A HEARTBEAT IN DARKNESS. The cold of metal, the warmth of his own arms, hugging himself. Pal lay with his head tucked down, his knees pressed up against his chest, and shivered in the cold of the storage compartment. A strange foolie. He would disappear.
He could hear Jahn out in the big room, with the lights and the buzzing knobs, and the picture of the spiral snake of green light going round and round. And the big screen, crammed full of stars, and deep, dark scary night.
Jahn was yelling crazy things. He had yelled at Pal, until Pal crawled away when he wasn't looking and hid in the storage compartment. Had yelled that he was helping Pal and Rhea—saving them from the Grups. Pal hadn't said anything. Didn't say that Jahn looked to him like a Grup, looked and acted and sounded like a Grup, except without some of the nice things. Grups could be nice, sometimes.
It was scary in the storage compartment; someone might open the door and find him.
Oh, and so why don't you hide in the other room?
I can't, they might see me go, I've got to stay here, now.
Well, why didn't you hide there before?
I'm scared of there, because there are no Onlies there, and maybe there are snakes, and I'm scared of snakes.
Why, have you been bad?
Yes, I think I have been bad, and when you are bad, the snakes come.
Pal rocked back and forth and made noises like a small bird. Exactly like a certain small gray-brown bird. He had learned how long ago. Very long ago.
Sometimes Rhea went into the other room, and then it was safe, and there were no snakes. Pal liked to be in there with her. They would play some of the old games; it made everything seem more normal. And she would sing a song to him that Miri used to sing, and he would be able to sleep. It was a very nice song, and it went like this:
Lumpkin, pumpkin, let me show you something,
Trick or a foolie, burn down the school, he
Ran to the doctor, doctor had a chopper,
Ran through the town, and the Grups fell down …
Pal liked this song, and the Grups had said they liked it too. They had had Miri sing it into a machine that recorded her voice, and then Miri didn't want to sing it anymore.
Where's Miri?
I don't know, something bad happened to her.
What happened to her?
Shut up, stop it, you'll make the snakes come.
The voice in Pal's head that talked to him was not Pal's voice. It used to be somebody else's voice in the white room with the cold light and the hard chair, but somehow the voice was in his head now, and it didn't like him, and it gobbled him up, until he curled away, like a kernel in a nutshell. He used to be so fast once, and run, and giggle, and fight sometimes, but now he looked for dark cracks and caves, and curled up like a ball inside them. He was getting bigger, but he felt little. He wanted to fade away into the air, get tinier and tinier and wink out, like a baby, growing backward.
Rhea, he remembered, used to be a little Only. But now she seemed big, and she acted like the ones who had always been big, acted like Miri or Jahn or Louise. Why did she seem different? She wore her hair up now. "Ponytail." And Jahn had always been big, and he still was, but now he seemed kind of mean, like Grups in the Before Time were supposed to be, the burning, hurting Grups. Doctor had a chopper … the Grups fell down …
Sometimes it seemed like maybe Jahn didn't know the right thing to do. Before, for all the time there was, Jahn had known what was right. He and the other big Onlies had led and explained the world. Jahn could run fastest, bounce a bird with one rock, melt into walls in the hiding game, punish clowns in the circus foolie. Pal had wanted so much to be like him. But the new Grups treated Jahn like he was little. Lots of Onlies didn't listen to him anymore. They did what the Grups said, instead. How could he and Rhea have changed so much? How come Pal saw them as different? He used to believe in Jahn, and in the ways of the Onlies, before the Grups came back.
The sound of Jahn yelling came filtering through to Pal, with a metallic echo. Yelling at Rhea? Or just yelling? Jahn was playing the Starfleet foolie.
"I'm the captain of this ship! I give the orders. Shields up! Drop them on my signal, and fire main phaser banks!"
"Jahn, we have no shields, there's no need to fire the phasers. But please keep an eye on the air pressure monitor. And the cloaking device …"
That was Rhea's voice. She was there.
Jahn cut her off. "Don't argue with me, Lieutenant! I run a tight ship, you follow my orders." Then, in a more nervous voice, "Where's Pal?"
Fear knotted Pal's stomach at the thought of being sought out and discovered. Oh, why hadn't he gone to the other room?
"I don't know, Jahn. I think he's hiding. I think maybe you're scaring him. Try to be calmer. Just let me have the controls for a moment …"
"I'm hungry."
"There's soup and stuff. I programmed it in the computer. Just punch for it."
Pal could hear them moving, shuffling past the compartment in which he lay hidden. His hand suddenly felt something in the corner of the compartment, something he had never touched, never known was there before. A coiled wire, like a snake, like the snake on the spiral viewscreen that went round and round, lay on the closet floor beside Pal. It felt slippery and cold. He shuddered.
In the main cabin, the food computer hummed, and then beeped. Pal heard it. He was hungry too. Grup food was better than Only food had ever been. He hoped that there would be some left for him.
Maybe the Grups would come, and make things all right, and then he could crawl out of the storage closet.
Oh, and what if they are mad at you.
I'll say sorry, I'll try to be good now. And if they don't want me, then I'll die … he would do anything they wanted, to make it better.
Maybe the Onlies and the others who got hurt would get better, and Miri would be there and Dr. Nazafar-7, and things would be okay. The blood and the screaming would be gone from the Home World. And the snakes. He wished he hadn't gone with Jahn and Rhea. He wasn't sure why he had, exactly. It had all happened so fast, been so scary.
Some of the Grups were scary. But he liked Mrs. File and Dr. Colignon. And Dr. Nazafar-7. He hoped they would still like him. Maybe Jahn and Rhea would be glad to see the Grups too. He wished someone would find them.