He towered over her. He had never before been this aware of his size, in relation to hers; and it seemed to him she had grown smaller, shrunk back against the wall as she was. But he could see nothing to terrify her. They were alone. Their faces stared at each other in the half-light, across a few inches of distance; and his soul turned over in him to see her so frightened.
Gently, he took hold of her shoulders; and was shocked to discover how small the bones and flesh of them felt, wrapped and enclosed by his own large hands. Gently, still holding her, sliding his hands about her shoulders, he stepped aside and behind her, urging her from the wall to one of the chairs facing the unlit fireplace.
"No," she said, closing her eyes as she reached the chair, pulling away from him and seating herself. He sank down into a chair half-facing hers, and stared at her. His own eyes, adjusted to the dimness, saw the paleness of her face.
"It's all right…" she said, after a long moment, in a hushed, breathless voice. She opened her eyes and went on, a little numbly. "It was just for a moment there. I'd thought you'd naturally go to your room to think. He got thin in the last years, but his hair stayed black—like yours. He… sometimes forgot to light the fire; and he used to sit like that, stooped a bit. It was a shock, that's all."
He stared at her.
"Ian," he said. "You mean… Ian."
Out of all his feeling for her came a sudden understanding.
"You were in love with him." He could not have pulled his gaze from her face with all the willpower he possessed. "At his age?"
"At any age," she said. "Every woman loved Ian."
A dull knife slowly cut and churned him up inside. The reciprocal feeling for him that he believed he had sensed in her—everything he thought he had understood—all wrong. He had been only a surrogate for a man dead for years, a man old enough to be her great-grandfather.
"I was sixteen when he died," she said.
—And then he understood. To love and not be able to have, as she was growing up, would have been bad enough. To love and watch the dying would have been beyond bearing. The terrible fire of loss within him was flooded out by love for her and the urge to comfort her. He reached out, to her, starting to get up.
"No," she said, quickly. "No. No."
He dropped his arm back, the pain returning. Of course she would not want to be touched by him—particularly now. He should have known that.
They sat in silence for several minutes, he not looking at her. Then he got up, almost mechanically, and lit the fire. As the warmth and the light of the little red flames, moving out and multiplying among the pieces of firewood, began to take over and change the room, he ventured to look at her again. He saw that the color had begun to come back to her face, but the face itself still showed a rigidity from the lingering effects of her shock. She sat with her arms upon the arms of the chair, her back straight against its back.
"You did well, today," she said.
"Better than I'd hoped," he answered.
"Not just that. You did well, very, very well," she said. "I told you, carrying anything over seventy per cent of them would be a victory. You only lost four out of thirty-one people; and you didn't even really lose them. You convinced them too thoroughly, that's why they left."
"I suppose," he said. A little of the earlier feeling of relief and triumph returned for a brief second. "But I was losing them to begin with, there. And then Rourke di Facino asked that one question and it seemed to trigger off just what I wanted to tell them. Did you notice?"
"I noticed," she said.
Her brief reply did not encourage him to talk further about the explosion of competence that had come so unexpectedly upon him at the meeting. He turned away to poke the fire; and when he looked at her again, she had gotten to her feet.
"I'd better get us something to eat," she said; and waved him back as he started to get up. "No. Stay there. I'll bring it in here."
She crossed the room quickly to the table with the drinks on it, poured some of the dark whiskey into a glass and brought it back to him.
"Sit and relax," she said. "Everything's fine. I'll call Omalu and find out the situation on a ship that can get you out toward the Final Encyclopedia."
He took the glass, smiled; and drank a little from it. She smiled back, turned, and left the room. He put the glass down on the table beside him.
He had no desire for it, now. But she would notice if he did not drink at least some of it. He set himself to get it down, gradually; and had almost succeeded by the time she came in with two covered hot-dishes on a tray, which she set down on a small table between his chair and the one she had occupied earlier. The tray divided to become two trays; and she passed one over to him, with tableware and a covered dish on it.
"Thanks," he said, uncovering the dish. "It smells good."
"There's a question you're going to have to think about," she said, uncovering her own dish. "I called the spaceport at Omalu. A ship's leaving for Freiland, from which you can transfer to one headed for Earth. It leaves tomorrow at mid-day. If you don't take that, the next might be in three weeks—or more. They're not certain. But it'll be at least three weeks. Do you still want to give them a week here?"
"I see," he said, laying his fork down. She was looking at him with a face on which he could read only the concerned interest of a householder with a guest. "You're right. Perhaps I'd better be on that one, tomorrow."
"It's too bad," she said. "If you could have stayed a week, some of those you met yesterday would've had a chance to talk to you again. There was a time when finding passage out of Omalu to any of the other thirteen worlds was something you could do almost overnight. But not now."
"It's too bad, as you say," he said. "But I'd better take the ship I know is leaving."
"Yes. You're probably right." She lowered her gaze to her plate and became busy eating. "You've got interstellar credit enough for passage, of course?"
"Oh, yes," he said to her forehead. "There's no problem there…"
They ate. In spite of the newly empty feeling inside him, his appetite did not let him down; and the soporific effect of the good-sized meal on top of the tensions of the day dulled his emotions and made him realize how tired he was. They talked for a little while about the next day's plans.
"I think some of those who were there today may want to have a last word with you," she said. "I'll phone around and see. We could get to the spaceport early and talk in the restaurant, there; if you don't have any objection."
"No objection, of course," he said. "But maybe I should be the one to call them?"
"No," she said. "Get some sleep. I'll be up for a few hours yet, anyway, with things I've got to do."
"All right," he said. "Thank you."
"It's no trouble."
Shortly, he went to bed; and in the darkness of his room escaped at last into the cave of sleep.
He slept heavily. He was roused by Amanda calling him on the house phone circuit; and he looked up from his pillow to see her face in the screen.
"Breakfast in twenty minutes," she said. "We'd better get going."
"Right," he said, half-awake.
The kitchen was bright with the first full light of morning as he came into it and took a seat at the table. Thick soup and chunks of brown bread were already waiting for him. She sat down with him.
"How do you want to make the trip to Omalu?" she asked.
He swallowed some bread.
"Is there a choice?"
"There's two ways," she told him. "We can hitch a ride, if someone from the area happens to be flying into Omalu today; or, if no one is, which is most likely, we can call for transportation for you from Omalu. In either case, you'll have to pay your way to whoever we ride with. I won't. Of course, I can take you. Because of the work I do, I've got my own jitney."
He frowned. What she had just said had somehow seemed to end hanging in the air.
"In which case I wouldn't have to pay," he said, slowly. "But the Dor
sai can use any interstellar credits it can get from me, isn't that right?"
"That's right," she said. "If you can afford them."
"Of course," he said. "Just let me know how much I ought to pay you for the ride."
"We'll go by the fuel used," she got to her feet. "I'll go roll the jitney out now. You finish here and collect anything you've got to take with you. Then come down beyond the stable and you'll find me."
There was nothing that he particularly needed to bring beyond what he had carried in when he had come. What he was carrying away that was important, from the Dorsai and particularly from Fal Morgan and Foralie, was immaterial and interior. They lifted off into the same almost-cloudless sky that had graced all the days he had been there.
—And they descended into an unbroken layer of clouds a little more than an hour later, over Omalu.
Below the clouds it was raining; not heavily, but steadily. They landed on the planetary pad, on the other side of the terminal from the pad for deep-space ships; and ran together through the rain to the side door of the terminal.
When they got to the restaurant on the building's second level, the list of the reservation screen showed the Grey Captains in Cubicle Four. Amanda led Hal through the open central dining area to the private rooms beyond. Cubicle Four turned out to be a room more than adequate to hold the nearly forty people already seated at square, green tables, there. Three sides of the room were white-dyed, concrete walls, with the fourth side all window, giving on the downpour over the planetary pad. Heavy white coffee cups were scattered around a number of the tables.
"You've got nearly two hours," said Amanda. "Come along. There's at least a dozen people here you haven't met yet."
She took him off to be introduced. It developed that two of those who had walked out the day before, one woman and one man, had returned, and with them were Grey Captains who had not chosen, or had not been able, to make the first meeting. After Hal had been introduced he took a chair facing a semi-circle of others drawn from the tables and began to answer questions. After a little more than an hour however, he called a halt.
"I don't think we're making much progress this way," he told them. "Basically what you're all asking me for are specific answers. This is the very thing I don't have to give you, simply because I haven't got them myself yet. I don't have a specific plan, as I've already told you, several times. That's what I'm going to the Final Encyclopedia to work out. All I can do for you now is what I've done; point out the situation and leave you to look at it for yourselves until I've got more information."
"No offense intended, Hal Mayne," said Rourke di Facino. He was sitting in the center of the semicircle, looking small and dandified, with the large, padded collar of his travelling jacket thrown open to the warmth of the cubicle. "But you've raised a demon among us; and now you seem to be refusing to lend a hand in laying it."
For a moment it seemed to Hal that the certainty that had visited him in the dining room stirred and threatened to take him over again. Then it subsided; and he kept a firm grip on his patience.
"I'll repeat what I've said before," he said. "I've only pointed out to you the situation as it exists; and that was something you actually already knew. You've all made it plain that you won't promise to do anything more than consider what I've told you. On my side, I can't promise anything more than I have, either."
"At least," said Ke Gok, "give us some idea of what to expect, some idea of what direction you're heading in. Give us something we can tie to."
"All right," said Hal. "Let me put it this way, then. Would you all be willing to move against the Others if the chance could be offered in the form of ordinary military action?"
There was a general chorus of assent.
"All right," said Hal, wearily. "As far as I know now, that's what I'll be trying to find for you. It's your strength; and it's only sensible to work with it."
"And on that note," said Amanda, getting to her feet, "I'm going to take Hal Mayne away. He'll be going directly to his ship. Those of you who want to say goodbye, say it now."
To Hal's surprise, they all crowded around him. It was not until Amanda had finally extricated him and they were going down a flight of old-fashioned stairs to the ground level, that he thought to look at his chronometer.
"We've got a good ten minutes yet before I'd have had to go," he said.
"I wanted to talk to you alone," said Amanda. "Here, this way."
She led him off from the foot of the stairs to a small waiting room with a door in its far wall. She led him to the door, opened it and they stepped out onto the spaceship pad.
The door sucked shut behind them under the differential in air pressure between pad and terminal. Weather control had been turned on over the pad, now that liftoff was close. The clouds lay thick above, appearing to be humped up into a dome over the pad by the action of the control; and gray, wavering curtains of rain enclosed the three open sides of the pad. Out here, the air felt damp and thick, with that peculiar stillness found in atmosphere artificially held. The increased pressure and the stillness, together, gave the impression that they were suspended in a bubble outside of ordinary time and space. Eighty meters distant, out on the pad, the spaceship for Freiland lay, lengthwise, enormous and mirror-bright, with her polished skin holding the images of the terminal, the clouds and the rain about her, fuming off the last of the decontaminant gas from her loaded cargo holds.
Amanda turned and began to walk eastward along the blank lower face of the terminal, pierced only by glassless, self-sealing doors like the one that had let them onto the pad. Hal fell in beside her.
"You realize," she said, "you're only been here eight days." She was walking along with her eyes fixed on the rain curtain at the pad edge, two hundred meters ahead of them.
"Yes," he said. "It hasn't been long."
"It's not easy to get to understand someone else in eight days—or eight weeks or eight months, for that matter," she said. She glanced sideways at him, briefly; then turned her attention once more to the rain at the edge of the pad. "If two people come from different cultures, they can use the same words and mean two different things; and if their reasons for doing what they do aren't understood, then without planning to, either one of them can completely mislead the other."
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"I know you were raised by a Dorsai," she said. "But that's not the same as being born here. Even born here, you could be wrong about someone from another household. You don't know—and in eight days you couldn't learn to know—the Morgans. Or the Amandas. Or me."
"It's all right," he said. "I think I know what you're trying to tell me. I understand. I simply look like Ian."
She stopped, turned and stared at him. Necessarily, he also stopped, and they stood, face to face.
"Ian?" she said.
"That's what I found out last night, wasn't it?" he said. "That he looked in his old age something like me; and you'd been… fond of him."
"Oh!" she said, and looked away from him, back at the rain. "Not that, too!"
"Too?" He stared at her.
"Of course I loved Ian," she said. "I couldn't help loving him. But after he died, I grew up."
She broke off. Then began again.
"I tried to help you understand," she said. "Weren't you listening when I talked to you about the first Amanda, and the second? Couldn't you hear what I was telling you?"
"No," he said, "now that you ask, I guess I didn't. I didn't realize you were trying to tell me something."
She made a small, harsh sound in her throat and walked for a few seconds toward the rain without saying anything more. He went in silence beside her.
"I'm sorry," she said, after a minute, more gently. "It's my fault. I was the one trying to explain. If you didn't understand, then it's my responsibility. I told you about the other two Amandas hoping you'd understand about me."
"What was it I should have understood?" he asked.
"What I am—what a
ll three of us are. The first Amanda had three husbands; but really—even including Jimmy, her first son, who was a special case—what she lived for was her family and people in general. She was a galloping protector." Amanda breathed deeply, going ahead with her eyes still fixed on the rain curtains at the edge of the pad. "The second Amanda understood herself. That's why she wouldn't marry Kensie or Ian—particularly Ian, whom she loved best. She gave them both up because sooner or later she knew a choice would come for her, between the one she'd chosen and her duty to everyone else; and she knew that when that happened it wouldn't be him, but everyone else she'd choose."
She walked a few more paces.
"And I'm an Amanda too," she said. "So, I'm going to be just as wise as the second Amanda; and save myself and other people heartache."
They walked on.
"I see," said Hal, at last.
"I'm glad you see," said Amanda. She did not look at him.
"Well," said Hal, after a moment. He felt numb; and in the domed space created around them by the weather control, everything appeared artificial and unreal. He looked at the spaceship. "Perhaps I ought to be getting on board."
She stopped, and he stopped with her. She turned to him and held out her hand. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then took it.
"I'll be back," he told her.
"Be careful," she said. Their hands still clasped tightly together. "The Others aren't going to like what you're doing. The easiest way for them to stop it, is to stop you."
"I'm used to that." He stood, looking into her eyes. "I've been running from them for over five standard years, remember?"
He smiled at her. She smiled back; and with an effort they both let go.
"I'll be back," he said again.
"Oh, come back!" she told him. "Come back safely!"
"I will."
He turned and ran for the spaceship. When he reached the top of the landing ladder and paused to turn his papers and certificate of passage over to the ship's officer, just inside the airlock, he looked back and saw her, made very small by the distance, still standing a little beyond the east end of the terminal building, and looking in his direction, with the curtains of the rain distant behind her, still coming down.
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