She looked at him.
“Oh?” Mara said.
Without warning, an invisible barrier had raised itself between them. They were no longer two people sitting together; they were opponents facing each other across a strip of disputed territory. Giles felt a powerful urge to break down and do away with whatever was separating them—an urge, the powerfulness of which surprised him. But he had no time to examine the emotional angle of the situation now.
“She told me so,” Giles said. “I didn’t really believe it.”
“That’s good of you, Honor, sir,” said Mara. “Of course, you’re right. I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Giles.
But the barrier was still there, in place between them.
She got to her feet.
“Thank you for telling me, though, Adelman.”
“Not at all,” he said, formally, helplessly. “Thank you for telling me bout Esteven.”
“I wanted to help,” she said.
She turned and walked out He let her go. There was a strange anguish inside him, at seeing her leave like that He could not understand what had gone wrong.
It was some hours later, when the recorder was playing loudly in the middle section, that he looked up to see Biset this time, standing by his cot She spoke to him without preamble, in Esperanto, as soon as his eyes were on her.
“Forgive me, Honor, sir,” she said, with no tone of an actual plea for forgiveness in her voice at all, “but I’m afraid I have to speak to you. I’ve warned you once about the girl, Mara, and her revolutionary connections. I must remind you now that your rank doesn’t exempt you from the authority of the Police. You’ve been giving this girl a good deed more license than you should.”
“She came to tell me about—” Giles broke off. He had been about to tell this woman how Mara had come to inform him about Esteven’s possible illness, and then it dawned on him that he was condescending to explain himself to her. A cold fury erupted in him.
“Get out!” he snarled.
He rose to his feet on the physical impulse of his own rage, but by the time he was fully upright, Biset was gone. He felt the pounding of his own heartbeat marking its pulse in the big artery tinder his chin.
He strode back through the screen entrance into the middle section of the lifeship and caught a glimpse of Biset in a corner, staring at him with widened, white-encircled eyes as he went by. Mara was not there. He stopped by the recorder long enough to turn it nearly to full volume with one twist of his fingers, then went on into the rear section. Di and Frenco were there, and so was Mara, picking spotted fruit from the vine and putting it into the converter.
“Leave us,” snapped Giles to Di and Frenco. They stared at him and hurried to leave the rear section.
He was alone with Mara. She turned to stare at him, puzzledly, as he came up to her.
“Biset” he said. Standing face to face with her, inches apart, it was just possible to make himself heard over the sound of the recorder while speaking in a normal tone of voice. They were entirely private under the noise of the music. “She came to see me just now with the damned effrontery to suggest I shouldn’t talk to you.”
Mara opened her mouth.
“Perhaps—” she began in the same formal tone on which they had last parted, but then her face and voice changed to a tone and expression of concern. “Perhaps you shouldn’t.”
“I?” he said. “I’m Giles Ashad of Steel. Never mind that There was something I should have mentioned to you. I should have told you that if Biset tries to make trouble for you—in any way—you come to me. I suspect she may try to accuse you of being the one who planted the bomb that blew up the spaceliner.” Mara stared at him.
“It actually was a bomb, then?” she said. “How can she or you or anyone be sure about that?”
“She can’t” said Giles briefly. “I can. I was the one who planted it there.” Giles’ teeth ground together at the memory. “It wasn’t intended to hurt anyone, and it certainly wasn’t intended to destroy the spaceliner. It was only supposed to damage it at a particular point on its trip, so that it would have to turn aside to the closest planetfall—a mining world called 20B-40—for repairs.”
For a second she only stared at him.
“All those lives ...” she said. Then she changed and came forward to put her hand on his arm. “But you said you didn’t mean to hurt anyone. What went wrong?”
His jaw muscles ached. He was suddenly aware that his teeth were clenched together. He parted them with an effort.
“I don’t know!” he said. “I suppose like a damn fool—the damn fool I was, and we all were—we underestimated how rotten with age one of these Albenarethian spacecraft are. The bulkhead that ought to have contained the explosion, back there among the cargo, must have split wide open and the fire started—you saw it.”
Her grip on his arm increased. She stared up into his face.
“Why are you telling me all this?” she said.
He looked at her grimly for a moment.
“Perhaps,” he said, slowly, “because I trust you. I don’t know why—I couldn’t explain to anyone why. But just now I suddenly began ... Suddenly I had to tell someone, and you’re the only one I could bring myself to open my mouth to.”
He saw her looking at him now in a way no one had ever done before. It disturbed him and, in an odd way, made him feel humble. He had never suspected that a woman might look at him with just that look. There were things he found he wanted to say to her, but a lifetime of training and discipline closed his throat when he tried to utter them.
Clumsily, he patted the hand with which she was holding his arm, and turned away. She released her fingers, letting him go. He went back through the middle section of the lifeship, pausing for a second to turn the volume on the recorder down to its previous level. All the other arbites there were staring at him and among them was the face of Biset.
He ignored them, going on into the front section and lying down on his cot, on his back. Throwing the loose sleeve across his eyes, he abandoned himself to the privacy and loneliness of artificial darkness.
9
Tenth day—11:22 hours
Di was crying. Sitting on her cot and crying. For a while after her experience with the Captain and the dying Engineer in the rear section of the lifeship, having one of the other women with her had comforted her. Then she had seemed to get better, and it was the presence of Frenco that soothed her when she woke from one of her nightmares. But lately, nothing helped. She cried frequently and could not say why.
“What can I do?” Frenco asked. He was standing with Giles and Mara in the rear section. Di had just thrust him away from her when he had tried to sit down beside her.
“I don’t know,” said Giles, thoughtfully, looking at the girl. “Obviously she needs medical help. Obviously none of us is equipped to give it to her. Don’t blame yourself, Frenco—”
“It was my idea to apply for indent to a Colony World!” Frenco said wildly. “My idea. The odds were a thousand to one against our getting it, and when we did, we couldn’t believe it, we were so happy. Now—”
“The word I used,” said Giles, “was ‘don’t.’ Don’t blame yourself. This depression of Di’s could have one of any number of causes. It could be a result of the food, or a result of the atmosphere aboard. It could be something generic in her that would have cropped up even back on Earth. But we’ll stay with her and do what we can for her. Call me if there’s any help I can give you.”
“And call me,” said Mara to the boy, “anytime I can help.”
“Thank you,” said Frenco. But he said it wearily, like someone who has worn out hope.
“Brace up!” Giles said to him, sharply. It was the same hard, sensible advice he would have given another Adelborn; but then Frenco cringed, and Giles remembered he was speaking to an arbite. He softened his voice. “If we can get her alive to planetfall, she’ll be all right in the long run.”
&nb
sp; “Yes, sir,” said Frenco. He made an effort to put some life back into his words and some animation into his posture.
“That’s right,” said Giles. “Why don’t you leave her to herself now? You can see she’d rather be left alone—and you could use some rest Come up to the front section and take my cot for a while.”
Frenco looked at him gratefully.
“Thank you, Honor, sir,” he said. “But you’re sure—you think I can’t help her at all by being here even if she acts like she doesn’t want me?”
“I’m sure,” said Giles. “Everyone else on board here will be keeping an eye on her for you.”
Frenco nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you all.... I guess I will go and lie down up front just a bit.”
He went out.
Giles turned his attention to Mara.
“Have you been eating?” he asked. “You look like you’re losing weight.”
She gave him a wraith of a smile.
“We’re all losing weight” she said. “I don’t see how we can last another eighty days to reach Belben, if we and the vine keep going downhill like this.”
“Yes ...” Giles felt the sudden ache in his jaws that signaled he was clamping his teeth together again too fiercely. The gesture was becoming a habit with him, lately.
“What is it?” Mara was looking at him.
“Something ...” He looked at Di, but Di was beyond listening—lost in the dark night of her own misery and the sound of her own weeping, added to the music sounds from the recorder in the middle section, that would keep anyone else from overhearing. “You know I said the plan behind my bomb was to turn the spaceship aside to 20B-40?”
“I remember,” she said.
“There was a critical period,” he said, “a maximum number of ship-days during which such a change of direction would be practical. The period of days began the day the bomb went off. I’ve been counting the days since. We’ve got no less than six days. After that it’ll be too late to change course. We might as well continue on to Belben.”
Her eyes were big. Or perhaps it was just the new thinness of her face that made them seem so.
“How close is this 20B-40?”
“Now?” he said. “About thirty days away.”
“But we could hold on another thirty days!” Mara said. “I don’t understand—”
“The Captain’s refused to change course from the one set for Belben,” he said. “There’s no use my trying to explain to you why. I don’t really understand it myself. Just take my word for it that it has to do with honor in the way the aliens see it.”
“But what’s wrong with him? Certainly just honor—”
“It’s not a ‘him,’ ” Giles said. “That’s something I’ve been keeping to myself from the first so as not to scare the arbites—” He broke off with a short, harsh laugh. “Do you know, I’m beginning to forget to think of you as an arbite? We’re all getting down to a basic common label of ‘human animal’ on board this boat.... No, the Captain’s a female. Not only that, she’s pregnant. The Engineer was the male parent, just before he died; and it must have been their ... mating that Di stumbled in on, back at that time she can’t remember.”
Mara drew a deep breath.
“Oh ...” she said.
“The fact that the Captain is pregnant ties in somehow with the matter of Albenareth honor, in taking the lifeship to its original destination, even though all of us—and she, too—are going to die before we reach it.”
“But if she dies, what about the—the child?”
“It won’t die. It lives on her body, in some way.” Giles waved the matter aside. Somehow, as with the matter of the bomb, he felt immeasurably better just from having been able to tell someone else about the Captain, her pregnancy, and 20B-40. “At any rate, what it all adds up to is that I’ve got to find some way of convincing the Captain she has to change course to 20B-40 inside of the next six ship-days.”
Mara shook her head.
“I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why can’t we just take over and make the course change ourselves? I know these aliens are awfully strong, but there’s eight of us and only one of her.”
He smiled at her a little sadly.
“Do you have any idea what changing course means?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “to be honest I don’t. It’s a matter of using the controls up front a certain way, isn’t it? But didn’t you have to study the Albenareth and their ships in order to figure when the bomb needed to be set off? So don’t you know how to work their controls?”
“The controls are no problem,” he said. “The problem is calculating a new course that will bring us to 20B-40 and figuring the changes in the present course that will put us on that new one.”
“But there’s Groce and his compute,” Mara said. “Groce could help you with any figuring you needed to do—”
She broke off at the shaking of his head.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you really don’t have any comprehension of what’s involved in interstellar navigation. The manipulation of the controls is simple, and the mathematics of course calculation can be performed by Groce’s compute, all right. But navigation out here between the stare is a science by itself. It calls for a mind trained in that science, and preferably one that’s already done some navigation.”
“But what about you? You’re an Adelborn, and lots of them have yachts they pilot themselves between Earth and the other planetary bodies of the Solar System. Haven’t you ever done anything like that before?”
“A few hundreds of times,” he said. “But interplanetary yachts like the one I had are preprogrammed with a great deal of information that out here would have to be worked out from scratch. The first problem in interstellar space is to find out where you are ... and it builds from there. No, if the course change is going to be made, the Captain is going to have to be the one to do it, and she’s going to have to do it while she’s still alert enough to manage it. She’s been getting less and less active, more and more withdrawn and indifferent, lately. I think from what she says it’s that ‘new life’ she talks about inside her, draining the nutrients it needs from her.”
Mara’s jaw was at a stubborn angle.
“There must be some way,” she said.
“No. It has to be the Captain.... Why don’t you get some rest, yourself, and leave me to work with the problem?”
“I can watch Di. That’ll leave you free to think.”
He shook his head again.
“Watching her doesn’t interfere with my thinking” he said. She got to her feet slowly.
“Call me, though,” she said, “the minute you need help.”
“I will.”
He watched her go through the entrance in the rear screen, into the middle section and out of sight. There was a weariness inside him that tempted him strongly to lie down, to stretch out horizontally, if only for a few minutes, but he knew better than to give in to it. Flat on his back, he would not be able to resist the desire for sleep that lately seemed to be plucking at his sleeve most of the time.
He must keep his mind alert and on the problem. There was a solution to any reasonable situation. The Captain’s objection to the course change was difficult only because it was involved with alien psychological and social factors. If there was only some way to give the Albenareth female what she wanted, without in any way sacrificing human lives or interfering with his own duty...
He came awake with a start, to the realization that someone was standing almost at his left elbow.
He turned to look. It was Esteven.
“Sir, sir ...” Esteven’s voice was hoarse. His face was gray and sweating under the merciless light from the overhead lamps. “What is it?” demanded Giles.
“I ...” The words seemed to take more effort to pronounce than Esteven had to give them. “I need help, sir. You ... you will help, Honor, sir?�
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“Of course, if I can,” Giles said. “Sit down, man, before you fall down.”
“No ... no, thank you, Honor ...” Esteven swayed. “I must have ... It’s just a request, a small one. But necessary. Indulge me, if you will, please, Adelman. You know I ... the Captain ...”
“What are you trying to tell me?” demanded Giles. “Pull yourself together. Talk plainly.”
“It’s just that I need ... Do you, Honor, sir, have ... a piece of paper... in your wallet, maybe?”
“Paper? No, I don’t even have a pad or stylo—” Giles broke off, looking at the other man narrowly. “This isn’t that music-writing you keep talking about, is it? Why—”
“No, sir! No, Honor, sir!” The denial was a cry from Esteven’s colorless lips. “I can’t explain. But I have to have some paper. Just to touch. Just to look at. Please, please ...”
The real pain in Esteven’s voice was undeniable. Instinctively, Giles began plunging his hands into the various pockets of his shipsuit He came up with various odds and ends, but nothing made of paper. There was the warrant, of course, but that was of incalculable value. He must not let Esteven know about it Paper was almost a collector’s item, on Earth, at least, nowadays. Only on the Colony Worlds was there much paper manufactured. How Esteven expected Giles, here on this alien lifeship, in just the clothes he stood up in, to produce a collector’s ...
Of course! Giles dug out his identity card case from a right trouser pocket. Behind the card was a souvenir folded banknote issued sixty years before by a small African country, before the last of the independent currencies had been done away with in favor of the International Credit Standard. Esteven snatched at it, but Giles pulled it back from the other’s trembling fingers.
“Wait a minute,” said Giles, sharply. “You said you just wanted to look at it, to touch it.”
“To feel ... to hold. If I could just keep it a little ...” Esteven’s mouth was becoming wet at the corner from escaping saliva. His lower jaw was making odd, chewing motions. Giles stared at these things, at the popping eyes and the strange grayness of pallor on the man’s face, and suddenly the truth jumped into the conscious area of his mind.
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