Priderell swore him to silence first. Her reputation was at stake.
“At heart,” she explained, “I’m no dancer at all. I’m a dirt-farmer.”
He might have looked startled for a moment. Technically, dirt-farming was a complicated government conducted science which investigated the hit-or-miss natural processes that paralleled mankind’s defter manipulations of botanical growth. But Priderell, it appeared, was using the term in its archaic sense. Rhysgaat had the average large proportion of unpopulated and rarely visited areas; and in one of them, she said, was her hideaway—a small, primitive farm, where she grew things in real dirt, all by herself.
“What kind of things?” asked Grevan, trying not to sound too incredulous.
“Butter-squogs are much the best,” she replied, rather cryptically. “But there’re all kinds! You’ve no idea . . .”
She was not, of course, implying that she ate them, though for a moment it had sounded like that to Grevan. After getting its metabolism progressively disarmed for some fifty centuries by the benefits of nutriculture, ordinary-human knew better than to sample the natural growths of even its own worlds. If suicide seemed called for, there were gentler methods of doing it.
However, it would hardly be polite, he decided uneasily, to inquire further.
All in all, they met only five times, very casually. It was after the fourth time that he went to see her dance.
The place was a rather small theater, not at all like the huge popular circuses of the major central worlds, and the price of admission indicated that it would be a very exclusive affair. Grevan was surprised then to find it packed to the point of physical discomfort.
Priderell’s dance struck him immediately as the oddest thing of its kind he had seen; it consisted chiefly of a slow drifting motion through a darkened arena, in which she alone, through some trickery of lights, was not darkened. On the surface it looked pleasing and harmless; but after a few seconds he began to understand that her motion was weaving a purposeful visual pattern upon the dark; and then the pattern became suddenly like a small voice talking deep down in his brain. What it said was a little beyond his comprehension, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that it would be just as well if it stayed there. Then he noticed that three thin, black beasts had also become visible, though not very clearly, and were flowing about Priderell’s knees in endless repetitions of a pattern that was related in some way to her own. Afterwards, Grevan thought critically that the way she had trained those beasts was the really remarkable thing about the dance. But at the time, he only looked on and watched her eyes, which seemed like those of a woman lost but not minding it any more, and dreaming endlessly of something that had happened long ago. He discovered that his scalp was crawling unpleasantly.
Whatever the effect was on him, the rest of her audience seemed to be impressed to a much higher degree. At first, he sensed only that they were excited and enjoying themselves immensely, but very soon they began to build up to a sort of general tearful hysteria; when the dance entered its final phase, with the beasts moving more swiftly and gliding in more closely to the woman at each successive stage, the little theater was noisy with a mass of emotions all around him. In the end, Priderell came to a stop so gradually that it was some seconds before Grevan realized she was no longer moving. Then the music, of which he had not been clearly aware before, ended too, in a dark blare of sound, and the beasts reared up in a flash of black motion about her.
Everything went dark after that, but the sobbing and muttering and sluggish laughter about him would not stop, and after a minute Grevan stood up and made his way carefully out of the theater before the lights came on again. It might have been a single insane monster that was making all those sounds behind him; and as he walked out slowly with his hair still bristling, he realized it was the one time in his life that he had felt like running from something ordinary-human.
Next day, he asked Priderell what the dance had meant.
She tilted her head and studied him reflectively in a way she had—as if she, too, were puzzled at times by something about Grevan.
“You really don’t know, do you?” she said, and considered that fact briefly. “Well, then—it’s a way of showing them something that bothers them terribly because they’re afraid of looking at it. But when I dance it for them, they can look at it—and then they feel better about everything for a long time afterwards. Do you understand now?” she added, apparently without too much hope.
“No,” Grevan frowned. “I can’t say that I do.”
She mimicked his expression and laughed. “Well, don’t look so serious about it. After all, it’s only a dance! How much longer do you think your ship will be stopping at Rhysgaat?”
Grevan told her he thought they’d be leaving very soon—which they did, two days later—and then Priderell looked glum.
“Now that’s too bad,” she stated frankly. “You’re a very refreshing character, you know. In time, I might even have found you attractive. But as it is, I believe I shall retire tonight to my lonely farm. There’s a fresh bed of butter-squogs coming up,” she said musingly, “which should be just ready for . . . hm-m-m!—Yes, they should be well worth my full attention by now . . .”
So they had spoken together five times in all, and he had watched her dance. It wasn’t much to go on, but he could not get rid of the disturbing conviction that the answer to all his questions was centered somehow in Priderell, and that there was a connection between her and the fact that their ship had remained mysteriously stalled for four weeks on Rhysgaat. And he wouldn’t be satisfied until he knew the answer.
It was, Grevan realized with a sigh, going to be a very long night.
* * *
By morning the tide was out, but a windstorm had brought whitecaps racing in from the north as far as one could see from the ship. The wind twisted and shouted behind the waves, and their long slapping against the western cliffs sent spray soaring a hundred feet into the air. Presently a pale-gold sun, which might have been the same that had shone on the first human world of all, came rolling up out of high-piled white masses of clouds. If this was to be the Group’s last day, they had picked a good one for it.
Grevan was in the communications room an hour before the time scheduled for their final talk with CG. The cubs came drifting in by and by. For some reason, they had taken the trouble to change first into formal white uniforms. Their faces were sober; their belts glittered with the deadly little gadgets that were not CG designs but improvements on them, and refinements again of the improvements. The Group’s own designs, the details of which they had carried in their heads for years, with perhaps a working model made surreptitiously now and then, to test a theory, and be destroyed again.
Now they were carrying them openly. They weren’t going back. They sat around on the low couches that ran along three walls of the room and waited.
The steel-cased, almost featureless bulk of the contact set filled the fourth wall from side to side, extending halfway to the low ceiling. One of CG’s most closely guarded secrets, it had the effect of a ponderous anachronism, still alive with the power and purpose of a civilization that long ago had thrust itself irresistibly upon the worlds of a thousand new suns. The civilization might be dying now, but its gadgets had remained.
Nobody spoke at all while Grevan watched the indicator of his chronometer slide smoothly through the last three minutes before contact time. At precisely the right instant, he locked down a black stud in the thick, yellowish central front plate of the set.
With no further preliminaries at all, CG began to speak.
“Commander,” said a low, rather characterless voice, which was that of one of three CG speakers with whom the Group had become familiar during their training years, “it appears that you are contemplating the possibility of keeping the discovery of the colonial-type world you have located to yourself.”
There was no stir and no sound from the cubs. Grevan drew a slow breath.
“It’s a good-looking world,” he admitted. “Is there any reason we shouldn’t keep it?”
“Several,” the voice said dryly. “Primarily, of course, there is the fact that you will be unable to do it against our wishes. But there should be no need to apply the customary forms of compulsion against members of an Exploration Group.”