The Apocalypse Troll

He laid her back down and did what he could with her hair (not much) as he tried to envision how anything, human or not, could survive that kind of traumatic damage. Unfortunately, his imagination was unequal to the task, and that scared him in a distant sort of way, for he was unused to questions he couldn't even begin to answer, and this shipwrecked girl was a mass of those. The sheer vitality her survival implied was frightening enough without wounds which, he noticed suddenly, had not only closed but were already begi

He peered closely at the fading rawness of her damaged flesh, and the puckered marks already looked less livid and new. Moved by a sudden impulse to gather proof, he found his camera and snapped pictures of the wounds, resolving to take more at regular intervals. Not that he expected anyone to believe him even with photos.

He sighed and tucked the sheet over her, wondering what he should do next. With a comparably wounded human, he could just have buried her at sea; as it was, he had to assume she would live ... unless he did something stupid and finished her off out of sheer ignorance. The ironic thought was less humorous than he'd expected, and his grin died stillborn. Damn it, it was important that she live! Whoever or whatever she was, she must be a treasure trove of data just waiting to be discovered-and she was a damned good-looking kid, too.

But how to keep her alive? He didn't even know her dietary requirements! What should he think about feeding her? Could she metabolize terrestrial food? Did she need vitamins he couldn't provide? Trace minerals? What about-?

He reined in his imagination before it did any damage. Manifestly, he thought, watching her breathe, she could handle terrestrial air, which was probably a good sign. Now. If she were a human, she would need lots of protein and liquids after losing so much blood. And while it looked like she was healing completely and with indecent speed, he couldn't know she was. There might be internal damage he didn't know about, too, though the fact that her abdomen showed no sign of distension encouraged him to believe that at least there was no major internal bleeding. But until he knew what shape her plumbing was in, solid food was out. Besides, how could he get anything solid down an unconscious patient in the first place?

Soup, he decided. Soup was the best bet, and he had literally cases of ca

He fired up his old-fashioned bottled-gas stove and put on a kettle of cream of chicken soup. He supposed something with vegetables might be better for her, but until she was able to chew on her own, he wasn't going to risk anything with solids. Actually, broth of some sort probably would have been best of all, but Aston had always hated broth and flatly refused to keep any in his galley.

He brought the soup to a simmer, stirring occasionally and checking his patient at frequent intervals. She showed no sign of waking, and before settling in to feed her-which he guessed might be a lengthy business-he took himself back topside and got Amanda back under sail. He waited long enough to be certain the self-steering was working properly (he hadn't done that once, and the results still made him shudder), then went back below, mentally rolling up his sleeves as he faced the daunting task of nursing an alien from God knew where while sailing single-handed across the Atlantic.

It was not, he reflected, a program which would appeal to the faint of heart. Odd; he'd never realized he was fainthearted.

He raised her head and shoulders and propped them with pillows before he half-filled a deep bowl (filling bowls to the brim was contraindicated aboard small craft) with soup. He carried it to a seat by her bunk and crooked a surprised eyebrow as her nostrils gave an unmistakable twitch. She'd shown absolutely no awareness as he undressed and bathed her, but now her eyes slitted blankly open, without any sign of recognition or curiosity, as the smell of the soup reached her.

He raised a spoonful to her lips, and her reaction banished any concern he'd felt over feeding an unconscious patient. Her mouth opened quickly, and when he tried to slide the spoon carefully into it, she snapped at it.

That was the only verb he could think of. He remembered Aardvark, a stray dog he'd taken in as a child-a miserable, three-quarters-starved rack of bones and hair which had become the most loving and beloved pet of his life. The first time Aardvark had smelled food, he'd gone for it with exactly the same desperation. There was something feral about the fierce way she accepted the soup, and the hazy fire in her unseeing eyes brightened. He had to tug to get the spoon back, and she released it with manifest unwillingness, only to snap even harder when he refilled it and proffered it once more.

He fed it to her one spoonful at a time. There was never the least awareness in her burning gaze, but she took each mouthful with the same ferocity. He emptied the bowl and got another. Then another. And another. He was uneasy about feeding her so much, but the almost savage way she ate convinced him she needed it. He made another kettle when the first was empty, and she ate half of it, as well, before she was satisfied.

It was obvious when she was sated, for her eyelids dropped abruptly and the soup lost all attraction for her. It happened so suddenly it caught him with a spoonful halfway to her mouth, and when he offered it to her she might have died between bites for all the interest she showed. For just a moment, he was afraid she had died-that the soup had proved some sort of deadly poison-but her slow, even breathing and the faint blush of color returning to her porcelain cheeks reassured him.

He sat back and shook his head in slow bemusement. She was more muscular than most women he'd encountered, but she was no more than five feet four, so how could she pack it away like that? He eyed the half-emptied kettle on the stove. She'd eaten over a gallon of soup, and he couldn't begin to imagine where she'd put it all. But he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the only eventuality which should really worry him would be the discovery that he actually understood anything that was going on.

He sat there for half an hour, listening to her breathe and wondering if she was going to come around, but she never even moved. She was motionless but for the slow rise and fall of her breasts and an occasional very faint flutter of her eyelids, and he felt his own eyes growing heavy.

He glanced out a porthole and gri

He rose and stretched, then checked his barometer carefully. It had risen very slightly since his last check, so maybe the good weather was going to hold. God knew he could use a spell of easy sailing if he had to play Florence Nightingale to Dejah Thoris for the foreseeable future!

He looked back down at his unexpected passenger. She didn't look very menacing, but perhaps it would be a good idea to nap topside in the cockpit, just in case.

He did, and if he was a bit shamefaced about hanging onto his .45 when he did, he didn't let it stop him from taking it along.

The next four days were among the most exhausting Dick Aston could remember. The girl did nothing but eat and sleep; she never even showed an inclination to rouse for a trip to the head, and that did almost more to convince him of her inhuman pedigree than anything else about her.

The only thing with the power to rouse her was hunger. Even that didn't bring her back to awareness, but she grew sufficiently agitated in her slumber to wake him less than three hours after he first fed her.