"Oh, there you are." Sverenssen’s voice sounded from behind her when she was halfway across one of the raised floors around the periphery of the corner room. She froze; had she done anything else, the coffee and the cup would have been all over the carpet. Sverenssen came out of one of the side rooms as she turned to face him. He was still wearing his bathing trunks, but had put sandals on his feet and thrown a shirt loosely over his shoulder. He was eying her uncertainly, as if he were mildly suspicious about something but not sufficiently sure of himself to be direct.
"I went to get some coffee," she said, as if it weren’t obvious. Immediately she felt like the classical dumb broad; but at least she managed to stop herself from following up her statement with an inane laugh. She was certain that Sverenssen was looking past her shoulder at the sculpture in its recess. She could picture it in her mind’s eye with a neon sign in six-inch letters above shouting, "I HAVE BEEN MOVED." Somehow she resisted the compulsion to turn her head.
"I wouldn’t have thought that somebody from Houston would be bothered by the sun," he remarked. "Especially somebody with a tan like yours." His voice was superficially casual, but had an undertone that invited an explanation.
For a second or two she felt trapped. Then she said, "I just wanted to get away for a while. Your friend. . . Larry, was starting to come on a bit strong. I guess I need time to get used to this."
Sverenssen looked at her dubiously, as if she had just confirmed his fears about something. "Well, I do hope you manage to loosen up a little before too much longer," he said. "I mean, the whole idea of being here is to enjoy oneself. It would be such a shame if one person allowed her inhibitions to ruin the atmosphere for everyone else, wouldn’t it?"
Despite her confusion, Lyn couldn’t keep a sharp edge out of her voice. "Look . . . I didn’t exactly come here expecting this," she told him. "You never said anything about playing musical people."
A pained expression came over Sverenssen’s face. "Oh dear, I do hope you’re not going to start preaching any middle-class morals. What did you expect? I said I would be entertaining some friends, and I expect them to be entertained and made to feel welcome in a manner appropriate to their tastes."
"Their tastes? That’s very nice of you. They must love you for it. What about my tastes?"
"Are you suggesting that my acquaintances fail to come up to your standards? How amusing. You’ve already made your tastes quite plain-you aspire to luxury and the company that goes with it. Well, you have them. Surely you don’t expect anything in this life to come free."
"I didn’t expect to be treated like a piece of candy to be dangled in front of those overgrown kids out there."
"You’re talking like an adolescent. Do I not have a right to expect you, as my guest, to behave sociably in return for my hospitality? Or did you imagine that I was some kind of a philanthropist who opens his home to the world for reasons of pure charity? I can assure you that I am nothing of the kind, and neither is anybody else who has the intelligence to understand the realities of life."
"Who said anything about charity? Doesn’t respect for people come into it anywhere?"
Sverenssen sneered. Evidently it didn’t. "Another middle-class opiate. All I can say to you is that whatever fantasies you have been harboring appear to have been sadly unfounded." He sighed and shrugged, apparently having already dismissed the matter as a lost cause. "The opportunity is yours to enjoy a life quite free from worries financial or otherwise, but seizing it requires that you throw off a lot of silly protective notions left over from childhood and make a pragmatic assessment of your situation."
Lyn’s eyes blazed, but she managed to keep her voice under control. "I think I just made it." Her tone said the rest.
Sverenssen appeared indifferent. "In that case I suggest that you call yourself a cab without further delay and return to your world of misplaced romanticism and unfulfillable dreams," he said. "It really makes no difference to me. I can get somebody else here within the hour. The choice is entirely yours."
Lyn stood absolutely still until she had fought down the urge to hurl her coffee in his face. Then she turned away and, mustering the effort to maintain her calm, walked off in the direction of her room. Sverenssen followed her coldly with his eyes for a few seconds, then shrugged contemptuously and hurried out through a side door to rejoin the others at the pool.
Two hours later Lyn was sitting in a Washington-bound plane beside the CIA agent who had accompanied her to New York. Around them sat families, couples, people alone, and people together; some were dressed in business suits, some in jackets, and others in casual shirts, sweaters, and jeans. They were talking, laughing, reading, and sleeping-just ordinary, sane, civilized people, minding their own business. She wanted to hug every one of them.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In the illusory world of VISAR’s creations, Karen Heller was half a billion miles tall and floating in space. A loosely coupled binary system of Ping-Pong-ball-sized stars, one yellow and one white, was revolving slowly in front of her while a myriad more glowed as pinpoints of light in the infinite blackness stretching away on every side. The center of mass of the two stars was located at one of the foci of a highly elongated ellipse, superposed on the view by VISAR, tracing the orbit of the planet Surio.
Hanging in space beside Helter and looking like some cosmic god contemplating the material universe as if it were a plaything, Danchekker extended an arm to point at the planet sliding along its trajectory in VISAR’s speeded-up simulation. "The conditions that Surio encounters at opposite ends of the ellipse are completely different," he said. "At one end it’s in close proximity to both its suns and therefore very hot; at the other it’s remote from them and therefore quite cool. Its year alternates between a long oceanic phase during the cool period, and an equally long hot phase during which Surio possesses practically no hydrosphere at all. Eesyan tells me it’s unique among the worlds that the Thuriens have discovered so far."
"It’s fascinating," Heller said, enthralled. "And you’re saying that life has emerged there despite those conditions. It sounds impossible."
"I thought so too," Danchekker told her. "Eesyan had to show me this before I’d believe otherwise. That was what I wanted to show you. Let’s go down and take a closer look at the planet itself."
They seemed to be rushing toward Surio as VISAR responded to the verbal cue. The stars vanished away behind them, and the planet grew rapidly and swelled into a sphere that flattened out beneath them as they descended from the sky. It was in a cool, oceanic phase, and as they plunged downward they shrank in size so that the sea stretching from horizon to horizon looked normal.
Then they were underwater, with strange alien life forms swimming and twisting in the ocean around them.
A black, fishlike creature, vaguely reminiscent of some shark species, seemed to single itself out, their viewpoint moving progressively as they followed it. Then, as VISAR altered the content of the information being injected into their visual systems, the body and soft tissues of the creature became a translucent haze to reveal clearly the structure of its skeleton. The light filtering through the water from above went out suddenly, then came on again, then continued to flicker steadily like a slow-motion stroboscope. The image of the fish remained motionless in front of them. "Day and night cycles," Danchekker explained in answer to Heller’s questioning look. "VISAR is speeding them up and freezing this image artificially so that we can observe it. Have you noticed yet that the intensity of the daylight periods is increasing?"