He raised his glance. His grin was wry. “I should think,” he said, “if they considered making the kind of effort needed to track me through all that, they’d have done better to arrest me on suspicion and interrogate. Simpler and cheaper.”
The life mask barely frowned. She wasn’t practiced in using one. “I think,” she said, “that they may be more clever. Lilisaire’s agent warned me a very high-powered agent had come to see her, Lilisaire, in person.”
“Yes, she told—”
Urgency cut across his words: “Search your memory. Has anything happened, no matter how trivial it seems, anything you can’t quite explain?”
A slight shudder passed through him. He pushed his mind back into time. Nothing, nothing … , Wait.
“Not really, but—Well, when I first landed on the Moon and her man met me, our flight was delayed about an hour because of an accident in orbit.”
“What happened?” Beneath the poncho, she crouched.
“Nothing. We were taken to the executive lounge and given a drink while we waited. Then we were let
go.”
“A drink. And you never mentioned this to Lilisaire?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe, maybe not. With everything else to talk about—”
“Pele!” She sprang to her feet, “Come on!”
“What?”
“Awiwi!” She grabbed his hand and tugged. “I could be wrong, b-but I’m afraid I’m not. Come on!” Numbly, he obeyed. They threaded among the tables, rearward. The waiter loomed in front of them.. Norton gave him a few rapid words in a language Kenmuir didn’t recognize. His massive countenance turning grim, he stepped aside and waved them to go ahead.
“I picked this place to meet because I know it,” Norton said in a voice slurred by haste. “I picked a time after dark because we might need darkness. Now, if we hurry, if we’re lucky^ we may—Here.”
They had passed through a hinged door to a storeroom. She swung another such door aside. A stairway descended into murk. She touched a switchplate, feeble fluorescence glimmered forth, she drew Ken-• muir along and shut the door behind them. They started downward.
But he was no criminal, he protested silently, wildly. He had done nothing unlawful, nothing to make him a fugitive. Why was he in flight? Only this morning he’d been conversing with Matthias over breakfast. The lodgemaster had admitted, grudgingly, that Lunarians might after all be the best hope of humans for getting to the stars, or even of humans becoming less than totally dependent on sophotectic intelligences—if that was desirable … It seemed impossibly long ago, another age, well-nigh as lost to him as the lifetime of the first Rydberg. T
Homebound from Jupiter, the Caroline Herschel passed within naked-eye range of 1^5. Nevertheless the gigantic cylinder gleamed tiny athwart space, half in light, half in darkness, its tapered ends pointed at the stars, jewel-exquisite. Firefly sparks flitted about it, spacecraft, machines. Earth and Luna were crescents to sunward, large and small, opalescent and ashen.
“We should have arrived a few months later,” Eva Jannicki said. “We might have inaugurated the dock and drunk liters of free champagne.” Though the orbital colony was an East Asian, mainly Japanese project, Fireball was inevitably a full partner and would dominate its commerce.
“I think our people will always gather mostly on Luna, when they do not on Earth,” Lars Rydberg replied. “That is where our traditions have struck root.”
“Oh, you!” The little full-figured woman gave the tall rawboned man a look of comic despair. Blue eyes returned her glance, from beneath cropped yellow hair and above jutting nose and lantern jaw. “That was a joke. I hoped you might know. Three times in these past four months I saw you smile. Once I distinctly heard you laugh. I thought my efforts were finally bearing fruit.”
“You exaggerate, my dear, as usual.” Rydberg’s tips turned upward, ruefully. “But maybe not much. I fear we Swedes are like the English of legend. If you want to make us happy in our old age, tell us^a funny story when we are young.”
“There, you see, you can, if you try. Besides, you told me you aren’t Swedish by ancestry.”
He looked from her, out the port to the sky. His tone harshened. “That was a mistake. I should not have. Could you please forget it?”