He did not linger. He had to see Locille. Rhame had already phoned the campus and reported that she was well but still asleep; but Cornut needed first-hand assurance.
A police popper took him to the campus in a pelting rainstorm and he ran through the wet grass, looking around. The grass was stained and Uttered; the windows of the Med Centre showed where the mob had nearly smashed its way in. He hurried past, past the aborigines' camp, now deserted, past the Administration Building; past the memory of Master Carl and the Clinic where Egerd had died. The rain clouds stank of fumes from fires in the city; across the river there still lay thousands of unburied dead.
But the clouds were thin, and radiance began to shine through.
In his room, Locille stirred and woke. She was quite calm, and she smiled.
'I knew you'd be back,' she said. He took her in his arms, but even in that moment he could not forget what Rhame had told him, what they had already learned from the drunken, babbling immortals. The number of incipient tele-paths was great indeed, as he had begun to suspect; but they were not 'abortions' of immortals, not at all.
They were the real thing. The mutation that had produced a St Cyr had produced many many millions; it was not shortlived humans they had killed or driven to death, it was young immortals. The gene was a dominant, and now that it had shown so often it would soon fill the race. What the immortals had done was not to preserve themselves at the expense of a race that should have become extinct. They had only protected their own power against the Cornuts, the Locilles, the others with whom they did not wish to share.
'I knew you'd be back,' she whispered again.
'I told you I would,' he said. 'I'll always be back...' and he wondered how to tell her what 'always' had suddenly come to mean for them.