thought in agony, if I could only see! I opened the pliers and ground them harshly around the side of the connector. And then I could feel the nut. I put the pliers on it, tightened up, and turned. Nothing gave except the pliers slipped a little, chewing up the nut. I bore down again. It came that time. The bolt broke.
It’s all right, I thought crazily. It’s all right. They’re a press fit, and it’ll work without the bolt. All I have to do is drive it on. I started gouging frenziedly at the other one. The nut turned on it, and in a few minutes I had it off. I started to lift the battery out. No, I thought. Why carry it down there? When I get the other battery I can drive down with it.
I was ready to go. I put the pliers in my pocket and groped my way through the trees to the road. I hit it and started to run when the same thought occurred to me again. I wouldn’t be able to find the car when I came back. I wouldn’t have the horn to guide me, and I couldn’t see the handkerchief. It had probably washed away. I had to mark the place somehow. But how? Geez, I thought, I can’t stand here all night. I’ve got to do something. I leaped to the side of the road and started sweeping my arms around. I found a small pine and broke off a limb six or seven feet long, and threw it across the ruts. I’d run into it with my feet when I came back.
I turned then and started running downhill through the downpour, feeling the water slosh in my shoes. I lost track of the number of times I fell and how many times I blundered off the road. When I got down in the clearing and groped and stumbled my way into the yard in front of the shack, breathing was an agony, I wanted to lie down and rest. I felt my way to the car and when I got the door open I turned on the lights and held my watch under the dash. It said twelve minutes until four. I wanted to scream at it. It was lying. It hadn’t taken that long.
I ground savagely at the bolts through the battery connectors, trying to work too fast and fumbling. I dropped the pliers and had to grope around for them in the darkness. Suddenly I was conscious that I was whispering to myself. I was saying, “Hurry, hurry, hurry—” in a kind of chant that had been going on forever like the rain. I got both connectors loose at last and lifted the battery out. I had to be careful about falling now. If I dropped the battery on anything solid it would break open like an over-ripe squash.
It was nothing now but sheer nightmare. I wasn’t going forward any more. I was just moving my feet up and down in the same place with the same weight on my shoulders and the same rain coming down while time ran past me like a river around a snag. I couldn’t remember the turns in the road. I didn’t know how far I’d come, or how far I had to go. I must have passed the car. It couldn’t have been this far. Maybe I’d brushed past that limb and hadn’t noticed it. I’d never make it now.
And then I felt the limb against my leg. It was there. I swung off the road and started pushing my way through the trees in a frenzy to get it done, to be able to see again, and to get out of here before it was too late. And then it happened. My shoulder brushed hard against a tree trunk and it threw me off balance. The battery slipped out of my grasp and fell somewhere into the darkness ahead of me as I crashed to the ground. I heard it slam into a tree.
This was the end. It had just been teasing me all the time, and now I was really done. The battery was broken. I couldn’t even find it. I lay on my stomach in the water and wet pine needles and swept my arms around, trying to locate it and still afraid of what I’d find. My fingertips brushed it and I slid forward and got my hands on it. It was lying on its