"Have a good trip, sir," said the officer.
"Thanks," said Hal.
Carrying his small satchel of personal possessions, he ducked through the matched locks, feeling the brief but sudden deeper chill of heat radiated from his body to the cold metal of the lock interiors, and stepped into the repair boat.
"This way, sir," said a middle-aged, muscular shipwoman in white coveralls. "You'll have to thread your way through the equipment, I'm afraid."
"That's all right," Hal said, following her along a complicated route, around and between the hard-edged pieces of equipment, toward the control cabin in the bow of the boat.
"It's just that the regular ship-to-surface passenger jitney is too big for the entry lock at the Encyclopedia," she went on over her shoulder. "That jit is built to carry up to two hundred passengers and crew."
"They explained that," said Hal.
"Just so you don't feel snubbed." She laughed. "In here, now…"
They entered the cabin and Hal found himself in a room full of control consoles and screens, with three operations chairs up ahead, facing a segmented vision screen. The chair on the far left was already occupied by a shipman, sitting idle.
"Take the seat in the middle, if you don't mind," said the shipwoman.
Hal obeyed. She seated herself to his right and laid her hands on the console before her. Behind them, there was the sound of their airlock resealing and a brief jolt. Then all feeling of motion ceased
"That's it, up ahead," offered the shipman. He was a wiry man in his forties, smaller than his partner.
Hal looked into the large screen. Its segments at the moment were combined to show a single wide image that spread itself out before them. It was an image of starfilled space; and in the center of it, in full sunlight, floated the small, misty globe of their destination.
The Final Encyclopedia hung there - as they also seemed to hang still, facing it - like a ball small enough for the hand of a young child to hold comfortably. But as Hal watched, it began to enlarge. It swelled and grew before him until it had filled the screen and began to loom, smoke-gray and enormous, over their repair boat, shutting out their view of half the universe.
An opening of bright, yellow light appeared before them as an iris dilated; and they rode through into the same noisy metal cavern that Hal remembered from his first visit, five years before.
The shipwoman got up with him, and steered him back through the equipment in the main cabin of the repair boat and out through the airlock that was already standing open.
He walked down the sloping ramp, his ears assaulted by the clangor of machines moving about on bare metal decking. Ahead of him was the faintly hazy circle that was the entrance to the interior of the Final Encyclopedia; as he stepped through it, the sound behind him was cut off. He stood, and let the moving corridor onto which he had just stepped carry him forward toward a vision screen on the wall to his right, ahead. The screen had been blank, but just before he came level, it illuminated, and the face of Ajela looked out.
"Hal? Take the first door on your right," her voice told him.
He rode along for another ten meters, saw the door and went through it into another, shorter corridor without a moving walkway. At the end of this was a second door. He pushed it open when he reached it, and went in.
As it sucked shut softly behind him, he saw that he had come into a room half-office, half-lounge. The farthest wall, almost a copy of what he remembered seeing in Tam Olyn's suite, appeared to give on a stream winding through a summer forest; but here the light was like the sunlight of early morning. Ajela was already rising from behind a large desk. Her pink gown rippled as she ran to him, kissed him, then stood back to stare.
"Look at you!" she said.
He had, in fact, been looking at her. After Amanda, and other women he had met on the Dorsai, she gave an appearance of being tiny and fragile - not merely small in stature, by comparison, but more delicate in bone and feature. And yet, he knew that in comparison to the general run of humanity she would not be considered so.
"Look at me?" he answered, triggered by her warm smile to smiling back at her, for no other reason than that she was radiating such happiness. "Why?"
"You're a monster. A giant!" she told him. "Twice the size you were when I saw you last, and savage-looking enough to scare people."
He laughed at that.
"Savage-looking?" he said
"See for yourself." She turned him toward the wall at his left, and must have signalled some sensor; for the misty blueness of the wall changed to a mirror surface that gave him back his own image and that of the room around him.
He gazed, startled in spite of himself. He was used to seeing himself every morning as he wiped off the stubble of his beard; and from time to time otherwise, he had caught glimpses of himself in reflecting surfaces like this one. But he had not viewed himself as he now did, with Ajela beside him and in sudden empathy with how she must see him.
The sudden stranger he now saw in the mirror towered above the slim, blond-haired young woman at his elbow. The man's body was lean, broadening from a slender waist to a wide chest, and shoulders broad enough above the narrowness of waist and hips to make him look almost top-heavy. The face above the shoulders was strong-boned, the mouth level, the nose straight; and the eyes, dark gray with a slight difference in color between them, looked out under straight black brows and a wide forehead topped by straight, almost coarse, black hair. But even these features, in total, could not by themselves make for the overall impression that had caused Ajela to call him savage-looking. There was something else, an impression about the figure he stared at which might have been called one of controlled violence, if it had not been for a somber thoughtfulness of eyes, that seemed to overwhelm the general impression of face and body, alike.
He turned from the screen to Ajela.
"Well," she said. "You're back to stay? Or is it only a visit?"
He hesitated.
"Both," he said. "I'll have to explain what I mean by that - "
"Yes, you will," she said; and suddenly hugged him again. "Oh, Tam's going to be so happy!"
She took his hand, towed him toward her desk and pushed him into a padded float beside it.
"How are you?" she said. "Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?"
He laughed.
"I've still got a pretty good appetite," he said. "But let's just talk for the moment. You sit down."
She perched on the edge of her desk, facing him.
"Let me explain what I meant, just now," he said; and hesitated, again.
"Go on," said Ajela.
"I've been thinking about how to explain this to you," he said slowly. "I was going to ask you to believe me when I said there's nothing I could imagine myself wanting to do more, than take Tam up now on his offer to work here at the Encyclopedia…"
"And then you realized it wasn't true," said Ajela, quietly watching him. "Is that it?"
"Yes and no." He frowned at her. "The Encyclopedia pulls me like a moon pulls the tides. I've got things to do here. In the real meaning of the words, it's a tool I've wanted all my life. I know there're things I can do with it, if I had time, that haven't even been dreamed of by anyone else, yet. When I was here before, I really wanted to stay. But you remember I found out I couldn't. There were other things that had to be done. Well, I've still got most of them to do."
"That's the whole reason that's holding you back from staying with us?" She was watching him closely.
He smiled a bit ruefully.
"That's the immediate reason," he said. "But, you're right, to be honest, it isn't all of it. You see, these last few years I've been out among people - "