Groton clapped his hand on Afra’s shoulder, sending her skidding in the weightlessness. “Girl, if you don’t get on those computations before I reorganize our gear, I’ll have the cap’n hurl you into the brig!”
They had tied down their equipment and pushed out from Neptune slowly, without the benefit of full gravity nullification. This had been expensive in working fluid, but far safer for man and machine. Now the ship was scooping in more hydrogen and compressing it, at the fringe of the Neptune atmosphere, so that they would have full tanks for the main haul. They were ready to retool for straight space flight.
They had to melt, despite Groton’s earlier objection; there was no other way to cover such a distance. The cycle was routine, however, once their course had been set. They revived in good condition light-seconds from one of the satellites. It had seemed wiser to investigate the minion before the master.
Ivo had been lulled by the somewhat cavalier attitude affected by the others, but the sight of the alien sphere looming so close — telescopically — reminded him with a shock that this was to be their first physical contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial civilization. A malignant one.
It was monstrous as they approached, not so much in its hundred-foot diameter (Afra had done expert photographic work and analyzing, to pinpoint that size at a distance of a light-day, even allowing for the superior equipment sponsored by galactic technology) as in its suggestion of implacable power. The surface was pocked, as though it had been subject to spatial debris for many millions of years. Portions of it projected, reminiscent of cannon.
Afra took over the telescope to make detail photographs. Now, while her attention was wholly taken up, he could watch her. She was radiant; her hair was bound in a single braid that drifted over one shoulder and down her front, red against the white of her blouse. She had recovered the weight she had lost and was now in vibrant health. Her lips were parted, half-smiling in her concentration. Light from the equipment played over her high cheekbone and across her perfect chin, caressing her face with shadow.
Was it the single rose he smelled again?
“Moonstruck,” Brad had termed him, setting that emotional snare, and Afra was that moon. Ivo knew he would have loved her anyway, whatever her color, whatever her intelligence. It was perhaps her appearance more than her personality; he had disillusioned himself long ago about his romantic values and hers. Still, the love he felt encompassed all of her, the violent along with the beautiful. All, no matter what.
She jerked her head up, eyes widening in shock, showing that blue again. Ivo jumped guiltily, thinking she had caught him staring, but her exclamation banished such inconsequential alarm immediately.
“It’s tracking us!”
Groton and Beatryx seemed to materialize beside her.
“It’s live!” Afra said with the same shock. “It has a range-finder on us.”
“Since we’re a sitting duck, all we can do is quack,” Groton said, but he did not look as complacent as he sounded.
Beatryx ventured one of her rare technical comments: “Wouldn’t it have done something, if it meant to?”
Afra smiled, as she did so readily and prettily now. “You’re right,” Tryx. I’m getting hysterical after the fact. We’d be smithereened by now if we were going to be. We’re within fifty thousand miles, and you can bet that’s well within its sphere of control. So eradication just isn’t in our horoscope for today.”
The strange antenna continued to track as they came close. It was a bowl-shaped spiral of wire about two feet in diameter, with beads strung on the outermost spire. There was no other sign of life. Ivo felt the cold sweat on his palms and wiped it off, embarrassed by it and what it signified. Was he the only one to feel old-fashioned fear?
The journey via melting and ten-G acceleration had reduced the problems of deceleration and docking to elementary ones; maneuvering was nothing after distance had been conquered. Afra piloted them into a companion orbit — the destroyer-sphere five light-minutes distant, small as it was, was the primary for both — and let Joseph drift. None of them had conjectured how an object two miles in diameter could have a gravitational field about it equivalent to that of a small star. Galactic technology had done it, utilizing gravity as a tool, and that was explanation enough.
“Someone should stay on the ship,” Groton said. “We can’t be sure what is waiting — there.”
“Ivo should stay,” Afra said. “If anything happens, he’s the only one who can get the ship out. Neptune, rather.” She said it as though he were a fixture, a commodity; she hadn’t asked his opinion. “Give me one companion, though; I’m afraid of the dark.”
“I’ll stay,” Beatryx said. “You go, Harold.”
Ivo could find no legitimate objection to make.
The two got into their suits and departed via the airlock at the appropriate time. Ivo was alone with Beatryx for the first time since their last conversation on satellite Schön, seemingly so long ago. In the interim he had traveled into Earth’s historic past, and into its geologic past, and beyond the fringe of the galaxy. His body had run through the astonishing liquefication and reconstitution so many times that the process had become routine, even tedious. He had lived many lifetimes, and many of his basic certainties had been annulled.
Why, then, did it bother him so much that Afra and Groton should be together?
He tried to say something to Beatryx, but realized that he could not ask her advice without undermining her own framework. She had proper faith in her husband.
He looked at her, realizing in this isolated moment of association and reflection how much she had changed. She had been plump and fortyish when he met her at age thirty-seven; in the period of the Triton trouble she had become emaciated and fortyish. Now she was thirty-eight — and had regained her health without her former avoirdupois. She looked thirtyish. Her hair had brightened into full blonde, her limbs were sleek, her torso reminiscent of the goddess she had been momentarily during the first re-constitution. It had happened gradually, this change in her; the surprise was that it had taken him so long to recognize it.
“You have changed, Ivo,” she said.
“I’ve changed?”
“Since your visit to Tyre. You were so young at first, so unsure. Now you’re more mature.”
“I don’t feel mature,” he said, flattered but disbelieving. “I’m still full of doubts and frustrations. And Tyre was nothing but violence and intrigue — not my type of life at all. I don’t see how it could have changed me.”
She only shrugged.
He glanced at the screen again, reminded that half their party was in the alien structure. Groton and Afra—
“She has let go of Bradley Carpenter,” Beatryx said. “Have you seen the difference? She’s changed so much. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Was there such a thing as being too generous? True, the two were risking their lives by attempting personal contact with aliens likely to be powerful and hostile; but the human interaction could not be entirely ignored. “I’ve noticed the difference, yes.”
“And she gets along so much better with Harold. I’m sure he has been good for her. He’s very steady.”
Ivo nodded.
“She’s such a lovely girl,” Beatryx said. There was no malice in her tone; nothing but concerned pleasure.
“Lovely.”
“You look tired, Ivo. why don’t I keep watch while you rest?”
“That’s very kind of you.” He went to his hammock and strapped himself in. It was an anchor rather than a support, in this weightlessness.
It was this about Beatryx, he thought: she was happy. There was no place in her philosophy for jealousy or petty conjecture. She did not worry about her husband because she had no internal doubts.
How much could the group have accomplished, without her? The ingredients of strife had been abundantly present, particularly with the strong personalities of Groton and Afra clashing at the outset, and the background specter of Schön, but somehow every flareup had been diverted or pacified. Beatryx had done it… and profited in the doing. Intelligence, determination, skill — these would have come to nothing without that basic stability.