"Oh, no, we'll eat something in Daisy Fay's room," Marco said. He didn't say why. Actually, he had two reasons. One was that neither he nor Daisy Fay liked to eat when their shipmates were watching. The other was simply that it looked to him as though Krake wanted to be left alone with Sue-ling Quong.
Marco turned both eyes on the lady doctor. Sue-ling looked pretty nearly exhausted to him—maybe from the ordeal of the surgery she had just performed; or maybe, Marco thought, from something else. He didn't know what was going on between Sue-ling and the captain, though he was beginning to get a pretty good idea, but there was obviously some kind of trouble. That didn't matter to Marco Ramos. Whatever happened, he was staunchly on the captain's side anyway. He paused one more second, looking for something to say that might take the captain's mind off his burdens. Then the face on his belly screen grinned ruefully, for the only thing he could think of to say was certainly not in that category.
He said it anyway. "Don't forget about the supplies, Francis," he said, and was gone.
Sue-ling looked after him. "What did he mean by that?"
Krake rubbed his stiff, short beard. "When we were looking for medical supplies Marco noticed we're running a litdc low on food. The Turtles didn't stock us up to cruise forever, with this many people."
"I thought Chief Thunderbird promised to take care of it," Sue-ling said.
"That's what I thought, too. If I had a suspicious nature, I might think the Turtles would be happy enough to see us all starve—then they'd have the ship to themselves. They can cat just about anything at all—even the bulkheads, if it came to that, I guess. But actually, I think the Turdes just didn't expect this kind of a trip, any more than I did." Then he took a deep breath and looked her in the eye. "What's the matter, Sue-ling?" he demanded.
She didn't answer right away. "Nothing that's your fault," she said at last. "I just made a mistake."
"The hell you did! What we did wasn't any mistake. You're not married to Sork Quintero—"
She grinned at him. It was not a happy grin. "Or Kiri," she pointed out.
He shook his head angrily. "I don't care how many people you've been sleeping with. You're not obligated to either one of them, Sue-ling!"
"But I really am, Francis," she said. "I love them, and that's all the obligation anybody needs, isn't it?"
He couldn't help asking, knowing he would regret it as soon as he said it, "If that's how you feel, how come you went to bed with me?"
"Yes," she agreed, "that's exacdy where I made my mistake." When she grinned at him this time, there was real humor in it along with the sadness. "I didn't say they didn't drive me crazy sometimes. Sork! Half the time I'm with him I wonder what's wrong with me, that I put up with his temper and his drinking and his bossing me around. And Kiri—well, he's so passive \ Sometimes being with him is just about like being all alone. But—well, here's where the test is. I can't imagine living the rest of my life without either of them."
"And what about me?"
She looked at him with affection and regret. "I like you very much, Francis," she said. "But, you see, I haven't got addicted to you."
When the time was close to coming out of wave-drive most of the ship's complement was back in the control room— lacking only the Quinteros, Sork still in his coma, Kiri once again by his bedside.
Krake looked up at that slowly swelling ocher disk on the screen, then turned to Moon Bunderan. "After we've all satisfied our curiosity, we'd better get out of here. Is your Taur going to be able to help us?"
"He would if he could, Francis," Moon said earnestly. She reached down to touch Thrayl, again slumped on the floor beside her. "I don't know what's the matter with him. He not only can't hear his songs anymore—the real ones, I mean— he's hearing something else that hurts him."
"What?" Krake demanded.
Moon said fretfully, "He can't seem to say. It's like anger and pain, all at once. Like someone screaming and screaming in his ear."
"Poor thing," said Sue-ling, but her tone was abstracted and her expression sad. Moon looked at her speculatively, wondering what had gone on in the last few hours. Whatever had been between Sue-ling and Francis Krake, it seemed to have gone badly. The captain was controlling an interior anger, and Sue-ling— Moon wished she knew what Sue-ling was feeling. As a doctor Sue-ling had been so machine-like sure and efficient at the operating table, and yet now, as a human woman, she seemed so vulnerable.
Of course, now she was only herself, not a puppet of a Turde memo disk.
There was no jealousy in Moon Bunderan any more. Her heart went out to this woman whom she admired. Whatever was troubling her, Moon wished she could case it. Impulsively, as Sue-ling passed her, Moon reached out a hand to touch her. Sue-ling looked up sharply and Moon, trying to find words that would help, said, "You were wonderful in the operating room. I—I envy you. I wish I could be a surgeon."
Sue-ling looked at her for a long, remote moment. Then her eyes seemed to come into focus and she smiled. "You could be, you know."
Moon said unhappily, "But I don't want to—well—"
"Become a memmie, like me?" asked Sue-ling, her facc hardening again. But it was only for a moment. "But I was a doctor before I became a memmie, Moon. You could learn. You're still young. You could even start now, if you wanted to; I've got some of my medical texts with me, and I'd be glad to help you with them."
Moon's smile was like a sudden sunrise. "Really?" But then she looked down at the Taur that was gazing mildly up at her as he lay across her feet under the control board. "But what would I do with Thrayl? If we got back to Earth and I did go to medical school—"
And stopped, because she had suddenly remembered what a very big "if" that was.
When they were coming out of wave-drive, close enough to the strange darkly glowing object that Moon thought she could actually feel heat from it, Kiri Quintero peered in. "Sork's resting quiedy," he reported. "Can I leave him so I can watch what happens?"
"Absolutely not," said Sue-ling firmly, but then she proposed a compromise. The chamber they had converted to an operating room didn't have proper hospital facilities, anyway; why not bed him down right here in the control room? There would always be someone to keep an eye on him, and, she said, someone must. That left no room for argument. Still unconscious, snoring faintly from time to time, he was strapped onto a cot in the control room.
When the transition flash came Sork did not even stir. Sue-ling was fussing with the sheet that covered him at the time— not because there was any need for it, just for the sake of something to do to help him. That wasn't like her, she told herself. Even less like the normal Sue-ling Quong, she discovered that she was weeping. She didn't understand what it was that brought those slow, endless tears trickling to her cheekbones. She didn't like it, because it was a confession of weakness, and so she concealed it from the rest of the Hind's crew. But there it was.
No one noticed, for everybody else in the control room was staring at the screens, fully occupied in trying to figure out just what it was that they were seeing, through all the myriad sensors the ship had to offer.
What struck Sue-ling about the gathering in the control room was that, for some strange reason, nearly everyone seemed—well—seemed to be once more alive. That was the only word that occurred to her. The despair that had blighted them all in the collapsing universe had melted away. It was crazy, she thought. They were not a centimeter closer to home, or even to anything that looked like a habitable world.
But even the Turtles were perking up as Marco waved a couple of tentacles at that great red coal blotting out half the sky. "Captain," he called, "I'm going to try straight optical frequencies now."