Deathwatch by Robb White Page B

braked to a stop, the dust settling around it. Madec got out, moving in the dust.
    Ben had an odd, clear thought: I don’t want to die here. Not here, on this barren piece of stone.
    He came out on the ledge.
    He came out fast, pushing himself out with his hands against the wall and, as he ran, he tried to block off the pain which pounded up from his feet.
    Whether Madec shot at him or not he would never know, for he seemed to have come into a bright, hot, tiny world, filled with sunshine, stone and silence. He did not hear his own breathing, or the thudding of his feet, or the increasingly hard beat of his heart.
    He did not feel anything, not the wind of his movement, or the heat of the sun, or the gentle rubbing of the bundle against his ragged back. All he felt was the soles of his feet, his whole attention moving down to those two areas of flesh and concentrating there.
    He ran straight off the end of the ledge, straight out into the sloping stone funnel.
    Now the areas of his feet touching hot stone changed. He was no longer running flat-footed; the left outer sole of his left foot and the inner sole of his right were all that touched.
    Every sense of feel he had he concentrated there in his feet, feeling every tiny roughness, his skin seeming to grasp it and let it go, feeling every smooth area, his skin sucking itself against it. His toes felt as sensitive as fingers, touching, gripping, pushing, letting go.
    As he ran, his left hand brushed the wall at his side with delicate, gentle caresses, not grasping, not pushing, not holding, his fingertips just flitting along the stone.
    He held his right arm out, only slightly bent, his fingers open and spread as though to find assistance in the air itself.
    Focusing his mind on the touch of his feet against the stone, he drove power down into them when he felt that he had some tiny grasp; did not force it when he felt that there was no grip, only smooth, steep stone.
    He ran and ran, touching, flying, fingering, balancing, floating, as the curved wall of the funnel seemed to spin beside him.
    He was trending down. He had planned to make this passage straight across the funnel from the wide ledge to the dark corridor on the other side, it, too, ending with a sharp edge at the face of the funnel.
    But he was going slowly down the steep slope, each step a fraction lower than the last.
    When he had left the ledge he could look across empty space and see into the dark corridor, see the small stones lying on its floor, see the walls where they touched it.
    Then he could not see the floor any longer, for the opening was moving slowly, slowly upward.
    If, when he reached the narrow opening of the corridor he could not get into it, all he could do was to run on, on to the edge of the funnel and then into space for there was nothing else.
    The corridor was a black rectangle in the reddish-brown wall on which he ran. It was coming closer—and rising higher.
    Ben flung his arms up, his fingers curled and reaching.
    They found the sharp edge and locked themselves to it.
    Everything stopped, the movement, the feel of air, the light touching of his feet, and he hung, his body flat against the steep wall, his arms stretched to their limits, his fingers curled over the edge of the corridor’s floor.
    The stone against him felt strange. It was as though, in all the time he had been running he had not been in contact with the earth, the fleeting touches of his fingers and the small areas of the soles of his feet not really touching the stone.
    This stone was solid and warm and felt soft, as though he were lying on a warm, stiff-fibered carpet. It was a sleepy, delicious feeling and therewas no reason to end it; just hang here on this warm carpet and sleep.
    The fingers of his right hand had slipped steadily, nerve by nerve, but he had not noticed it.
    Only the snapping movement of his little finger, as it slid off the edge, brought his attention to his hands and made him feel the growing