Like the extra-animated Henry Higgins. He sat with unnaturally red cheeks puffed out beneath his beard, eyes glassy wet, looking at McBride as if harboring some question too awful to ask. There was something of the frightened, wild animal about him as his eyes left McBride and jerked around from one face to another. Then he was up and awkwardly running in among the trees.
The men got up from the rough table that had been set up outside the ship. They got up and went away, slinking, like a sex maniac leaving the scene of his crime when his reason returns and he knows his insanity. They went away by themselves—those not too sick to walk—and hid from one another.
But a man can't hide from himself. That was the Hell. This was not a life-raft on the open sea, every man told himself. This was a green, smiling world with the smell of flowers on the air, with plenty of glistening, tempting fruit growing wild and enough game to make an Indian hunter call it the Happy Hunting Ground. Like a camping trip back on Earth. Like a picnic where you get drunk and start eating and then sober up with the smell of blood in your nostrils to find yourself chewing the hair off the detached leg or arm of your best friend.
What did every man tell himself? That it wouldn't happen again, ever, this terrible thing. When they found the strength and courage to go back and clean up the remains of a meal, knowing it to be the remains of a meal, when they had put what was left of Heinie in a hole and covered it with dirt and set up a stone marker, they promised one another it would never ever happen again.
The next day they put it on paper, in black and white. An agreement. On the third day they thought about it, and on the fourth day they began wondering why they had done it. And on the fifth day—
On the fifth day they found Thompson, the chemist, hanging from a tree a short distance from the ship. Quite dead, of course, and no one had to ask why he had done it.
Hunger madness walked among the men. They took Thompson down from the tree. Hunger madness whispered in their ears. They listened.
McBride took out the agreement and looked at it, having heard the tempter's whisper. He didn't think much. It hurt him to think. But something that had been done once—
He looked at the men and saw an inescapable vise tightening. He looked at himself and saw the same. At his feet fell the small fragments of the agreement.