A voice roused him. "That is too bad," said the plant.
He turned his head numbly. He was kneeling less than half a dozen feet from the little hollow where the plant still sheltered. He looked at it now, dazed, as if he could not remember what it was, nor how it came to talk to him. Then his eyes cleared a little of their shock and he crept over to it on hands and knees and crouched in the shelter of the hollow.
"The water is rising more swiftly," said the plant. "It will be not long now."
"No!" said Calvin. The word was lost in the sound of the waves and wind, as though it had never been. Nor, the minute it was spoken, could he remember what he had meant to deny by it. It had been only a response without thought, an instinctive negation.
"You make me wonder," said the plant, after a little, "why it hurts you so—this thought of dying. Since you first became alive, you have faced ultimate death. And you have not faced it alone. All things die. This storm must die. This rock on which we lie will not exist forever. Even worlds and suns come at last to their ends, and galaxies, perhaps even the Universe."
Calvin shook his head. He did not answer.
"You are a fighting people," said the plant, almost as if to itself. "Well and good. Perhaps a life like mine, yielding, giving to the forces of nature, traveling before the wind, sees less than you see, of a reason for clawing hold on existence. But still it seems to me that even a fighter would be glad at last to quit the struggle, when there is no other choice."
"Not here," said Calvin thickly. "Not now."
"Why not here, why not now," said the plant, "when it has to be somewhere and sometime?"