Chapter 15:
Cash awoke on a leathery surface. He was startled! Where was he!? He didn't remember going to sleep here! The sun was shining outside but the tinted windows made it not seems so bright. He was wearing his clothes he had taken off last night.
"Oh I see you're awake." Amy said leaning back in her seat.
They were in Amy's car. She had put him in the back seat of her Camaro while she slept up front.
"I thought we were in the cave?" Cash asked.
"I woke up late last night. I figured that we shouldn't sleep in the water because we might drown in our sleep. So I carried you back here and I slept up here." Amy said sweetly. She also had a light blush on her face. This meant she was hiding something.
"What's with the blush?" Cash asked.
"Oh, nothing. It's just that while I was carrying you back you sucked your thumb and cooed like a little baby." Amy said,
"Oh, I didn't know I still did that." Cash said rubbing the back of his head. He sat up and gave her a peck on the cheek. Amy leaned in close to his ear,
"Cash, thank you for last night that was amazing." Amy whispered in his ear. She had smacked her lips a little. The whispering and lick smacking made his spine tingle, his body shook a little.
"Oh, what was that?" Amy asked concerned.
"Sometimes whispers, especially in my ear, make me get tingly sensations in my spine and head."
Cash slammed the piece of red-hot steel. Into the mold.
He slammed it again.
He slammed it again.
It was hot, tough work. Forging a piece of steel made it incredibly strong. They had pulled up nearly an entire meteor worth of the stuff. Cash continued to pound the steel with a large sledge hammer.
Amy kept using flamethrower on the steel. She had to keep it hot so it would be malleable enough to be forged into a breastplate. It was the last piece they needed to make.
They had built one set of armor already for her, this last one was for Cash.
"Alright." Cash said with barley and strength left. "It's done. Now we let it cool."
"Oh thank god, I thought we'd never be done." Amy said with a groan. She slumped back against a rock. She was out of breath. Amy also felt a bit lightheaded. Probably from all the fire breathing she had done.
Cash hated seeing her like this. "Amy, just rest okay I can handle the rest of the armor okay." Cash said.
"No, I need to help you." She groaned.
"You've helped me all you can. You kept the steel hot and that's all I needed. Just rest okay? I've got everything for now." Cash said gently. "I'm going to go get some lunch from the truck. Stay here okay?"
"I will. I feel fine just tired and out of breath." Amy said.
Cash walked over to the truck. He had a song called "Walk the line" stuck in his head. He couldn't remember where all these old song he had heard. Did he hear them in the other world? He couldn't remember.
He brought back energy bars and water. He sat down in front of her and tossed her some water and energy bars. Amy drank at least two of the bottles and three of the bars. Cash ate one bar and drank a little of the water.
"You aren't very hungry?" Amy asked concerned.
"Not really." Cash replied. "I was wearing the brace so it made the work I did easier. If I hadn't, I'd probably be in the shape you're in. I wish I had a charcoal to give you. That would have made it much easier for you."
Amy was silent. She simply stared into Cash's eyes. And He into hers. He could get lost in her eyes. The pale blue dots of his lover.
Cash suddenly remembered something he had read.
"Cash is everything alright?!" Amy asked concerned. Cash had zoned out staring into her eyes. He remembered the words of Carl Sagan, the picture of Earth taken by a space probe many millions of miles away past Neptune.
"Look again at that dot.
That's here.
That's home.
That's us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Amy began getting concerned for Cash she kept yelling his name. He snapped out of it.
"What, what happened?"
"You zoned out I thought I had lost you!"
"No I had just remembered something I read a long time ago." Cash said. His cheek hurt. Amy had obviously been slapping it.