"We're trying to help the boy. Besides, I couldn't leave you holding the bag like this—alone with those soldiers and three thousand fanatic Mandmoorans."
Jane smiled at him. There was nothing else she could offer him now. Their deaths seemed almost a certainty. They would be—had to be—deserted. They would be left to the Mandmoora—and the novaing sun.
"Is the boy going to live?" Sid asked.
"For a while. I've done all that first aid can do. The bleeding's stopped. The antibiotics will take care of any possibility of infection. But he's lost blood. If he doesn't get a transfusion soon, I'm afraid he won't pull through."
"Then tell the chief."
Jane nodded, and found the chief near the shaman's hillock, gazing on his medicine man with a troubled expression as if he couldn't decide between the old way and the new. "Your boy," Jane said.
"The boy lives?"
"For now he lives. He needs the kind of medical care I can't give him. The kind of care he can get aboard the exodus ships. Let him go, chief. Let us take him back. We can save his life."
The shaman leaped from the hillock and—for all his bag-of-bones appearance—alighted athletically beside them. "I heard!" he cackled, showing a toothless black hole of a mouth. "I heard! A trick to leave our island. A trick to leave our planet! A trick...."