The Apocalypse Troll

But that, he thought, was impossible. He'd heard air sucking through the hole!

Only there was no hole, he noted with a queer, calm detachment; only an ugly little pucker, raw as a fresh-closed surgical incision.

He shook his head, feeling unaccountably as if he'd taken one punch too many, and reached out. His fingers, he noted distantly, trembled as he touched the pucker lightly. He raised his hand and examined them, but there was no fresh blood. It wasn't an illusion; the wound really had closed-and in just the few minutes it took to carry her this far.

He steeled his nerve and reached out again, laying his hand gently against the spot where a human's heart would be. He held his breath for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. She had a heart, all right, and it was beating-beating slowly and steadily.

He sank down on the opposite bunk, staring at her. That wound had been real, damn it! And, without the help of a trained, well-equipped doctor, it had been mortal. But instead of dying, color was already creeping back into her pale, sleeping face!

The tremble in his hands was more pronounced, and he gripped them together to still it, wishing he could banish his internal shudders as easily.

A human would have died, he thought quietly. Even if she hadn't, she would never have ... healed ... that quickly. So this motionless young woman had to be something else.

But what?

CHAPTER SIX

Richard Aston was a competent man. Anyone who knew him would have testified to that, yet at the moment he felt anything but competent. He sat paralyzed on the spare bunk, staring across the tiny cabin at the young almost-woman lying in his own, and had no idea in the world what to do. Nor was there any way to ask anyone else.

He'd been confused, at first, when he tried to raise someone for advice only to find his radio stone-cold dead. In all his sailing, he'd never suffered the breakdown of a solid-state transmitter. He'd had them shot up, blown up, lost, and otherwise rendered useless in the field, but never aboard his ship. Yet neither, he slowly realized, had one of them ever been exposed to the EMP of multiple nuclear explosions. It wasn't a subject on which he was extraordinarily well-informed, but he remembered snippets from various briefings as he considered it. Solid-state electronics were highly susceptible to the electromagnetic energy burst associated with nuclear weapons, and his transceiver had simply burned out. And so, he discovered, had his commercial receiver. Not only could he not talk to anyone, he couldn't even know what (if anything) the rest of the world had to say about what he'd just seen.

All of which meant that he was very much on his own.

He pondered his options, but he really had only one. He was a bit more than halfway to Europe on the prevailing westerlies, which meant it would be faster to continue than to turn about, though he shuddered at the thought of explaining things to British customs when he arrived. Yet even that was less daunting than his total ignorance about how to care for the girl he'd rescued.

He rubbed his bald, ta

The first thing was to get her out of her blood-stained, filthy flight suit. He still couldn't see any closures, but he'd already ruined her tailoring. He found a pair of huge sail-maker's scissors and went to work.

His patient-if such she was-was a sturdily built girl, he discovered, rather pleased with himself for managing to maintain an almost clinical attitude. She had the appropriate numbers of fingers and toes and perfect teeth without a single filling. As far as he could determine, there were absolutely no external differences between her and any other woman, except, perhaps, for how extraordinarily well developed her muscles were. They had a sleek, flowing vitality-the strength of conditioned endurance, not just brute power. He'd seen enough hard-trained people in his life to know the difference.

He peeled her out of the suit, discovering along the way that it had comprehensive and ingenious plumbing co

The weapon itself was completely baffling. He knew it was a weapon-he'd handled enough of them to feel its lethality-yet he had no inkling of how it functioned. The barrel was a massive piece of alloy suspiciously like stainless steel, except that a check with a magnet showed that it was nonferrous. It was some sort of projectile weapon ... he thought. But the bore was tiny, certainly no more than a millimeter in diameter, and there was no sign of a slide or ejector port. Hair-thin, almost invisible lines formed a square on the bottom of the pistol butt, and a pocket in the back of the holster held half a dozen blocky, featureless rectangular cubes of what appeared to be solid plastic which would have fitted perfectly inside the square and just about filled the "pistol's" grip-assuming the butt was hollow and there was some way to eject the cube already in it.

He handled the thing with extreme care. It undoubtedly made his .45 look like a big, noisy cap pistol, but he felt no particular desire to squeeze the button inside its trigger guard. There were three more small buttons or sliding switches recessed into the side of the barrel, and he kept his hands carefully away from them, as well. He was fairly certain any weaponeer would have the sense to build in a safety, but he had no intention of finding out the hard way which one wasn't it.

She wore a thin metal necklet of some sort, as well, and he scrutinized it with almost equal curiosity. It supported a plastic cube a half-inch square and a quarter-inch thick. Study it as he might, he could discern no apparent closures, readouts, or features of any sort, but it certainly didn't look like an ornament! He was a bit worried by its snug fit, wondering if it might interfere with her breathing, but then his probing fingertip touched a nearly invisible stud and the supporting band sprang open so suddenly he almost dropped it in surprise. He held it up for one last, close look, then shrugged and admitted defeat.

He slid the weapon back into the holster and tucked everything away in a locker, then turned back to his passenger. That was the best word, he decided: "passenger." Or perhaps he should think of her as a distressed mariner? The thought won a wry snort of amusement from him-the first levity he'd felt since she fell out of the sky at him.

One thing he could do was clean her up. Whatever her activities for the past few weeks, bathing hadn't been one of them. His supply of fresh water was limited, but he could spare enough for a sponge bath, and did, trying to ignore her firm softness without a great deal of success ... until he discovered a second, larger pucker just below her left shoulder blade and barely half an inch from her spine.

He froze for only a moment, then made his hands continue their gentle cleansing, but his discovery had shocked him into remembering her alien nature. Those two marks were an entry and an exit wound-which meant something had passed entirely through her body, ripping its way through her lung and God knew what else at high velocity. And she'd survived it.