He had no recollection of floundering the remaining hundred yards to the shore. Physically sick and shaking with horror, he ploughed through the shallowing ooze and fell headlong on wet, but solid earth.
The sun was sinking as he finally stirred, groaning, and pulled himself further away from the haunted ooze. Incredibly, he slept at last, waking to the first rays of the sun, dazed and unbelieving. Turning instinctively for the reassurance of another face, remembrance hit him like a blow. Bile came up into his mouth as he wrenched his faceplate open and was grindingly, shudderingly sick.
The spasm over, he heaved himself to his feet, staring about stupidly. Surely there was something he had to do? Every morning for so long he had had to lift himself to his feet and force himself to go on till dark—toward the Pole.
But—here was the green and a few miles away the hoarfrost glitter of the snowcap. There was nowhere to go!
"We made it—" he said uncertainly, looking around. But there was no one to share the triumph. Dully, he thought of them all—Palmer, betrayed by a gentle, kittenlike thing—Rodriguez, a human sacrifice to something utterly alien—Canham, dead on the edge of victory. He looked at Canham's oxygen canister and laid his hand on it gently. Then slowly, with dragging steps, he went on toward the shining green that had cost them so much to achieve.
The ground and the air above it as he approached were strangely warm. And the plants too, were warm and oddly different. No biologist, he dimly sensed a difference from any growth that Earth knew. The stems, the leaves were veined with pulsing red and at the tip of each stem, a flower lifted, shaped like an open mouth. There was a space between each plant, none crowded his neighbor. It was very orderly and pleasant and so warm—so warm. He opened his faceplate.
Drowsy and relaxed, no longer driven by unrelenting urgency, he found himself nodding dreamily as he walked between the tall stems. With a sigh of pleasure, he laid down among them, conscious on the verge of sleep of an insistent demanding whisper—"More air! Give us air!" Unhesitatingly, he opened the gauge of the oxygen tank, drifting into a sea of darkness.
The red-veined plants about him pulsed with a quicker rhythm as the thousand opened mouths drank in the air, rich with a richness they had not known for a million years. And about the unconscious form of the man, poured the carbon dioxide from the lips of a thousand oxygen breathing creatures.
They had had a million years to learn the technique of survival as the atmosphere of their planet drained off into space. Retreating, adapting, eon by eon to their last stronghold: ringed round by their guardians of the Earth, the Air and the Water.