Earth and Air by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

me about what happened next. It is not the words of the MS, but the gist of the events. You will see where it fits . . .
    When she had finished her account she went to Britannica Online and read up about the mating behaviour of the amphibia.

    â€œWhat happened?” said Dick as he wolfed his way through an enormous breakfast. “Something tipped the dinghy over. That’s the last I remember.”
    She had never lied to him, and wouldn’t do so now.
    â€œI’ll tell you this evening,” she said.
    She did so in the dusk, sitting at the edge of the tarn, with the stream beside them racing towards the waterfall.
    â€œI suppose you could get a wetsuit and oxygen mask and go down and find the cave,” she said as she finished. “I think I’d have to go first and ask his permission. Otherwise I don’t know what he’d do.”
    â€œI don’t need to,” he said. “I would have believed you in any case, but in fact I saw his arm come out of the water, only I thought I was hallucinating. What did he do it for? Trolls eat people, don’t they?”
    â€œHe needed you alive. He is the last of his kind. He told me that. He can’t father any more trolls, but he’s found a way of passing something on. Look at me. I’m human all through, but I still have troll blood. Look how I scorch in the sun. That’s inherited from him. He wanted to come to me in your body—I don’t know how he does that—he made himself into a rock for a moment or two when he came out of the pool at the bottom, but that isn’t the same thing. I don’t think we’re the first ones. I think he looks in through people’s windows at night. He wasn’t at all surprised when I told him about electricity.
    â€œAnyway, he was going to make love to me in your body and we’d have a baby. It would still have been your child—I don’t believe he and I could actually cross-breed, we’re too different—but he’d have passed something on again—troll blood on both sides . . .”
    â€œYou know, I have a sort of dream memory of walking towards you. It was almost dark. You ran to meet me and we hugged each other, and then you suddenly pushed me away.”
    â€œHe said you were there too.”
    â€œI’m still believing all this. It’s an act of faith.”
    â€œBut you are believing it?”
    â€œI think I have to . . . there’s something else?”
    â€œYes . . . This is . . . well, see what you think. I read up about frogs and toads and so on this morning. Most of them mate in water. The female releases the eggs and the male fertilises them. I told you he made me go and fetch the dinghy and take it to the rock shelf. I waited for a bit, and then he popped up close behind me and just stayed there for two or three minutes before he climbed out and put you in the dinghy . . .”
    Her voice had dropped to a shaky whisper with the strain of telling him. He took her hand and looked at her with his characteristic half-tilt of the head.
    â€œFrogs and toads. I’ve seen them at it. They hug each other pretty close, don’t they? And it goes on for hours.”
    â€œIt was only a couple of minutes. And no, he didn’t touch me. But . . .”
    â€œYou didn’t release any eggs?”
    â€œI’m due to ovulate in a couple of days”
    â€œAnd then . . .?”
    â€œI think it depends on us. He said he left me with a choice. He can’t fertilise me by himself.”
    â€œAnd you want to have the child?”
    Mari had managed to suppress consideration of this. What she, personally, wanted had seemed of no importance beside Dick’s possible reactions. But now that he himself asked the question, she knew the answer, knew it through every cell in her body. It was as if a particular gene somewhere along the tangled DNA in each cell had at the same instant fired in response.
    â€œI