if we are taken alive, you are under my protection.”
Gladness burst in Djana. My men can be friends!
“You are kind,” said Flandry with a bow. He turned to the girl. “How
about making us a pot of tea?” he said in Anglic.
“Tea?” she asked, astonished.
“He likes it. Let’s be hospitable. Put the galley intercom on–low–and
you can hear us talk.”
Flandry spoke lightly, but she felt an underlining of his last sentence
and all at once her joy froze. Though why, why? “Would … the datholch
… accept tea?” she asked in Eriau.
“You are thanked.” Ydwyr spoke casually, more interested in the man.
Djana went forward like an automaton. The voices trailed her:
“I am less kind, Dominic Flandry, than I am concerned to keep an
audacious and resourceful entity functional.”
“For a servant?”
“Khraich, we cannot well send you home, can we? I–”
Djana made a production of closing the galley door. It cut off the
words. Fingers unsteady, she turned the intercom switch.
“–sorry. You mean well by your standards, I suppose, Ydwyr. But I have
this archaic prejudice for freedom over even the nicest slavery. Like
the sort you fastened on that poor girl.”
“A reconditioning. It improved her both physically and mentally.”
No! He might be speaking of an animal!
“She does seem more, hm, balanced. It’s just a seeming, however, as long
as you keep that father-image hood over her eyes.”
“Hr-r-r, you have heard of Aycharaych’s techniques, then?”
“Aycharaych? Who? N-n-no … I’ll check with Captain Abrams … Damn! I
should have played along with you, shouldn’t I? All right, I fumbled
that one, after you dropped it right into my paws. Getting back to
Djana, the father fixation is unmistakable to any careful outside
observer.”
“What else would you have me do? She came, an unwitting agent who had
acquired knowledge which must not get back to Terra. She showed
potentialities. Instead of killing her out of hand, we could try to
develop them. Death is always available. Besides, depth-psychological
work on a human intrigued me. Later, when that peculiar gift for
sometimes imposing her desires on other minds appeared, we saw what a
prize we had. My duty became to make sure of her.”
“So to win her trust, you warned her to warn me?”
“Yes. About–in honesty between us, Dominic Flandry–a fictitious
danger. No orders had come for your removal; I was welcome to keep you.
But the chance to clinch it with her was worth more.”
Anglic: “No? I’ll–be–especially–damned.”
“You are not angry, I hope.”
“N-n-no. That’d be unsporting, wouldn’t it?” Anglic: “The more so when
it caused me to break from my cell with a hell of a yell far sooner than
I’d expected to.”
“Believe me, I did not wish to sacrifice you. I did not want to be
involved in that wretched business at all. Honor compelled me. But I
begrudged every minute away from my Talwinian research.”
Djana knelt on the deck and wept.
Blink … blink … blink … furnace glare spearing from the screens.
The hull groaned and shuddered with stresses. Fighting them, the
interior field set air ashake in a wild thin singing. Often, looking
down a passage, you thought you saw it ripple; and perhaps it did,
sliding through some acute bend in space. From time to time hideous
nauseas twisted you, and your mind grew blurred. Sunward was only the
alternation of night and red. Starward were no constellations nor points
of light, nothing but rainbow blotches and smears.
Djana helped Flandry put the courier torpedoes, which he had programmed
under normal conditions, on the launch rack. When they were outside, he
must don a spacesuit and go couple them. He was gone a long while and
came back white and shaken. “Done,” was everything he would tell her.
They sought the conn. He sat down, she on his lap, and they held each
other through the nightmare hours. “You’re real,” she kept babbling.
“You’re real.”
And the strangeness faded. Quietness, solidity, stars returned one by
one. A haggard Flandry pored over instruments whose readings again made
sense, about which he could again think clearly.
“Receding hyperwakes,” he breathed. “Our stunt worked. Soon’s we stop