Afterward he remembered with irony and sadness how careful he had been. Pleading an urgent requirement for his presence on Fox II, he raised his yacht within .the hour. But Koumanoudes volunteered to stay behind, aboard the Quest on a “courtesy call.” Heim knew the Greek had done a good: job of preliminary arrangement-making on Staurn; how good he would be with his fellow humans was uncertain, but there was scant choice. It had to be him or Wong, the only ones who spoke the local language fluently and hence could use the spaceport’s eavesdrop-proof maser line.
His report came after two watches. “They’re clean, skipper. I was toured around the whole ship and talked to everybody. There’re five in the crew, plus captain, mate, and C.E. They’re plain spacehands, who signed on for this cruise the same as they would for any other exploratory trip. You can’t fake that. Anybody who’s so good an actor works on 3V, not in the black.”
“They don’t have to act,” Heim said. “They only have to wear a poker face.”
“But these bucks didn’t. They swarmed over me, asking every kind of question about us. On the whole, they thought we had a hell of a fine idea here. A couple of them wished they’d joined us.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not surprised. The common man often shows more common sense than the intellectual elite. But wait, now, do you include their officers in this?”
“The engineer, yes. Captain Gutierrez and the first officer … well, they were stiff as meteorite plating. I don’t know what they think. Probably they don’t like us on principle, figure war should be left to the regular Navy. But I did make an excuse to see the articles of the expedition. It’s bona fide, official papers and everything.”
“How about the scientific passengers?”
“A mixed bag. I think Bragdon and Mrs. Lawrie must be the only ones who’ve ever been out of the Solar System. There’s another xenologist, a semanticist, a glossanalyst, a biologist, and half a dozen graduate students to help. I gather none have visited Staura before.”
“Odd.”
“Charlie Wong and I hadn’t either, boss, when you sent us off. They did the same as us, boned up on what information was available and learned the main language with RNA-electro cramming, en route. Anyhow, I can tell you there’s nothing to fear from these academic types. I don’t think any but Bragdon can handle a gun. They don’t much care for us and what we stand for, so relationships were a tad strained even if nothing rude got said. But they’re no threat.”
“They all feel this way?” Heim asked, with a curious little sinking in his spirit.
“No, funny thing, Bragdon and Mrs. Lawrie were both friendly. He remarked once he disagrees with your ideas but has a lot of respect for your guts. And she said she hopes you can come back soon.”
“I can,” Heim said softly. “Oh, I can.”
An hour later, Connie accelerated planetward.
Seated on the bridge, Heim listened to the thrum of the yacht and his own pulse, underlying the flamenco that leaped from Vadász’s guitar beside him. For a while neither man spoke, nor did their eyes leave the spectacle in the viewports.
Two and a fifth times the diameter of Earth, nine and a half times the mass, Staurn rolled immense against darkness. The seas shone royal blue, the continents, blurred by snow-colored cloud bands, were ocher and cinnabar. Along the horizon, atmosphere made a violet rim; over the whole, under the irradiation of a hot FS sun, ran a fluorescence which near the poles became great banners of aurora, shaken aloft into space. Two moons were visible beyond, glacially luminous, and further yet there glittered strange constellations.
“When I see something like that,” Heim murmured at length, half to himself, “I wonder.”
Vadász stopped playing and cocked a birdlike glance at him. “What do you wonder?”
“Why the hell we waste time hating and killing, which we might use to—Argh, never mind.” Heim got out his pipe. “It only takes one to make a quarrel.”
Vadász studied him, “I’ve come to know you somewhat well, Gunnar,” he said. “You are not given to the role of Hamlet. What is the real trouble?”
“Nothing!”
“Ah. Excuse me if I pry, but this whole enterprise depends on you. Is it the lady’s unexpected arrival that is so disturbing?”
“A surprise, no more. We used to be friends.” Heim became busy loading his pipe. The Magyar’s steady look forced him to explain further. “My wife and I had quite a bit to do with the Lawries, years ago. They went off to Ourania in the Epsilon Indi System shortly before Connie died, to establish a machine-tool factory in the colony there. Things can’t have worked out too well, because she came back last year, .divorced. The conflict with Alerion was already serious, even if they hadn’t yet attacked New Europe, and she became active in the peace movement. It had her shuttling around the world, so we only met again a few times, briefly, at large loud parties. I, uh, half doubted she’d speak to me now, after what I’ve done.”
“And are pleasantly amazed, eh? She is indeed attractive. You must find her especially so.”
“What do you mean?” Heim bridled.
“Oh … “ Vadász’s grin was disarming. “One does not wish to get too personal. However, Gunnar, busy though you were, I felt you were mistaken not to, um, prepare yourself for a long cruise in strictly male society.”
Heim grinned back. “I’d trouble enough concocting stories to explain your absences. How could I tell Lisa her hero was out tomcatting?”
“Touché” Vadász went tomato red and attacked his guitar with great vigor.
But he has a point, maybe, Heim thought. I could have—well, Connie would’ve understood. The way she understood about Jocelyn. Lord knows there’ve been other women since—Maybe 1 was thinking too hard about Madelon on New Europe. Damned foolishness. Or—I don’t know, I’m all confused.
That was what he remembered, afterward.
—His finger was not quite steady when he pressed the button on her door. She opened it while the chime was still sounding. “Gunnar,” she said, and took both his hands. “I’m so glad you could come.”
“You were nice, to invite me,” he said.
“Nonsense. When two old friends meet again, halfway between home and the Southern Cross, what else do they do but have a private gabfest? Come in, man.”
The door closed behind them. He looked around. Her cabin was large and comfortable, and she had made it her own. He recognized some things from her lost San Francisco home—a Matisse and a Hiroshige reproduction, some worn volumes of Catullus, Yeats, Tagore, Pasternak, Mosunic-Lopez, the flute he had once loved to heat her play—and there were a few souvenirs of her years in the Epsilon Indi System, less from Ourania than from stark New Mars. His attention returned to her and stayed. She had on an electric blue dress and a Gean necklace of massive silver. The outfit was at once quiet and stunning. Or was that simply the contents?
Whoa, boy! he checked himself. Aloud: “You haven’t changed.”
“Liar. But thanks.” Her eyes dwelt on him. “You have, anyway. Tired and bitter.”
“Why, no, I feel happier now than—” His protest was cut off. She let his hands go and went to a table where bottles and ice stood.
“Let’s do something about it,” she said. “As I recall, you’re a Scotch drinker. And here’s some sho-nuff Glenlivet.”
“Eh? You always preferred light wine.”
“Well, Vie—Dr. Bragdon, you know—he shares your taste, and very kindly gave us this from his locker.” She poured. For a moment the clear gurgle was the only sound in the universe.
What the devil right have I to feel jealous? “I’m not sure what, uh, you’re doing out here with him.”
“Officially I’m secretary to the expedition. I have such skills from my job before I married, and got the rust off them working for the peace movement. Then too, I’ve had experience on other planets, including planets where you need special equipment to live. I used to go to New Mars quite often, ostensibly with Edgar’s mineral prospectors, actually to get away—No matter. That’s past. When I heard about this expedition, I applied for a berth and, rather to my surprise, got it. I suppose that was partly because most qualified people were scared to come so near the big bad Aleriona, partly because Vie knew me and felt I could handle it.” She handed him a glass and raised her own. “Welcome aboard, Gunnar. Here’s to the old days.” They clinked rims, wordless.
“When life was simple and splendid,” she added. Tossing off a sip of her Chablis, she toasted again, defiantly. “And here’s to the future. We’ll make it the same.”
“Well, let’s hope so.” His mouth creased upward. She’d always been overly, dramatic, but his own stolidity had found it a trait more endearing than otherwise.
“Sit down.” She waved him to her lounger, but he took a chair instead. Jocelyn chuckled and relaxed in the form-fitting seat. “Now,” she said, “tell me about yourself.”
“Didn’t you get a bellyful of me in the news?”
“There sure was plenty.” She clicked her tongue. “The entire Solar System in an uproar. Half the people wanted to hang you and H-bomb France for commissioning you. The rest—” Her humor waned. “I hadn’t known there was so much popular support for your side of the issue. Your departure crystallized it, somehow.”
He gathered his nerve and said, “Frankly, that’s what I hoped. One decisive gesture, to cut through that wretched muddle … Okay, you can throw me out.”
“No, Gunnar. Never.” She leaned over and patted his hand. “I think you’re wrong, horribly wrong, but I never doubted you mean well.”
“Same for you, of course. Wish I could say likewise for some of your associates. And mine, I must admit. I don’t like having the approval of some pretty nasty fanatics.”
“Nor I. The Militants—I quit them when they started openly applauding mob violence.”
“They tried to blackmail me through my daughter,” he said.
“Oh, Gunnar!” Her clasp tightened over his knuckles. “And I never came to see you while she was missing. There was this work for the movement, way off on Venus, and by the time I got back and heard, everything was finished and you were gone. But … are you serious? Did Yore’s people really—”
“I fixed that,” he said. “ ’Druther not say any more. We had to keep it out of the news. I’m glad, Joss, you broke with them.”
“Not with what they meant in the beginning, though,” she said. Tears glimmered suddenly in the long hazel eyes; he wondered on whose account. “Another reason I wanted to get off Earth. Everything was such a ghastly mess, no clear rights or wrongs anyplace you searched.” She drew a breath before continuing, with swift earnestness:
“But can’t you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it’s all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they weren’t going to wait any longer. They went home. We’ll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken.”
“Or come after them, if it breaks my way,” he said. “What you can’t see, you won’t see, is that they’ve no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether.”
“Why?” she pleaded. “It doesn’t make sense!”
He frowned into his glass. “That’s something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don’t think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there. Your faction denied the evidence, but be honest with yourself, Joss.”
“You be honest too, Gunnar—No, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren’t going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it’ll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You’ll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing.”
“I’m hoping the Navy will move,” he said. “If, as you put it, I make enmity worse—Uh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can.”
“So does a woman,” she sighed.
Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: “No more argument. Let’s be only ourselves this evening. It’s been such a long time.”
“Sure has. I wanted to see you, I mean really see you; when you came back to Earth, but we were both too busy, I guess. Somehow the chance never seemed to come.”
“Too busy, because too stupid,” she agreed. “Real friends are so rare at best. And we were that once, weren’t we?”
“Rawthuh,” he said, as anxious as she to walk what looked like a safe road. “Remember our junket to Europe?”
“How could I forget?” She gave him back his glass and sat down again, but upright this time, so that her knee brushed his. “That funny little old tavern in Amsterdam, where you kept bumping your head every time you stood up, till finally you borrowed a policeman’s helmet to wear. And you and Edgar roared out something from the Edda, and—But you were both awfully sweet outside Sacre Coeur, when we necked and watched the sun rise over Paris.”
“You girls were a lot sweeter, believe me,” he said, not quite comfortably. A silence fell. “I’m sorry it didn’t last between you and him,” he ventured.
“We made a mistake, going outsystem,” she admitted. “By the time we realized how much the environment had chewed our nerves, it was too late. He’s got himself quite a good wife now.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“What about you, Gunnar? It was so dreadful about poor Connie. But after five years, haven’t you—?”
“After five years, nothing,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why.”
She withdrew herself a little and asked with much gentleness, “I dare not flatter myself, but could I be to blame?”
He shook his head. His face burned. “No. That was over with long ago. Let’s discuss something else.”
“Sure. This is supposed to be a merry reunion. A nuestra salud.” The glasses clinked again.
She began to talk of things past, and presently he was chiming in, the trivia that are so large a part of friendship—do you remember, whatever became of, we did, once you said, we thought, do you remember, and then there was, we hoped, I never knew that, do you remember, do you remember?—and the time and the words and the emptied glasses passed, and finally somehow she was playing her flute for him, “Au Clair de la Lune” and “Gaudeamus Igitur,” “September” and “Shenandoah,” Pan-notes bright and cool through the whirl in him, while he had moved to the lounger and lay back watching the light burnish her hair and lose itself in the deep shadows below. But when she began “The Skrydstrup Girl”
“Was it her that I ought to have loved, then, In a stone age’s blossoming spring—”
the flute sank to her lap and he saw her eyes shut and her mouth go unfirm.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking. You taught it to me, Gunnar.”
He sat straight and laid a clumsily tender hand on her shoulder. “Forget that business,” he said. “I should’ve kept my “big mouth shut. But there was no real harm done. It was no more than … than one of those infatuations. Connie didn’t hold it against you. She nursed me through the spell okay.”
“I wasn’t so lucky,” she whispered.
Dumfounded, he could only stammer: “Joss, you never let on!”
“I didn’t dare. But that was the real reason I talked Edgar into leaving Earth. I hoped—Gunnar, when I came back, why were we both such idiots?”
Then suddenly she laughed, low in her throat, came to him and said, “We’re not too late, are we? Even now?”