Piers Anthony - Mer-Cycle

“B-but it’s unnecessary.”

Gaspar ignored him and went to work on the chain.

Belatedly Don remembered the warning about stubbornness. He had been arguing instead of thinking, and now he was stuttering, and Gaspar had tuned him out. His first “but” had probably lost his cause, and he wasn’t certain his cause was right. Why not fix the chain now? They did have time for that, and he needed a rest. The muscles of his legs were stiff again.

He saw that Melanie was being more practical: she was lying beside her bicycle, squeezing in all the rest for her legs she could. Her skirt had slid up around her full thighs. Oh, her limbs looked nice!

Don returned his gaze to Gaspar’s bicycle, before he started blushing or stuttering worse. He tried a new approach. “A chain shouldn’t break like that. It must have been defective, or—”

“Oh, it can happen. Stone tossed up—”

“ Here? ”

Gaspar laughed. “Got me that time! Stone couldn’t do much unless it was phased in. But this is an old bike—I never was one to waste money, even if Uncle Sam or whoever pays the way. Ten dollars, third hand. Got to expect some kinks.”

Ten dollars! A junker would have charged that to haul the thing away! Yet it was now loaded with what might be a hundred thousand dollars worth of specialized equipment. “S-so you don’t think that anyone—” But it sounded silly as he said it. How could anyone sabotage a third-hand bicycle that hadn’t yet been bought? And what would be the point? It was obvious that it could readily be fixed, so that was no real test of the man’s survival skills.

He walked his own bike back to where Melanie lay, wishing he had the courage to start a dialogue with her. He turned around so that he would not be peering at her legs when he lay down, though he wished he could do that too.

“I heard,” she said, though he had not spoken to her. “What’s this about something happening?”

Don managed to get his mouth going well enough to explain about the possibility of sabotage. “But it was just a conjecture,” he hastened to say. “Probably p-paranoia.”

“I’m into paranoia,” she said, surprising him.

“You are? Why?”

“Maybe some time I’ll tell you. For now, just take my word: I’m more diffident about people than you are, for better reason.”

“You?” He was incredulous.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Let’s change the subject.”

“I—I can’t find a subject.”

She laughed, tiredly. “Then I’ll find one. It’s nice talking to you, Don. So much better than waiting around for the radio to sound, with a pile of books and packages of ugh-y food.”

He chuckled, surprised that he was now able to do that in her presence. She was making him feel more at ease than he had a right to be.

He glanced at Gaspar. The chain was still off, and the man was doing something with the little screwdriver and pliers. It would be a while more before the job was done.

“Y-you were just waiting?”

“For you, yes. Two days. But my life was much the same before that, mostly alone. Books are great company, but I would have enjoyed them more if I’d had live companions. So when I took this job, hoping my life would change, and then for two days it was just more of the same, well, I had to do something.”

“I-I can’t believe you were alone!”

“I could make you believe, but I don’t want to.” She rolled to her side and angled her head to face him. “You’re really interested, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll try to explain. When I was just waiting for you, I walked down to the beach.”

“The beach?”

“In the early morning, when no one was around. I didn’t want anyone to see me, because of the phase.”

“I know. I came into the water at dawn.”

She laughed again. “Here I’m telling you something that’s not meant to be understood, and you’re understanding.”

“I—uh—”

“Don’t apologize! It’s not meant to be understood, just felt. But you feel it too, don’t you?”

“Yes.” This conversation was becoming odder and more comfortable. He could lie here forever, talking with her like this, his shyness ebbing.

“I enjoyed the beach,” she continued. “It was raining. Just a little cool. There was a stiff wind—I couldn’t really feel it, but I saw the sea-oats leaning. I just had to go out and walk along the surf a way. Right near the edge of the water. In my bare feet. Except there wasn’t anything to feel, it’s just sort of neutral in phase, and I had to walk the bicycle right along. You know—so I could breathe. That’s one thing that doesn’t wind down when the bike stops moving: the oxygen field. Lucky thing, or we’d never be able to rest or sleep. Batteries, I guess, that recharge for that. I tried to breathe away from the bike, and couldn’t. I’m married to the bike, now. We all are.”

“Yes.”

“So I had to pretend. I had the whole beach to myself with only the gulls for company. They stood on the sand facing the wind. I saw a horseshoe crab, and I tried to pick it up—it was the first horseshoe crab I had ever seen.”

“They’re not crabs,” Gaspar said without looking up from his work. That surprised Don; he had thought the man had tuned them out. “They’re related to the scorpions and are the only living members of a large group of extinct animals. They’ve survived unchanged for two hundred and fifty million years.”

“All the more wonderful to behold,” Melanie said. “The beach has a powerful internal significance for me that I’ve never quite been able to understand. This one I experienced was wonderfully dramatic. They all are. I never just have seen a beach. It’s a total experience. The sand under my feet, warmth, wind, smells, sound, and motion. The beach just is. And I am there walking along looking for seashells and somehow I feel that I belong there. For the moment. It feels like something I can always come back to. Something almost unchanged in a sea of change.”

Like the horseshoe crabs, Don thought. Unchanged since the dinosaurs. Perhaps man, when he gazed upon the beach, remembered his ancestor who fought the extraordinary battle to free himself from the grip of the sea, and this was that battleground.

“My life so easily slips into things and experiences with labels,” Melanie said. “But the beach somehow for me always slips the compass of a label and asserts the primacy of existence.” She paused. “If that makes sense to you.”

All he could say was “Yes.” It wasn’t just her perspective on the beach, it was the fact that she had presented it to him as a fellow human being, as if he deserved to have this insight. What a wonderful experience!

Gaspar completed his repair, and they resumed riding. The difference between a slight decline and a slight incline was enormous, when they were pedaling it. But they could not go down forever. Don had been pleased at how well he was keeping up, but now he wondered whether there was something wrong with his own bicycle. He pushed and pushed on the pedals, but the machine moved slowly, and he was out of breath doing a bare five or six miles per hour. Melanie was struggling similarly.

Gaspar abruptly stopped again. This time his rear wheel was loose, so that it rubbed against the frame with every revolution. Thank God! Don thought guiltily, offering no argument about repairs. He dropped to the ground and let life soak back into his deadened limbs.

Gaspar was tough. If he was tired, it didn’t show. Don had never been partial to muscle, but would have settled for several extra pounds of it for this trip.

Melanie dropped beside him, almost touching. Even through his fatigue, he felt the thrill. “Talk to me, Don,” she murmured.