‘Your fingers first—one at a time,’ she snarled; and, seizing a hand, she brought it toward her mouth.
She paused then as if thunderstruck; a dazed, incredulous expression spreading over her face. Bending over, she felt, curiously, tenderly, of his neck.
‘Why, he … he’s dead!’ she gasped. ‘His neck … it’s … it’s broken! From such a little, tiny pull as that? Why, anybody ought to have a stronger neck than that!’
She straightened up; then, as a crowd of Vegians and the Tellurian women came up, she became instantly her old, gay self. ‘Well, shall we all go back and finish our dance?’ ‘What?’ Cloud demanded. ‘After this?’
‘Why certainly,’ Vesta said, brightly. ‘I’m sorry, of course, that I killed him so quickly, but it doesn’t make any real difference. Zamke is avenged; he can now enjoy himself. We’ll join him in a few years, more or less. Until then, what would you do? What you call “mourn”?’
‘I don’t know … I simply don’t know,’ Cloud said, slowly, his arm tightening around Joan’s supple waist. ‘I thought I’d seen everything, but … I suppse you can have somebody take that body out to the ship, so they can check it for identity?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll do that. Right away. You’re sure you don’t want to dance any more?’
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‘Very sure, my dear. Very sure. All / want to do is take Joan back to the ship.’
‘QX I won’t see you again this trip, then; your hours are so funny. I’ll send for my things. And I won’t say good-bye, Captain Nealcloud and you other wonderful people, because we’ll see each other again, soon and often. Just so-long, and thanks tremendously for all you have done for me.’
And Vesta the Vegian strode away, purring contentedly to herself—tail high.
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17: The Call
The Lensmen and their Patrolmen, having made sure that the body of Zamke’s murderer was in fact that of the long-sought Fairchild, went unostentatiously about their various businesses. The six Tellurians, although shaken no little by their climactic experience on Vegia, returned soon to normal and resumed their accustomed routines of life—with certain outstanding variations. Thus, Helen and Joe flirted joyously and sparced dextrously, but neither was ever to be found tete-a-tete with anyone else. And thus, Bob and Barbara, neither flirting nor sparring, became quietly but enthusiastically inseparable. And thus, between Joan and Cloud, so close even before Vegia, the bonding became so tight that their two minds were, to all intents and puposes, one mind.
The week on Vegia was over. The Vortex Blaster II was loafing through the void at idling speed. Cloud was pacing the floor in his office. Joan, lounging in a deeply-cushioned chair with legs stuck out an an angle of forty-five degrees to each other, was smoking a cigarette and watching him, with her eyes agleam.
‘Confound it, I wish they’d hurry up with that fine-tooth,’ he said, flipping his half-smoked cigarette at a receptacle and paying no attention to the fact that he missed it by over a foot. ‘How can I tell Captain Ross where to go when I don’t know myself?’
‘That’s one thing I just love about you, my pet,’ Joan drawled. “You’re so wonderfully, so superhumanly patient. You know as well as I do that the absolutely irreducible minimum of time is twenty-six minutes from now, and that they’ll probably find something they’ll want to study for a minute or so after they get there. So light somewhere, why don’t you, and unseethe yourself?’
‘Touche, Joan.’ He sat down with a thump. ‘Has Doctor Janowick a prescription specific for the ailment?’
‘Nothing else but, chum. That tight-linkage snooping that we’ve been going to try, but never had time for. Let’s start on Helen and Barbara. I’ve snooped them repeatedly, of course, but our fusion of minds, theoretically, should be able to pick their
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minds apart cell by cell; to tap their subconscious ancestral
memories, even—if there are such things—for a thousand
generations back.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘You know, I think you must
have some ghoul blood in you somewhere? I tell you again,
those girls are friends of ours!’
‘So what?’ she grinned at him, entirely unabashed. ‘You’ll
have to get rid of that squeamishness some day; it’s the biggest
roadblock there is on the Way of Knowledge. If not them, how
would Nadine suit you?’ ‘Worse yet. She’s just as good at this business as we are,
maybe better, and she probably wouldn’t like it.’
‘You may have something there. We’ll save her for last, and
call on her formally, with announcements and everything. Vesta,
then?’
‘Now you’re squeaking, little mouse. But no deep digging for
a while. We’ll take it easy and light—we don’t want to do any
damage we may not be able to undo. As I told you before, my
brain is firing on altogether too damn many barrels that I simply don’t know what are doing. Let’s go.’
They fused their minds—an effortless process now—and were at their objective instantaneously.
Vesta was primping; enjoying sensuously the physical feel of her physical body even as dozens of parts of speech of dozens of different languages went racing through her mind. And, one layer down, she was wishing she were old enough to be a newly-wed; wishing she had a baby of her own … babies were so cute and soft and cuddlesome …
Then Tommie. Cloud and Joan enjoyed with her the strong, rank, sense-satisfying flavor of a Venerian cigar and studied with her the intricate electronic equations of a proposed modification of the standard deep-space drive. And, one layer down, the Tomingan engineer, too, was thinking of love and of babies. What was all this space hopping getting her, anyway? It didn’t stop the ache, fill the void, satisfy the longing. As soon as this cruise was over, she was going back to Tominga, tell Hanko she was ready, and settle down. A husband and a family did tie a woman down something fierce—but what price freedom to wander when you wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming of a baby in your arms, only to find the baby isn’t there?
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Then Thlaskan and Maluleme. They were seated, arms around each other, on a davenport in their own home on Chickladoria. They were not talking, merely feeling. They were deeply, truly, tremendously in love. In the man’s mind there was a background of his work, of pilotry, of orbits and charts and computations. There was a flash of sincere liking for Cloud, the best boss and the finest figure-man he had ever known; but practically all of his mind was full of love for the wonderful woman at his side. In hers, at the moment, there were only two things; love of her husband and longing for the child which she might already have succeeded in conceiving … Cloud wrenched their linked minds away. ‘This is monstrous, Joan!’
‘What’s monstrous about it?’ she asked, quietly. ‘Nothing. It isn’t. Women need children, Storm. All women, everywhere. Now that I’ve found you, I can scarcely wait to have some myself. And listen, Storm, please. Before we visit Nadine, you must make up your mind to face facts—any kind of facts— without flinching and shying away and getting mental goose-bumps all over your psyche.’
‘I see what you mean. In a fully telephathic race there couldn’t be any real privacy without a continuous block, and that probably wouldn’t be very feasible.’
‘No, you don’t see what I mean. You aren’t even on the right road—your whole concept is wrong. There couldn’t be any thought, even of privacy, no conception of such a thing. Think a minute! From birth—from the very birth of the whole race— full and open meetings of minds must have been the norm of thought. That kind of thing is—must be—what Nadine is accustomed to at home.’
‘Hm … I never thought… you go see her, Joan, and I’ll stay home.’
‘What good would that do? Whatever you may be, my dear, I know darn well you’re not stupid.’
‘Not exactly stupid, maybe, but I haven’t thought this thing through the way you have … of course, if she’s half as good as we know she is, she’s read us both already, clear down, to the footings of our foundations … but this thing of a full meeting of minds with anybody but you …’
‘You haven’t a thing to hide, you know. At least, / know, whether you do or not.’
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‘No? How do you figure that? Maybe you think so, but … I’ve tried, of course, but I’ve failed a lot oftener than I succeeded.’
‘Who hasn’t? You’re not unique, my dear. Shall we go?’
‘We might as well, I guess … I’m as ready as I ever will be … I’ll try, but…’
‘Please do, Master,” came Nadine’s quiet, composed thought, in a vein completely foreign to her usual attitude of self-sufficient aloofness. ‘I have been observing; studying with awe and with wonder. If you will so deign, revered Master, come fully into my mind.’