1n1REzE

Peter Watts 133 Blindsight
Bates hesitated. "You said you were bli—"
"Just do it!"
Bates pulled a spare suit battery off her belt and lobbed it.
Szpindel reached, fumbled. The battery slipped from his grasp and
bounced off the wall.
"I'll be okay," he gasped. "Just get me into the tent."
I yanked the cord. The bell inflated like a great gunmetal
marshmallow.
"Everyone inside!" Bates ran her pistol with one hand, grabbed
Szpindel with the other. She handed him off to me and slapped a
sensor pod onto the skin of the tent. I pulled back the shielded
entrance flap as though pulling a scab from a wound. The single
molecule beneath, infinitely long, endlessly folded against itself,
swirled and glistened like a soap bubble.
"Get him in. James! Get down here!"
I pushed Szpindel through the membrane. It split around him
with airtight intimacy, hugged each tiny crack and contour as he
passed through.
"James! Are you—"
"Get it off me!" Harsh voice, raw and scared and scary, as male
as female could sound. Cruncher in control. "Get it off!"
I looked back. Susan James' body tumbled slowly in the tunnel,
grasping its right leg with both hands.
"James!" Bates sailed over to the other woman. "Keeton! Help
out!" She took the Gang by the arm. "Cruncher What's the
problem"
"That! You blind" He wasn't just grasping at the limb, I
realized as I joined them. He was tugging at it. He was trying to
pull it off.
Something laughed hysterically, right inside my helmet.
"Take his arm," Bates told me, taking his right one, trying to pry
the fingers from their death grip on the Gang's leg. "Cruncher, let
go. Now."
"Get it off me!"
"It's your leg, Cruncher." We wrestled our way towards the
diving bell.
"It's not my leg! Just look at it, how could it—it's dead. It's