He left the plant and went for a walk about the island. It had been in his mind that possibly a drifting log or some such could have been caught by the island and he could use this to get ashore. He found nothing. For a few minutes, at one end of the island, he stood fascinated, watching a long sloping black rock with a crack in it, reaching down into the water. There was a small tuft of moss growing in the crack about five inches above where the waves were slapping. As he watched, the waves slapped higher and higher, until he turned away abruptly, shivering, before he could see the water actually reach and cover the little clump of green.
For the first time a realization that he might not get off the island touched him. It was not yet fear, this realization, but it reached deep into him and he felt it, suddenly, like a pressure against his heart. As the moss was being covered, so could he be covered, by the far-reaching inexorable advance of the water.
And then this was wiped away by an abrupt outburst of anger and self-ridicule that he—who had been through so many dangers—should find himself pinned by so commonplace a threat. A man, he told himself, could die of drowning anywhere. There was no need to go light-years from his place of birth to find such a death. It made all dying—and all living—seem small and futile and insignificant, and he did not like that feeling.
Calvin went back to the plant in its little hollow, tight-hugging to the ground and half-sheltered from the wind, and looked down on its dusky basketball-sized shape, the tough hide swollen and ready to burst with seeds.
"So you think there's no way out," he said roughly.
"There is none," said the plant.
"Why don't you just let yourself go if you think like that?" Calvin said. "Why try to keep down out of the wind, if the waves'll get you anyway, later?"
The plant did not answer for a while.
"I do not want to die," it said then. "As long as I am alive, there is the possibility of some great improbable chance saving me."