Part 10 (1/2)

”I'm stupid, Maril, but you're touchy. There's nothing personal.”

”There is to me!” she said fiercely. ”I was born among blueskins, and they're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed on Weald if I'd been known as--what I am! And there's Korvan, who arranged for me to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do just what you said,--abandon my home world and everybody I care about! Including him!

It's personal to me!”

Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.

”I'm sorry,” he repeated, ”Drink your coffee!”

”I don't want it,” she said bitterly. ”I'd like to die!”

”If you stay around where I am,” Calhoun told her, ”you may get your wish. All right. There'll be no more questions, I promise.”

She turned and moved toward the door to the sleeping-cabin. Calhoun looked after her.

”Maril,” he called out to her.

”What?”

”Why were you crying?”

”You wouldn't understand,” she said evenly.

Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there is no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand women.

Calhoun annoyedly had to let fate or chance or disaster take care of Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.

But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the reference tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information on exactly the subject he needed. He left the control-room to go down into the storage areas of the Med s.h.i.+p's hull. He found an ultra-frigid storage box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of liquid air. He donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of gla.s.s was embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage-box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating of frozen moisture.

He went back to the control-room and pulled down the panel which made available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biological laboratory.

He set the plastic block in a container which would raise it very, very gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there. It was, obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quant.i.ty of the same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus with great exact.i.tude.

”This,” he told Murgatroyd, ”may be a good day's work. Now I think I can rest.”

Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the Med s.h.i.+p.

The girl Maril may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in a chair which at the touch of a b.u.t.ton became the most comfortable of sleeping-places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled over his nose. There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the s.h.i.+p. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound--carefully recorded for this exact purpose--the feel of the s.h.i.+p would have been that of a tomb.

But it was quite otherwise when another s.h.i.+p-day began with the taped sounds of morning activities as faint as echoes but nevertheless establis.h.i.+ng an atmosphere of their own.

Calhoun examined the plastic block and its contents. He read the instruments which had cared for it while he slept. He put the block--no longer frosted--in the culture-microscope and saw its enclosed, infinitesimal particles of life in the process of multiplying on the food that had been frozen with them when they were reduced to the spore condition. He beamed. He replaced the block in the incubation oven and faced the day cheerfully.

Maril greeted him with great reserve. They breakfasted.

”I've been thinking,” said Maril evenly. ”I think I can get you a hearing for--whatever ideas you may have to help Dara.”

”Kind of you,” murmured Calhoun. ”May I ask whose influence you'll exert?”

”There's a man,” said Maril reservedly, ”who--thinks a great deal of me.