He did not know if it was grief or if it was hate at last finding expression because the cause of his hate could no longer retaliate against him. Perhaps, it was both grief and hate. Whatever it was, it was working out of his body like a poison; his body was expelling it. At the same time, it was boiling him alive.
Yet, it was coming out. Though he felt he was dying, by the time he had walked to his home, he was rid of the poison. Fatigue leadened his arms and legs, and he could scarcely find the energy to walk up the flight of steps to the front door of the building.
At the same time, his heart felt light. It was strong, pumping unimpeded as if a hand around it had released its clutch.
13
A tall ghost in a light blue shroud was waiting for the Terran in the false dawn. It was Fobo, the empathist, standing in the hexagonal-shaped arch that led into his building. He threw back the hood and exposed a face that was scratched on one cheek and blackened around the right eye.
He chuckled and said, 'Some son-of-a-bug pulled my mask off and plowed me good. But it was fun. It helps if you blow off steam now and then. How did you come out? I was afraid you might have been picked up by the police. Normally, that wouldn't worry me, but I know your colleagues at the ship would frown upon such activities.'
Hal smiled wanly.
'Frown misses it by a mile.'
He wondered how Fobo knew what the hierarch's reactions would be. How much did these wogs know about the Terrestrials? Were they onto the Haijac game and waiting to pounce? If so, with what? Their technology, as far as could be determined, was far behind Earth's. True, they seemed to know more of psychic functions than the Terrans did, but that was understandable. The Sturch had long ago decreed that the proper psychology had been perfected and that further research was unnecessary. The result had been a standstill in the psychical sciences.
He shrugged mentally. He was too tired to think of such things. All he wanted was to go to bed.
'I'll tell you later what happened.'
Fobo replied, 'I can guess. Your hand. You'd better let me fix that burn. Nightlifer venom is nasty.'
Like a little child, Hal followed him to the wog's apartment and let him put a cooling salve on it.
'Shib as shib,' Fobo said. 'Go to bed. Tomorrow you can tell me all about it.'
Hal thanked him and walked down to his floor. His hand fumbled with the key. Finally, after using Sigmen's name in vain, he inserted the key. When he had shut and locked the door, he called Jeannette. She must have been hiding in the closet-within-a-closet in the bedroom, for he heard two doors bang. In a moment she was running to him. She threw her arms around him.
'Oh,maw пит, maw пит ! What has happened? I was so worried. I thought I would scream when the night went by, and you didn't return.'
Though he was sorry he had caused her pain, he could not help a prickling of pleasure because she cared enough about him to worry. Mary, perhaps, might have been sympathetic, but she would have felt duty-bound to repress it and to lecture him on his unreal thinking and the resulting injury to himself.
'There was a brawl.'
He had decided not to say anything about thegaptor the nightlifer. Later, when the strain had passed, he'd talk.
She untied his cloak and hood and took off his mask. She hung them up in the front room closet, and he sank into a chair and closed his eyes.
A moment later, they were opened by the sound of liquid pouring into a glass. She was standing in front of him and filling a large glass from the quart. The odor of beetlejuice began to turn his stomach, and the Picture of a beautiful girl about to drink the nauseating stuff spun it all the way around.
She looked at him. The delicate brackets of her brows rose. ' Kyetil? '
'Nothing's the matter!' he groaned. 'I'm all right.'
She put down the glass, picked up his hand, and led him into the bedroom. There she gently sat him down, pressed on his shoulders until he lay down, and then took off his shoes. He didn't resist. After she unbuttoned his shirt, she stroked his hair.
'You're sure you're all right?'
'Shib. I could lick the world with one hand tied behind my back.'
'Good.'
The bed creaked as she got up and walked out of the room. He began to drift into sleep, but her return awakened him. Again, he opened his eyes. She was standing with a glass in her hand.
She said, 'Would you like a sip now, Hal?'
'Great Sigmen, don't you understand?' Fury roused him and he sat up.
'Why do you think I got sick? I can't stand the stuff! I can't stand to see you drink it. It makes me sick. You make me sick. What's the matter with you? Are you stupid?'
Jeannette's eyes widened. Blood drained from her face and left the pigment of her lips a crimson moon in a white lake. Her hand shook so that the liquor spilled.
'Why – why–' she gasped – 'I thought you said you felt fine. I thought you were all right. I thought you wanted to go to bed with me.'
Yarrow groaned. He shut his eyes and lay back down. Sarcasm was lost on her. She insisted on taking everything literally. She would have to be reeducated. If he weren't so exhausted, he would have been shocked by her open proposal – so much like that of the Scarlet Woman inThe Western Talmudwhen she had tried to seduce the Forerunner.
But he was past being shocked. Moreover, a voice on the edge of his conscience said that she had merely put into hard and unrecallable words what he had planned in his heart all this time. But when they were spoken!
A crash of glass shattered his thoughts. He jerked upright. She was standing there, face twisted, lovely red mouth quivering, and tears flowing. Her hand was empty. A large wet patch against the wall, still dripping, showed what had become of the glass.
'I thought you loved me!' she shouted.
Unable to think of anything to say, he stared. She spun and walked away. He heard her go into the front room and begin to sob loudly. Unable to endure the sound, he jumped out of bed and walked swiftly after her. These rooms were supposed to be soundproof, but one never knew. What if she were overheard?
Anyway, she was twisting something inside him, and he had to straighten it out.
When he entered the front room, he saw she was looking downcast. For a while, he stood silent, wanting to say something but utterly unable to because he had never been forced to solve such a problem before. Haijac women didn't cry often, and if they did, they wept alone in privacy.
He sat down by her and put his hand on her soft shoulder. 'Jeannette.'
She turned quickly and laid her dark hair against his chest. She said, between sobs, 'I thought maybe you didn't love me. And I couldn't stand it.
Not after all I've been through!'
'Well, Jeannette, I didn't – I mean – I wasn't...'
He paused. He had had no intention of saying he loved her. He'd never told any woman he loved her, not even Mary. Nor had any woman ever told him. And here was this woman on a faraway planet, only half-human at that, taking it for granted that he was hers, body and self.
He began speaking in a soft voice. Words came easily because he was quoting Moral Lecture AT-16:
' ". . .all beings with their hearts in the right place are brothers... Man and woman are brother and sister... Love is everywhere... but love... should be on a higher plane... Man and woman should rightly loathe the beastly act as something the Great Mind, the Cosmic Observer, has not yet eliminated in man's evolutionary development... The time will come when children will be produced through thought alone. Meanwhile, we must recognize sex as necessary for only one reason: children..." '
Slap! His head rang, and points of fire whirled off into the blackness before his eyes.
It was a moment before he could realize that Jeannette had leaped to her feet and slammed him hard with the palm of her hand. He saw her standing above him with her eyes slitted and her red mouth open and drawn back in a snarl.
Then, she whirled and ran into the bedroom. He got up and followed her. She was lying on the bed, sobbing.
'Jeannette, you don't understand!'
' Fva tuh fe fu! '
When he understood that, he blushed. Then he became furious. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her over so that she faced him.
Suddenly he was saying, 'But I do love you, Jeannette. Ido.'
He sounded strange, even to himself. The concept of love, as she meant it, was alien to him – rusty, perhaps, if it could be put that way. It would need much polishing. But it would, he knew, be polished. Here in his arms was one whose very nature and instinct and education were pointed toward love.
He had thought he had drained himself of grief earlier that night; but now, as he forgot his resolve not to tell her what had happened, and as he recounted, step by step, the long and terrible night, tears ran down his face. Thirty years made a deep well; it took a long time to pump out all the weeping.
Jeannette, too, cried, and said that she was sorry that she had gotten angry at him. She promised never again to do so. He said it was all right. They kissed again and again until, like two babies who have wept themselves and loved themselves out of frustration and fury, they passed gently into sleep.
14
At 0900 Ship's Time, Yarrow walked into theGabriel,the scent of morning dew on the grass in his nostrils. As he had a little time before the conference, he looked up Turnboy, the historianjoat.Casually, he asked Turnboy if he knew anything of a space flight emigration from France after the Apocalyptic War. Turnboy was delighted to show off his knowledge. Yes, the remnants of the Gallic nation had gathered in the Loire country after the Apocalyptic War and had formed the nucleus of what might have become a new France.
But the swiftly growing colonies sent from Iceland to the northern part of France, and from Israel to the Southern part, had surrounded the Loire. New France found itself squeezed economically and religiously. Sigmen's disciples invaded the territory in waves of missionaries. High tariffs strangled the little state's trade. Finally, a group of Frenchmen, seeing the inevitable absorption or conquest of their state, religion, and tongue, had left in six rather primitive spaceships to find another Gaul rotating about some far-off star. It was highly improbable that they had succeeded.
Hal thanked Turnboy and walked to the conference room. He spoke to many. Half of them, like him, had a Mongolian tinge to their features. They were the English-speaking descendants of Hawaiian and Australian survivors of the same war which had decimated France. Their many-times great-grandfathers had repopulated Australia, the Americas, Japan, and China.
Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.
About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.
The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite's left to sixth from his right. Thelamedhon his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen's death. Thegaptwas considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.
Macneff ordered Hal, as the deadgapt'sspiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.
It was a good example of the Haijacs' subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.
In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing theGabrieland built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.
'However,' said Macneff, 'I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality. Not unless the Backrunner is more powerful than I believe. Of course, you could take the attitude that this course might be best. What better shape could the future take than to wipe out our Israeli enemies through means of these nonhumans?
'But, as you all know, our ship is well guarded against attack by open assault or stealth.