Fred Hoyle: A for Andromeda

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.