove had absorbed all the hair. After that, he was able to keep his face stubble-free.
Norton hadn’t touched his own water yet, and Grawl grabbed the cup, thrusting his right index finger inside, swirling it around. Then he raised the gloved finger. It was dry.
Grawl nodded slowly, then looked up.
Norton also looked up, imagining all the water above the lifeboat.
Lifeboat! The word was a joke. A boat which had sunk to the bottom of an alien ocean.
Grawl walked toward the end of the capsule, the end where the hatch was.
“No!” yelled Norton.
Grawl reached for the controls.
Norton reached for Grawl.
“Don’t!”
Grawl grabbed hold of Norton.
Then the hatch burst open.
And in flooded the water.
Water! The one thing Norton dreaded most in the world. In the universe. He hated water. He feared water. It was so… so wet. He’d always imagined this would be the worst way to die. Mouth and throat filling with liquid. Choking. Unable to breathe. Unable to resist. No air. Lungs saturated. Struggling, struggling, struggling. Drowning slowly. Slowly drowning.
Slowly dying.
“Ahhhhhhh!!!!”
Grawl’s hand went over Norton’s mouth, cutting off his scream of terror.
The capsule filled with water, totally engulfing them. Norton waited to die.