Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page A

whatever had been the nearest airfield, some version of which however modest should be within electronic reach anywhere on the continent? Even if the radio had eventually failed, it was working when they took off. Would not the subsequent silence have alerted those whose business it was to listen?
    But perhaps he was being too sentimental about how other people were supposed to perform, he who never had a profession. It was in any event useless to sit there asking questions that could not be answered until he was rescued. Not only useless but morally degrading. He had work to do, for the first time in his life. Half of another day was gone, and he still had no food, no fire, no shelter, and no weapon with which to defend himself against the bear.
    â€¦ At first the sound was too faint to be identified. It could have been an insect or even the humming of his own blood in his ears. In two days here he had got himself under such management that he could allow for the delusions of hope; he refused to admit he heard an airplane until he finally saw it.
    But it was high, far too high! If the plane was to him a winged speck, what must he be to it? He ran, knee throbbing with pain, back to the mirror, tore it from its forked mount, and flashed it at the sky. Now that he put it into play, the glass seemed much smaller than before. He had no way of knowing whether he was catching the sun, let alone projecting a signal in the proper direction. If this pilot was looking for him, the man was doing a bad job. For an instant, Crews yearned for a gun, not for signaling but for firing at the aircraft, bringing it down in flames with a lucky shot.
    He continued to gesticulate with the mirror until he could no longer hear a sound and the speck had first lost its wings and then its reality in the blue vastness. His anger was succeeded by a profound depression of spirit that left him momentarily too weak to make any further effort to preserve himself. He dropped the mirror on the sand and sank down beside it, convinced, on no better evidence than this single failure, that he would never be found while alive. He had been able to control his hope, but self-pity overwhelmed him. If he had not been able to cope with civilization, what could be expected of him now?
    He felt a warmth on his forearm, through the shirt that, with his trousers, he had pulled on when emerging from the water after the latest dives—he could scarcely afford to sunburn his spring-pale skin. In another moment his arm was painfully hot. Had he been stung or bitten by a venomous creature? He rolled up the sleeve and examined the skin, finding nothing untoward. Was it a withdrawal effect of the two days’ abstention from alcohol? Would he suffer imaginary pains at various places on his body? Drinking had surely got him into, or anyway exacerbated his part in, many scrapes, but he had not previously been afflicted with hallucinatory phenomena that could be associated with either the presence or the absence of drink. He knew the DTs only by way of vintage movies. Perhaps they came from the contaminated liquor of yore. But he had suffered a scare at one point when an apartment, hitherto innocent of mice and roaches, was abruptly invaded by both: or seemed to be, for examples of both were visible for such brief instants that, to senses corrupted by alcohol, they might well have been illusions. When, having fled to the nearest bar, he saw a mouse run under his stool, it took all his courage, and four drinks, to confess as much to the bartender, from whom, thank God, he heard reassurance. “Been all over the neighborhood since they tore down that building next door.”
    He returned his arm to its former position. Soon afterward he felt the warmth again. He noticed that the shaver-case top that held the mirror had fallen to embed itself in the sand at an angle from which the mirror reflected the sun as a focused beam on his forearm. He picked the thing up and noticed for