Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Far From This Earth and Other Stories is volume 2 of a collection of Chad Oliver's SF, containing the following: Stardust Let Me Live in a House Field Expedient Transformer If Now You Grieve a Little Anachronism North Wind Pilgrimage The Wind Blows Free Of Course Rite of Passage Didn't He Ramble? Second Nature Ghost Town End of the Line Just Like a Man Far From This Earth King of the Hill Meanwhile, Back on the Reservation A Lake of Summer

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

“Stardust”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 49:5, July 1952 [reprinted as “First to the Stars”]

“Let Me Live in a House”, first printed in Universe Science Fiction no. 4, March 1951 [reprinted as “A Friend to Man”]

“Field Expedient”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 54:5, January 1955

“Transformer”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 7:5, November 1954

“If Now You Grieve a Little” first printed in Fantastic 2:3, May-June 1953, as “Hardly Worth Mentioning”

“Anachronism”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 4:4, April 1953

“North Wind”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 10:3, March 1956

“Pilgrimage”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 14:2, February 1958

“The Wind Blows Free”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 13:1, July 1957

“Of Course”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 53:3, May 1954

“Rite of Passage”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 53:2, April 1954

“Didn’t He Ramble?”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 12:4, April 1957

“Second Nature”, first printed in Future Quest, edited by Roger Elwood, New York: Avon, 1973

“Ghost Town”, first printed in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact 103:10, Mid-September 1983

“The End of the Line”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 28:1, January 1965

“Just Like a Man”, first printed in Fantastic Science Fiction - Fantasy 15:6, July 1966

“Far From This Earth”, first printed in The Year 2000, edited by Harry Harrison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1970

“King of the Hill”, first printed in Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1972

“Meanwhile, Back on the Reservation”, first printed in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact 101:5, April 27, 1981

“A Lake of Summer”, first printed in The Bradbury Chronicles, edited by William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg, New York: ROC, 0-451-45134-1, November 1991

A funny thing happened on the way to the printer….

This double-volume set was originally going to be only one book.

I carefully took word counts, and made agonized decisions about which stories to put in and which to leave out. After much obsessive behavior and advice from many corners, I decided upon 34 stories, that should just fill 640 pages (that’s twenty 32-page signatures, if you’re interested)—since I decided that anything larger than that would be physically uncomfortable to read.

After type setting all those stories, I counted up and they came to 706 pages. Too big! Arrgh!!

And I just couldn’t bear to cut anything more out….

So, I got onto the trusty computer to ask advice of fellow NESFAns.

Much gnashing of teeth, apologizing, agonizing. No, we agree … shouldn’t cut anything out … this man can really write … I want more.

So, we added back six stories that many of us has been sorry to see go in the first place, and split the collection in two, and we’re all happy about it. I hope you are, too.

You might be curious about how we choose which author to collect when putting together these NESFA’s Choice books.

Memories.

Recommendations, too. But the memories are more important.

I remember reading Chad Oliver stories through college, and loving them. (I took a lot of anthropology courses then; I expect there’s a connection.) When George Zebrowski recommended Oliver as a good candidate for collection, it seemed like a great idea to me. As George pointed out, Chad Oliver has been “rediscovered” by at least three generations of readers, in the ’70s, in the ’80s, and now in the new century.

Based on suggestions from George and others, I started re-reading Oliver—and realized I had previously read only a fraction of his work (which was just as good as I remembered). And all those “new” stories—some really new; they hadn’t even been written before I was out of school—were just plain terrific.

In his introduction to the first volume of these stories, Howard Waldrop writes, “If you haven’t made these word-journeys before, I, as the usual phrase goes, envy you. But I really do.” He’s right on the money there; what a delight to go back to a favorite author and find that he’s even better than you remember!

(And—just wait till you see the novels!)

O.K., what makes them so good?

I think it’s because they’re about people.

Sometimes set against a background of small-town life, sometimes in a spaceship, and sometimes on an alien planet, the stories ask questions:

What defines culture?

What defines civilization?

What defines man?

Man—the imperfect machine (as Oliver sometimes referred to him)—takes center stage in almost all of these stories. And, though some of them, especially those “anthropological” tales of cultural manipulation and lost cultural patterns, seem superficially similar, dig a bit deeper and you’ll find subtle twists that illuminate yet more facets of the very nature of humanity, and its relationship to the greater universe. They are moving stories of lifeways—human and alien, and sometimes both.

A hero is described in “The Gift” as “a dreamer, a doer, a man of impulse … a bringer of fire, a slayer of dragons, an opener of the way.” Chad Oliver’s stories explore the familiar and the hypothetical, the humorous and the elegiac. Mostly, they investigate mankind: in the present, the past, and the future. They look at where we are, where we’ve been, and where we might be going. They help us understand who we are—and why we are that way.

They open doors.

 

—Priscilla OlsonFramingham, MassachusettsJune 2003

Collins floated through the jet blackness with every sense alert. He heard the low hum of voices welling up out of the emptiness ahead of him and the oxygen in the still air tasted sweet to him as he drank it into his lungs. The cold smell of metal was all around him, hemming him in, and he shivered involuntarily in the darkness.

At precisely the right instant, he extended his hand forward, made contact with an invisible brace that felt rough and dead to his tingling fingers, and changed direction with a light, delicate shove. The new tunnel was almost as dark as the one he had left behind him, but he could see a faint luminous haze in the distance. His pulses quickened as tiny warmth currents touched his skin and he caught the smell of men in the abyss ahead of him.

It was good to be going toward men, Collins thought. It was a good feeling. He kept to the exact center of the shaft, as far away from the cold metal taste as he could get. A man knew loneliness in the eternal night, alone with his thoughts. A man knew fear—

He guided his body around another turn, and still another, and felt the sudden life shocks in front of him. He closed his eyes to narrow slits, letting them adjust. He could feel space and air on all sides, and the cold, unpleasant smell of metal receded into the distance. Warmth currents bathed his skin—and yet there was a coolness even here, an icy coolness of hostility that mottled the warmth tides like a cancerous disease—

Collins shook the feeling from his mind. Slowly, gradually, the chamber took shape around him, although he still could not look directly at the intolerable, flickering flame that hissed and sputtered atop the fire torch. Black shadows writhed in the gray halflight on the periphery of the fireglow and white bodies floated all around him, waiting.

Collins took a deep breath. He could see again.

“Class will come to order,” he said into the silence.

The men—young men, all of them—hesitated and then moved into a circle around him. The circle was composed of three distinct layers, one even with Collins, one slightly above him, and another just below him. Each layer contained four men. Collins forced himself to look directly at the fire torch, even though the unaccustomed brightness lanced little needles of pain through his eyes and narrowed their pupils to tiny dots of black. It was not easy, but he kept his face expressionless.

Men were made to live in light.

“Before we start, do any of you have any questions about your work for today?” His voice was soft, patient. But it had a firm edge to it—sheathed now, but capable of cutting like a knife when the need arose.

The young men looked at each other, faintly hostile, uncertain.

“Speak up,” Collins said, smiling. “Asking questions is not a sign of ignorance, you know. It is only the stupid who never ask questions.”

One of the men cleared his throat. It was Lanson, one of the most intelligent of them. Collins nodded encouragement.

“We don’t understand our problem for today, sir,” he said, faintly accenting the sir to give it a slightly contemptuous ring. “We’ve talked it over among ourselves, but we can’t seem to get it.”

“Be specific, Lanson. Exactly what is it that you do not understand?”

Lanson shifted nervously in the still air. “It’s about this problem of falling bodies, sir,” he said. His voice was genuinely puzzled now; Lanson was interested almost in spite of himself. “You stated that, because of gravity, two bodies will fall through a vacuum at precisely the same rate of speed, regardless of weight—that is, if we get your meaning correctly, a heavy body will fall with the same speed as a light body, or, to use your example, a piece of paper and a chunk of metal will hit the floor together.”

“O.K. so far, Lanson.” Collins braced himself, knowing what was coming. It was difficult.

“Well, sir,” Lanson continued, choosing his words with care, “we sort of see what you’re driving at in the concepts heavy and light—but what is falling? What pushes the piece of paper and the chunk of metal down? Why don’t they float like we do?”

“They do float,” a voice whispered loudly. “Everyone knows that.”

Collins looked at the white bodies around him, pale and ghostly in the dancing fireglow. Beyond them, the great darkness hovered like a gigantic beast, shadow tentacles writhing, waiting to envelop them, pull them all into the black vault of the abyss. Collins shivered again as an icy chill crawled down his spine. They couldn’t go on like this forever, he knew. They weren’t trying the way they used to—it was very hard, and they weren’t trying. Every day, every hour, they lost ground. And below them, dancing around their great fires—

He had to make them see.

“You are right, in a sense,” he told them carefully. “I’m glad to see that you’re using your minds and not just accepting what I say without thought of your own. They do float, as you’ve seen—here. The point is that conditions here are unnatural, not normal, although they are the only ones we’ve ever known. I’ve tried to tell you about gravity—”

“Him and his gravity,” someone snickered.

“We’re not approaching the situation with the proper gravity,” someone else whispered. Several of the young men laughed aloud at the pun, staring at Collins with ill-concealed contempt.

“Yes, but what is gravity?” Lanson persisted. “You say that in science we experiment, we measure, we deal with facts rather than wishful thinking. Very well—show us some gravity then.”

Collins breathed deeply, feeling the doubt all around him. “I can show you no gravity that you can recognize as such,” he said slowly. “Nor can I show you the atoms of which matter is composed, much less the subatomic constituents of the atoms themselves. You must be patient, you must consider the situation in which we find ourselves. Even in science, gentlemen, there are times when we must go along on faith, do the best we can—”

“We’re not trying to dispute your word, sir,” said Lanson, who was doing precisely that. “But it seems to us that even if all this stuff were true somewhere, sometime, we still have to live here and not there. Since we have to live here, why not confine ourselves to this world, to what can be of practical use to us, and just forget about—”

“No!” Collins said sharply, the anger rising in him like a hot flood. “That will do, Lanson, unless you wish to be reported. We must not forget, or we are lost, we are animals, we are no longer men. One day you will see and understand. Until then—”

He stopped, suddenly. The men shifted uncertainly in the air. Collins tensed, every sense alive, vibrant, questing. He probed the deep shadows. His skin tingled. Something was out there—those shadows were no longer empty. Something—

“The other men,” he hissed. “Kill that torch.”

The flame sputtered and died. The men drifted backward, united now against a common danger, fighting to adjust their eyes again to the absence of light. Collins felt his heart hammering in his throat and cold sweat in the palms of his hands. He drew his knife, waiting.

In the dead silence, panic stalked on padded feet through the chamber of darkness.

Ship’s Officer Mark Langston tossed off a few choice expletives and permitted them to explode harmlessly within the confines of his book-lined office. He flipped open a desk drawer, removed a well-worn flask, and treated himself to a short snifter of Scotch. Then he replaced the flask, banished the contemptuous expression from his face, and glued a patient smile to his mouth.

“Come in,” he said, bracing himself.

The office door opened with a calm precision that hinted at a hurricane just below the horizon. A tall, angular, hatchet-faced woman marched inexorably into the room with her teen-age daughter following meekly in her wake.

“You are the Ship’s Officer?” inquired the woman in a voice like a file sawing on iron.

“Right the first time,” said Mark Langston.

“You’re not the same man I spoke to last time,” the woman stated suspiciously. “Where is Mr. Raleigh?”

“He jumped overboard,” Mark Langston wanted to say.

“Mr. Raleigh is not on duty at the moment,” Mark Langston said. “My name is Langston—may I be of service?”

“Well, I should certainly hope so. I am Mrs. Simmons, and this is my daughter Laura.”

Mark Langston nodded and glanced at the note that Raleigh had left on his desk. As a small token of my esteem, I have willed you Mrs. Simmons, the note read. May God have mercy on your soul.

“What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Simmons?”

Mrs. Simmons sighed deeply, giving an excellent imitation of a death rattle. “It’s this excruciating artificial gravity, Mr. Langston,” she said. “I simply cannot stand it another moment. I’m having terrible pains around my heart and my back aches. I’m a nervous wreck. You’ve got to do something, my man. And my darling Laura absolutely can’t sleep at night—she does need her sleep so, she’s such a delicate child. Aren’t you, Laura?”

“Yes, mother,” said Laura in a delicate voice.

“Well now, Mrs. Simmons,” Langston said carefully, struggling desperately to maintain the smile on his face, “I find this most difficult to understand. Do you have these symptoms back on Earth? You see, ship’s gravity is kept at all times at Earth normal—there’s no difference whatever, in effect, between artificial gravity and the gravity you have lived with all your life.”

“My good man,” Mrs. Simmons said, drawing herself up haughtily, “are you accusing me of—”

“Not at all, not at all,” Langston lied. He forced himself to remember Mr. Simmons and his power and influence with the Interstellar Board of Trade. “It’s quite possible that the machinery is out of adjustment or something. I’ll check into it at once, Mrs. Simmons. We will spare no effort in securing your comfort during your stay on our ship. In the meantime, won’t you check with Dr. Ford on Three Deck? I’m certain that he’ll be able to help you and your daughter.”

Mrs. Simmons brightened visibly. “Oh, Mr. Langston!” she breathed. “Do you really think I require medical attention?”

“It’s entirely possible, Mrs. Simmons,” Mark Langston said, and meant it. He neglected to mention what sort of medical attention he thought Mrs. Simmons needed, but that was a minor detail. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ford and he’ll be ready to take care of you instantly.”

“Thank you so much,” Mrs. Simmons said happily. “Come, Laura—now watch your step, dear.”

Mrs. Simmons and her offspring left the room and the door hissed shut behind them. Mark Langston maliciously neglected to warn Ford in advance; it was a dirty trick to play on the Doc, of course, but Ford was capable of handling the situation and would duly dispatch Mrs. Simmons and Laura to some other luckless official.

Langston got up from his desk and limped over to the private screen against the outside wall. He flicked it on and an infinity of night reached coldly into his soul and pulled him out among a myriad of incredible stars—

There it was, right in his office with him. Space, deep space, the endless darkness and the stars that had been his life, his very being. He lost himself in the ever-new immensities. This was space—the space that he had helped to conquer, the star trails that he had made his own. This was the strange world that he had chosen for a home. Out there, far beyond imagining, distant beyond belief, the men and the women that he had lived with, fought with, laughed with, flashed forever into the deeps of night. They carried the great adventure onward, always, and now—

And now he was no longer with them.

Mark Langston turned off the screen and limped back to his desk. They had opened up the greatest frontier of them all—and for what? For Mrs. Simmons and Laura? For stupidity and greed and ignorance? For wealthy tourists who made the Earth a world to be ridiculed? For what?

Yes, he was still in space. He smiled without humor. He would have been wiser to have stayed on Earth, or on one of a hundred worlds that he had known. Wiser to have cut it cleanly and for good. Wiser to have left space behind him. Once, on the long runs, the new runs, he had been proud and happy to be a man; he had gloried in it. Now—

But he could not leave space. It was a part of him.

A red light flashed over his visibox. He switched it on. It was Stan Owens, the ship anthropologist. He looked excited, which was profoundly unusual.

“What’s up, Stan? More of those pesky space pirates?”

“Cut the clowning, Father Time. We’ve run smack dab into the middle of something.”

“On the Capella run? What is it—the Ultimate Boredom at last?”

“On the level, Mark. We need you in the control room on the double.”

Mark Langston eyed his friend’s face with sudden interest. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not kidding!”

“Come up and see for yourself,” Owens smiled, and switched off.

Mark Langston left his office at a thoroughly respectable speed, hurried down the corridor with scarcely a limp, and caught the lift to the control room. He stepped out and instantly it hit him—the spirit, the feel of a ship up against the unknown. He had known that feeling a thousand times in his life, and he responded to it with a spreading grin.

Owens collared him and pulled him toward a knot of men gathered around a subsidiary computer. “Hang on tight, old son,” the anthropologist said. “This may be too much for your ancient nervous system—this crate has hit the well-known jackpot.”

The men stepped back to make room and Captain Kleberg welcomed Mark by shoving a computer report into his hand. “Take a look at this, Mark,”’ he said, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair, “I’ve about decided that the computer’s psycho, or we’re psycho, or both.”

Langston examined the report with a practiced eye. It was a sub-space survey report—normal space being sub-space with respect to their ship, the Wilson Langford, in hyperspace—and seemed to be routine enough at first glance. There was the usual co-ordinate check, the drift check, the hydrogen check, the distress beam check—nothing to get excited about. In fact—

Then he saw it.

“But that’s impossible,” he said.

“Agreed,” said Captain Kleberg. “But there it is.”

“You figure it out,” Owens suggested.

Mark Langston checked the report again carefully. “Is this a gag?” he asked, knowing full well that it wasn’t. “There can’t be a ship down there.”

“Just the same,” pointed out the Navigation Officer, “thar she blows!”

“Maybe it’s the Flying Dutchman,” Owens offered.

Langston tried to think the thing through logically. But it simply wasn’t logical. There evidently was some sort of a ship down there, in normal space, light-years out from any planetary system. What was it doing there? How did it get there?

“Any distress calls of any sort?” he asked.

“Dead silence,” said Captain Kleberg. “And we can’t get a blip out of her.”

“How about positioning?”

“We’re almost directly ‘above’ her,” the Navigation Officer reported. “We’re practically back-pedaling to keep from losing her.”

“How about acceleration?”

“Hard to tell, but I’d guess that she’s in free fall. Absolutely no energy tracings at all, and no radiation. She’s dead.”

Langston let that sink in for a minute. “Have you got a picture yet?” he asked finally.

“They’re building one up downstairs,” Captain Kleberg said. “It isn’t an easy job, of course, but they should be getting something soon.”

“Just wait until some of our noble human cargo gets wind of the fact that we’re off our course and will miss scheduled landing time by a week or three,” Stan Owens chuckled. “We’ll have everybody down on us like a pack of hyenas.”

“That isn’t funny,” said Captain Kleberg.

“We’ll probably get strung up by our thumbs,” Mark Langston said, “while the esteemed officials of the Interstellar Board of Trade dance around the tribal fires and massage our toes with jolly acid.”

“That isn’t funny either,” the harassed captain pointed out.

“Have you met Mrs. Simmons?” asked Stan Owens fiendishly. “A very interesting cultural phenomenon—”

“You and your cultural phenomena,” shot back Captain Kleberg. “You anthropologists think you’re so—”

There was a whirring buzz and a three-dimensional mock-up thumped out of a chute. Captain Kleberg snatched it up and put it on a chart table where everyone could get a good look at it.

There was a dead silence in the control room.

“It just can’t be,” Captain Kleberg said finally, his voice very small.

“No,” Mark Langston agreed softly. “But it is.”

The men stared at each other, searching for words that were not there.

They came up from the depths, spawned in hate, fed on fury. Collins could smell them, feel the warmth currents from their bodies and the rush and surge of air currents from beating wings. They choked the chamber, filling it, strangling it, shooting up like gas under pressure from the world below.

Like creatures from hell, and yet—

Collins edged back to the mouth of the tunnel and stopped, letting the rest of the rear guard slide into position around him. Differences were forgotten now, melted in the flame of danger. Collins smiled without humor. It was ironic—they respected him only as a fighter—

He floated down to the very floor of the chamber and touched the cold metal. He blanked his mind, watching his chance.

The other men came in high, as they always did, and he felt and smelled and heard the battle in the darkness above him. Knives and clubs and spears collided with clanging crashes and the echoes of harsh breathing filled the chamber with sound. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Something wet and sticky brushed his face—blood pumping in a warm pulsing stream from a punctured artery.

With a blind rage seething within him, a rage as much at himself as his enemies, Collins launched himself from the floor. His nostrils quivered and he angrily choked off a low animal growl of defiance in his throat. He went up, high and hard, his knife extended in front of him. For a long, intolerable instant there was nothing. And then—contact.

Collins cut and slashed with methodical accuracy, giving no warning and no quarter. Like so many men who see fighting for what it is, he cherished no illusions about it and was chillingly effective. His invisible antagonist fought in silence and then stopped, suddenly. Collins moved on, pushing the body away from him. He went up again, slowly, trying to sort the sounds and smells and feelings of battle into some kind of a coherent pattern that would enable him to tell friend from foe. He hesitated, briefly, sensing danger, and then shifted just in time as something hissed past his head and struck his shoulder a numbing blow.

Fighting to see, Collins closed to the attack. The man almost got away from him, but he grabbed a foot and held on. The man suddenly lurched forward and up, and Collins felt the rush of air from his wings. Desperately, he lashed out with his knife. He had to get the mutant before he was smashed against a wall—those fragile wings gave the man an impossible advantage in the open air.

A foot kicked him over and over again, methodically, in the face. There was a complete absence of vocal sound, lending to the combat the unreal deadness of a dream. Collins twisted into position, ignoring the kicking foot, and slashed at a wing. The knife punched home, and Collins carefully ripped the thin membrane to shreds. His opponent faltered. Collins cut him again, and then was pushed away. Collins let him go and dived for the tunnel. He could feel the battle receding around him as the other men began to turn back. The smell of blood was sickening in the still air. His shoulder throbbed with pain and his throat was dry and thick with dust.

Collins darted into the tunnel, gasping for breath, and pushed himself forward. He hadn’t gone ten yards before he contacted someone else—going the other way.

A knife whirred past his ear and he caught an arm and twisted. There was only a weak, hopeless resistance. Tired or wounded, or perhaps both, he thought grimly. He moved in for the kill, his own knife ready.

“You’re beaten,” he whispered. “Surrender.”

By way of reply, a hand reached out of the darkness and fingernails clawed at his face. Collins closed in warily, seeking an opening. A cornered animal was always dangerous, he had read, and man was no exception. But he was sick of the killing, sick with horror and the smell of blood. His anger was gone, leaving the man. But he could see no way out. What could you do with such a man? When you gave him a chance for his life, he thanked you with renewed fury. His enemy was not a man, he caught himself thinking. He was an animal—

He raised the knife.

“My spirit will return to destroy you,” the man hissed weakly. “My spirit will not forget!”

Suddenly revolted by the thing he had almost done, Collins returned the knife to its sheath.

“You are my prisoner,” he said quietly.

The man laughed in his face and clawed him again, feebly. Collins hit him once, wincing as his fist smashed into his jaw, holding on to the other’s arm to keep him from floating away. Then he pulled the inert body with him down the tunnel, away from the chamber of death and into the endless darkness and the silence.

After turning the man over to Malcolm, and resting briefly in his quarters, Collins swam up through the dark tunnels to the captain’s room. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and floated inside.

The captain’s torch was burning as always. It was a wonderful thing, as all the special torches were with their combustion draft chambers, but more wonderful still was the soft, steady light from the myriad of stars that were suspended like gleaming jewels in the black velvet of the viewports. Collins drank in their beauty with his eyes and then turned toward the captain.

“Sit down, my boy,” the captain said. “I was just having lunch.”

The captain was eating alone at the little table in the center of the control room. His long, snow-white hair was silver in the flickering torchlight and his dark eyes flashed in his hard, deeply-lined face. The captain had strapped himself into his chair and fastened the plate and glass to the nailed-down table. It was far simpler to eat while floating, but the captain refused to do so.

Collins slid into the chair across from him and buckled himself in place. He ate in silence for a moment, swallowing the sticky synthetics without relish and washing them down with drafts of water sucked up through a straw from a closed glass.

“We’ve got to find a way,” Collins said finally.

“Yes. We lost a man.”

“There must be a way.”

“There is no way,” the captain said slowly. “But we must keep trying.”

Collins looked at the captain, his mind tired with worry. The captain was very old now, he thought. Very old, this man who had held them all together for so long. When he was gone—

“They are beginning to slip, my boy,” the captain said. “I don’t know how much longer we can hold them. They are turning into animals like the rest of them. And when that happens, we are through. The fools! Do they believe that the food and water will last forever? Time, time—we must have more time, and it is running out on us.”

Collins shrugged. “We’re losing the fight as it is,” he pointed out. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We need more than time, and dreams won’t chan