Where was the boy?
She stepped out onto the eastern sun deck as though for a breath of air—who would want that? Steamy, sultry, it stung her nose. There was no one there, no one on the long, green lawn, no one visible in the piney grove or around the water-lily pool. "Sawyer," she called harshly over her shoulder. The butler appeared at once. "Sawyer, have you seen Pettyman Castor this morning?"
"Yes, modom. In the conservatory. With Comrade Feng Miranda, modom," he said, and Delilah whirled and glared at the tone of faint amusement in his voice. How terrible if even the servants thought she was jealous of the boy! Delilah was in no good mood as she stormed through the rooms toward the conservatory.
Before she saw them she heard the voices, Castor's good-humored growl, Miranda's angry soprano. It was not only Miranda's voice that annoyed Delilah, the voice that had always grated on her nerves—pitiful bird-chirp, how could a sensible man like Castor stand hearing it? The words were far worse. She was denouncing Castor: "You're a honey-ball! Rice-flour white on the outside, Han yellow inside—you're a traitor to your country!"
And Castor's placatory "Aw, sweet, you're as Han as Delilah is. What are you carrying on about?"
If only he had not said her name, thought Delilah as she stormed into the doorway, glaring at them with frost and flame. "You have no country, you fool," she shouted at Miranda. "You had a desert, and we Chinese came and brought it back to life for you!" She blasted them while she froze them. They stood petrified, Castor with a foolish grin on his face, hand still uplifted in mock-defense against Miranda's attack; the girl with her mouth still open to deliver it. And what a nasty little mouth she had, lip-sticked to make it worse!
Whatever Miranda was, she was no coward. "We hate you for it!" she cried belligerently.
And that was fine! How stupid of the girl to let it become a debate, Delilah thought, for at debate she was confident of winning. She advanced into the room, the fire and ice controlled. "I see," she said, seating herself between them. "You and those other madmen the Russians, you did your best to destroy the world, did you not?"
"We did not! We were simply defending ourselves—a network of antimissile satellites that could not possibly be used to attack—"
"Ah, yes," nodded Delilah. "You erected your nuclear laser defenses, yes, so that the Russians could thereafter do nothing to hurt you. But you could hurt them. And you were terribly surprised when it all failed."
"They attacked us without warning!"
"Yes," sighed Delilah. "The naked warrior saw his opponent putting on armor, so he attacked while he thought there was still a chance to win, is that not right?" The girl was angrily silent. "But let us consider this question of hate, Comrade Feng. You hate us because we brought you law and order. You hate us for helping to get your farms clean again. You hate us because you insanely destroyed what used to be your country and your people were unable to put it together again. I understand that. It is natural to resent help. The wounded dog snaps at the master who tries to bind its wounds."
"Tsoong," Miranda said, "the British brought law and medicine to India long ago. Did that make the Indians love them? Or want them in their country?"
Delilah shook her head indulgently, though the frost and fire were still in her voice. "The cases are entirely different. There it was a few thousand Englishmen running the affairs of a hundred million Indians. Now there are almost as many Han Chinese in North America as aborigin—as persons of North American extraction."
"Do you think that makes it better?"
"It makes what you say unfair!"
Miranda said doggedly, "You're Han, Tsoong. You don't understand."
"You're Han, too!"
Miranda shook her head. "I'm an American, Tsoong. So is Castor if only he knew it. And," she added, rising and moving toward the door, "this conversation is at an end."
The Indian unrest grew. The alien ship was moving into position. The training went on. The man-rated ship was tested and fueled and stocked.
And armed.
Only Delilah and Tchai Howard, of the crew, knew about the armament. Castor was kept away from the ship while the weaponry was installed and so, of course, were the other "Americans." Castor objected only out of annoyance, because the ship was so fascinating to him; Feng Miranda objected out of the reasons she always had for objecting to anything the Han Chinese did. "You stole our space program from us," she shouted at Delilah, and Delilah snapped back, "You have no space program. There is no 'you'! In any event, you have neither the training nor the aptitudes to be of any use."
"You said I couldn't stand the centrifuge, either, but I did! I won twenty yuan from Tchai Howard because I took more Gs than he could!"
"Tchai Howard will be spoken to," snapped Delilah. "Go about your business!"
But at last the great day dawned.
To Tsoong Delilah's astonishment, she found she was frightened. Going into space was not, after all, like getting into an airplane. Going into space was like entering an immense, hostile, and unknown place where human beings—even Renmin police inspectors—came at their peril; and the burden of the responsibility (and the fear) of meeting whoever was in the alien spacecraft was terrifying. She let her dressers put her space suit on her and attach the vulgar and uncomfortable little pipes and slip the mating collar around her neck, and she was in a daze.
It all went so fast! Out of her dressing room, into the White Room, up the elevator with Tchai and Castor in their own suits next to her, as silent as she. She glanced into their faces and saw only what they saw in her, the opaque light-shutter faceplates and no humanity behind them; they didn't talk; the technicians and helpers talked, kept on talking, talked endlessly, but it was only orders: "Through the door, please!" "Sit down in your seat, please!" "Move your arm so I can see if it's free—"
And then the great belly-busting thrust from below and the queerest moment of sick terror and wild jubilance Tsoong Delilah had ever felt.
And they were in space. Forty kilometers up in six hundred seconds, dropping the boosters and the tanks, and Delilah was too busy to think and Castor too drunk with delight to stop talking. They were in space! Naked hairless apes, spurning the planet that had borne them! What a clod you are, Tchai Howard, Delilah exulted as she matched her board for the lifting thrust—not a word out of you in this great moment...
The words did come from Tchai then, but not from the space-masked figure still beside her. They came from the space control radio, and they said,
"Tsoong! Pettyman! Arrest her at once! She must be shot! She knocked me out and took my suit!"
Delilah and Castor turned to stare at the figure between them.
"I told you I could get into space," said the shrill, vindictive voice of Feng Miranda.
V
It was impossible to turn back, of course.
It was ridiculous to "arrest" Feng Miranda, though of course Delilah did so. But what did "arrest" mean when there was nowhere to go?
It was inevitable, though, that rage and frustration exploded on the girl, and her nose was still bleeding from the back of Delilah's fist when they sighted the alien spacecraft. If Castor had not got in the way, there would have been more than a nosebleed, but he took Delilah's karate chop harmlessly on his forearm and managed to squirm out of the way of Miranda's retaliatory kick. "Don't kill each other, damn it!" he shouted. "How'll I get rid of the bodies?"
Delilah breathed hard for a moment. A moment was all she had; the spaceship needed to be piloted or they were all dead and the mission wasted. "I will deal with you later," she said through gritted teeth, and devoted her attention to the board.