"That's all I need to know." Intensely aware that the dressing gown was no longer fully lapped around her torso, he closed his eyes to loss Silvia again and found himself looking at Gerald Mathieu's broken corpse.
"Trouble is," he said, floundering and distracted, "I'm not sure what to do next."
She smiled calmly. "How about locking the door?"
"Good thinking." Dallen thumbed the door's security button and when he turned back to Silvia the dressing gown was around her ankles on the floor. Dry-mouthed and reverent, he surveyed her body, then took her extended hand and went with her to the bed. She lay down at once and locked herself on to him, now trembling, as he positioned himself beside her. They clung together for a full minute, he still clothed, simulating the sex act in a way which by every law of nature should have aroused him to near-orgasm, but each rime he allowed his eyes to close there was Mathieu's serene-smiling death mask with the tridents of blood at each corner of the mouth and the anaesthetic coldness was gathering in his own loins, emasculating him, denying him any stake in the game of Life. Without waiting for Silvia to sense what was happening, he rolled away from her and dropped into a kneeling posture at the side of the bed. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him in puzzled reproach.
"It's all right," he said, almost grinning with relief at the clarity of his understanding of the situation. "This won't make any sense to you, Silvia, but I was trying to be two people at once, and it can't work."
"That makes perfectly good sense to me." Her understanding was intuitive, almost telepathic. "How long will it take you to become one people?"
Dallen gazed at her in purest gratitude. "About two minutes. There's something I have to do. Would you please wait? Right here? Like this?"
"I wasn't planning to go anywhere."
"Right." He stood up, strode to the door of the cabin and let himself out. A life for a life, he thought, amazed at the simplicity of the psychological equations in an area where he would have expected layer upon layer of murky Freudian complexity. Being born again allowed for no half-measures. He could not take from both existences, racking up debits in each, and therefore Gerald Mathieu had to be spared.
With the after-image of Silvia's full-breasted nakedness drifting in his vision, Dallen closed the cabin door behind him, but did not lock it. He turned towards the elevator. Two men — Renard and Captain Lessen — were approaching on the curved strip of deck between the cabins and the cargo well. As usual, they were engaged in heated argument, but Renard broke off on the instant of seeing Dallen and came straight to him, his gold-speckled face solemn.
"What were you doing in there?" he said directly. "It's a bit early for visiting, isn't it?"
Dallen shrugged. "Depends on how well people know each other."
"You're not fooling anybody, old son." Renard showed his bow of teeth as he waited for Lessen to sidle by him and get beyond earshot. His gaze was hunting over Dallen's face, and each passing second brought a change of his expression — amiable contempt, incredulity, alarm and dawning anger.
"If you'll excuse me," Dallen said, "I've got work to do." He tried to walk towards the elevator, but Renard detained him by placing a hand on his chest.
"You ‘d better listen to me," Renard said in a venomous whisper. "If I…"
"No, you'd better do the listening for once," Dallen said in matter-of-fact, conversational tones. "If you don't take your hand off me I'll hit you so hard that you'll be hospitalised for some time and may even the."
Renard was trying to form a reply when Lessen called to him in an aggrieved bark from the foot of the stair to Deck 4. Dallen ended the encounter by side-stepping Renard and walking to the elevator cage.
During the quivering descent to the bottom of the hold he indulged in a moment of satisfaction — perhaps Renard's trust in the universe was somewhat misplaced — and when the elevator stopped he went confidently to the lane which ended at Mathieu's stacks, taking the solvent sponge from his side pocket as he crossed the puddled floor. Sounds of movement nearby indicated that somebody was at work on the trays, but it was not until he had actually turned the corner that Dallen realised that things were not what they should be. High in the geometric jungle, amid the scattered bars of light and shade, there were unexpected signs of movement.
Somebody was climbing to the top of Mathieu's ladder.
In the instant of recognising the climber as Mathieu himself, Dallen saw that he was in the act of reaching for the topmost rung. With a despairing grunt, knowing he was too late to prevent the calamity, Dallen hurled himself to the foot of the ladder and turned his eyes upwards, bracing himself for what could easily be a crippling impact.
He was greeted by the sight of Mathieu angled nonchalantly outwards from the ladder, the slim plastic tube of his spray hose coiling down from his waist. His weight was taken by his right hand gripping the top rung.
"What's going on down there?" Mathieu said, his attention caught by the sudden movement.
"Nothing," Dallen assured him. "I slipped, that's all." He backed up the story by pressing a hand to his side as though nursing a strained muscle.
Mathieu descended at once. "Are you hurt?"
"It's nothing," Dallen said, experiencing a strange mixture of emotions at being so close to the man who had so profoundly affected his life. "But we ought to get a mop and take away some of this surface water before somebody really gets hurt." He rubbed his side, excusing himself from the chore.
"I’ll do it," Mathieu said compliantly. "I think there's a kind of broom closet near the elevator." He moved away and was lost to sight among the stacks.
As soon as he was sure of being unobserved, Dallen climbed Mathieu's ladder in a kind of vertical run, stopping when his face was level with the top rung. The light was less than ideal, but he could easily discern the frost-like coating of Pietzoff emulsion on the full length of the alloy tube., which meant that Mathieu should have received a fierce neural jolt as soon as his fingers had exerted pressure on the embedded crystals.
The only explanation Dallen could conceive was that the container he had stolen in Madison had come from a defective batch. Intrigued, momentarily forgetting the need for urgency, he lightly flicked the rung with a fingernail as a test.
The paralysing shock stabbed clear through to his feet.
His muscle control instantly disrupted, Dallen sagged and fell — then recovery came and he clung to the ladder, gasping with fright. He had almost dropped the whole way to the metal deck, a lethal twenty metres below, and had been saved only by the fact that his nail had served as a partial barrier to the Pietzoff s neural charge. And Mathieu was due to return at any second. Striving for full control over his body, Dallen inched upwards to regain the height he had lost. He squeezed the solvent sponge to activate it, wiped the top rung free of paint and got to the bottom of the ladder just as Mathieu appeared with a mop and bucket which could have been props from a period play.
"I love these high-tech solutions to the problems of space flight," he said, gamely cheerful as he set to work on the water-beaded deck, looking like a blond holo star making a bad job of playing a menial.
Dallen nodded, still slightly shaky, still baffled by his experience at the head of the ladder. By all the rules governing such things, Mathieu should have taken the big drop and hit the deck like a sack of bones. Was it possible that his right hand was an extremely lifelike prosthetic? Or was it merely, returning to the prosaic, that there had been an uneven distribution of crystals in the emulsion and Dallen had chosen the wrong place for his test? It hardly seemed likely, but it was the most acceptable explanation he could devise. Nobody was immune to Pietzoff.