“My favorite character in that story is Merlin,” said O’Mara, trying to move the conversation onto safer ground, “the magician who went through time in reverse and met the elderly king long before meeting Arthur as a boy. Merlin has never been given the attention he deserves, and even though time travel in either direction is impossible…”
“There speaks the typical hardheaded technocrat,” Joan said softly. “Is there no room in your mind for magic?”
“As a child I had plenty of room there for magic,” said O’Mara, “but only while reading or, as now, talking about the story. Centuries ago it was the technocrats who formed groups and came together as you people are doing now, but they did it to discuss and write and dream about the effects of future advances in science. Now it has all happened. We have star travel, frequent contact and commerce with other-species sapients, antigravity, advanced medicine, everything, and so there is very little room left to us for scientific dreaming. Yet on every civilized planet there are individuals or groups who spend their spare time thinking about, writing about, or discussing the magic and legends of their pasts. Magic is all we have left.”
There was a moment of silence that was broken by Joan. “So you are a closet fantasy fan,” she said. “O’Mara, you’re a strange and very interesting man, as well as being a waste of a valuable natural resource, with muscles.”
Kledenth rippled its fur and said, “O’Mara, normally I would tell you exactly what I think and feel about this situation, and you. But I have been studying a tourist book about polite and non-offensive conversational usage and wish to practice it before we visit Earth. I think your insensitive behavior toward this female makes me conclude that you are mentally disadvantaged, visually impaired, and that your parents were unmarried.”
Before O’Mara could think of a suitably polite response he felt the instant of vertigo that marked their insertion into hyper-space followed by a momentary unsteadiness in the deck underfoot The artificial gravity system, he guessed, had made a less than smooth transition during the changeover from compensating for the five-G thrust of the main engines to the weightlessness of hyperspace. Right now the officer responsible would be having harsh words said to him, her, or it by the captain. Even minor fluctuations in the artificial G could cause nausea in some life-forms and space sickness on a modern interstellar passenger vessel was just not supposed to happen. Apparently the others hadn’t noticed anything.
“Well, there’s nothing more to see here,” said Joan. She tried to encircle his upper arm gently with her long, delicate fingers and pull him away from the viewing panel. “Let’s go for another swimming lesson. I haven’t shown you everything yet.”
CHAPTER 20
Their single Tralthan passenger had completed its round-trip tour and left the ship on its home world, where two others, who as honeymooners were no longer single in either sense of the word, had come aboard. As yet they had shown no interest in other-species legends or in anything but each other apart from galloping ponderously up and down the sloping ramp on one side of the pool.
“Theoretically,” said O’Mara, “it is possible for two Earth-humans and a pair of overenthusiastic Tralthans to swim together, but…”
“We’d be mad in the head to try it,” Joan finished for him. Laughing, she added, “Am I right in thinking that you dislike the water, Kledenth?”
“You’re wrong,” said the Kelgian, ruffling its fur. “I intensely hate, detest, and abhor the water. Let’s move over to the lounger beside the direct-vision panel. There’s nothing to see, but at least we’ll be out of range of the liquid fallout.”
They picked their way between the multi-species exercising and gaming equipment that filled the remainder of the recreation deck area. Apart from the swimmers, two Nidians playing something fast and complicated that involved knocking two tiny white balls between them, and a Melfan who was lying reading on something that resembled a surrealistic wastepaper basket, they had the place to themselves. Kledenth curled itself into a thick, furry S on a nearby mattress while Joan and O’Mara stretched out on loungers.