Chapter 9

The young spaceman was still silent.

Lyddy lifted her head. There was resolution on her tear-smudged face. "I'm going to leave you, Len! I can't go on living with a man who does the awful, evil, unnatural things you do...." Her voice petered out as her vocabulary proved unequal to her emotions. Poor Lyddy, he thought. And then, Poor Len, with emotions unequal to his vocabulary.

"Everything I did, I did for your sake, Lyddy," he told her softly, but no longer with any hope of her comprehension. "It was because I was poor and couldn't afford your love that I went into hyperspace." He couldn't help adding, "Doesn't it mean anything to you that I risked a whole universe for your sake, and that now I have worlds to offer you?"

"Don't put the blame on me, Len Mattern!" Angry tears stood in her eyes. "I never wanted anybody to do that much for me. All I wanted were nice things and somebody to take care of me and maybe love me. I never wanted to have the whole universe risked for me." Her voice broke on the truth. "Nobody's worth all that!"

She was right, he thought—being given too much can be worse than being given too little. The words spilled out of her; he'd been so disenchanted by her stupidity that he gave her credit for less understanding than she did have.

"You wouldn't've been able to wait fifteen-sixteen years for me if you really loved me. But you were happy the way you were—you and that extraterrestrial of yours. All you wanted was to dream about me. You were a fool ever to have come back for me; you shoulda stuck with your dreams."

And again, he knew, she was right. He felt very tired and empty, the way he'd felt after Schiemann and Balas had died, as if nothing mattered any more. He didn't argue with her.

"What would you do if you left me, Lyddy?" he asked gently.

"I can always—" she swallowed—"go back to my old job, I guess."

Alard gave an exclamation of horror, and Mattern agreed in his mind that that solution would never do. Beyond a doubt, she was his responsibility. And so was Alard. Why had he ever longed for a family?

And then an outside mind joined in with his and he knew what to do.

"Alard," he said, "before, I offered to do something for you. Now I'm not going to do anything for you, not a damn thing."

Alard drew himself erect. "I wouldn't expect you to, see? Even if you wanted to, I wouldn't take—"

"I want you to do something for me," Mattern cut in.

Alard paled, then flushed with anger. "If this is some half-baked way of thinking you can make up for things without me feeling—"

"Hear me out before you leap to conclusions. You said that you loved my wife...."

Lyddy gave a moan. "You know he was only stringing me along to get back at you."

"He wouldn't have done that," said Mattern. "Not a fine, upstanding boy like Alard, no matter how much he hated me. You really love Lyddy, don't you, Alard—as you said before?"

The boy looked frightened. "Only in a manner of speaking," he said quickly. "I was trying to make you jealous. I think of her as a sister—a sister-in-law."

"She's very beautiful," Mattern reminded him. And the xhindi had done their work well. She hadn't changed; they had preserved her for him just as she had been sixteen years before. If only they had let her change, then things might have worked out. They could have kept the body from growing old without holding back the mind—or had they not held back the mind? Was this the fullest maturity it was capable of?

"A man who has her as his wife should be very happy," Mattern pointed out. "You wouldn't want her to go back to what she'd been doing, and she won't stay with me."

"Yes, sure." There was a desperate note in the boy's voice. "But she's not young. I mean for me—although, of course, she looks young," he added, with a wild glance in her direction. "And she's not very—she isn't—"

Mattern got up and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. "Then if you feel that way about her and do as I ask, it will really be a favor to me."

"Why should I do you a favor?" Alard demanded. His eyes darted back and forth like an animal that is beginning to realize it is caught in a trap.

"To prove you're the better man," Mattern told him. "To heap coals of fire on my head. To prove that if there's bad blood in the family, it exists only in me."

Alard didn't ask what Mattern wanted him to do. He knew already.

Mattern put it into words: "I want you to take her with you."

"Take her," Alard repeated numbly. "Where?"

"Anywhere she wants to go—to Earth or back to Erytheia, or any one of the planets she chooses."

"Will she go with me?" Alard challenged. "You have to ask her; she has the right—"

"Oh, I'll go with you, Alard," Lyddy interrupted joyfully. "I'd go with anybody right now, but especially you."

"Even if you know I love you only as a sister?"

"That's better than nothing," Lyddy said. "Besides, you could change your mind. I think you and me have a lot more in common than him and me."

"I want to make sure there will always be someone to take care of her, to watch over her," Mattern told his brother. "Funny, I wouldn't have done what I did except for the sake of winning her, and now that I've won her, I can't hold her because of what I did to get her. But she was my dream and I want her to be cherished."

"That's noble of you, Len," Lyddy said. "I'll think of you often, and I won't be mad at you." She got up and linked her arm in Alard's. "You'll take good care of me, won't you, hon?"

But it was to his brother that Alard spoke. "I'll take good care of her," he promised, his voice thick with an emotion that was one part sentiment, one part resignation.

"Splendid," Mattern said. "I wouldn't want her to be cast adrift. She knows so little of any of the worlds outside her own restricted sphere."

"Sure," Alard replied miserably, "I understand. I'll do my best."

Mattern got up and put out his hand and, after a little hesitation, Alard took it.

"I hope in time you'll come to forgive me," Mattern said, "and that your hatred will dwindle into dislike, perhaps even tolerance."

"Oh, I don't hate you any more," Alard assured him. "I guess, in your way, you've had as much to put up with as I did." He frowned in perplexity. "But why did it have to be me?"

"You'll change your mind about that, too," Mattern said comfortably. "Lyddy is a very accomplished woman."