"The Ark? You mean the starship?"
"Yeah. Brand new technology, tested all to hell, and it still blew up when it got back from the Centauri system. People figured the scientists rushed things so they would have something flashy to keep them from losing their funding again. At least, that's what I read. The Ark came down about thirty miles from here. It was supposed to land at one of the space stations or on the moon, but it came all the way home. And before it blew up, Eli got out."
"Eli . . . ? What are you telling me?"
"His name is Asa Elias Doyle. He was their geologist. In case you haven't noticed, he can drop that dumb accent of his whenever he wants to. The disease is from the second planet of Prox-ima Centauri. It killed ten of a crew of fourteen. I
think more would have lived, but they began by isolating anyone who got sick. Then they found they had to restrain
them to keep them isolated." She shuddered. "That amounted to slow death by torture.
"Anyway, four survived to come home. I think they had to come home. The compulsion drove them. But when they landed something went wrong. Maybe for once, someone managed to break the compulsion. The ship was destroyed. Only Eli managed to get out. But in one way, that didn't matter. He brought Proxi Two back to us as well as a crew of fourteen could have. And now . . . now it's as Terran as you or me."
PAST 7
A few minutes of careful listening told him there were seven people sharing the isolated wood-and-stone house with him. There were the two adult sons and a twenty-year-old daughter, who had spent the night in Barstow. There was their mother, who had brought food and who had been kind, and the sons' new young wives, who were eager for the
separate houses to be finished. There was the white-haired patriarch of the household -a stern man who believed in an outdated, angry God and who knew how to use a shotgun. He reminded himself of this last when he met the daughter. Meda, her name was.
Meda introduced herself by walking into the room he had been given just as he pulled on a borrowed pair of pants. And instead of retreating when she saw that he was dressing, she stayed to watch. He was so glad she was not the woman of the night before, the woman whose scent had frozen him outside her window, that her brazenness did not bother him.
This one's scent was far more interesting than a man's would have been, but she had not yet reached that dangerous
time in her cycle. She was big like her mother-perhaps six feet tall, and stocky where her mother was becoming old- woman thin. Meda was brown-haired, heavily tanned, and strong-looking-probably used to hard work.
She stared at him curiously and was unable to conceal her disappointment at his thin, wiry body. He did not blame her. He was disgusted with his appearance himself, though he knew how deceptive it was. He had been good-looking once. Women had never been a problem for him.
This woman, however, was a problem already. Her expression said she recognized him. That was completely
unexpected- that someone in this isolated place would keep up with current events enough to know what one of fourteen astronauts looked like. Unfortunately, his face had changed less than the rest of him. It had always been thin. And with the Ark returning, there must have been a great rebroadcasting and republishing of old pictures. This woman had probably just seen several of them in Barstow.
"How have you lost so much weight?" she asked as he pulled on a shirt. The clothing belonged to Gabriel Boyd, the father of the family. He was thin, too, though not quite as tall. The pants were too short. "You look like you haven't eaten for weeks," Meda said.
"I am hungry," he admitted.
"My mother says you just ate enough for two people."
He shrugged. He was still hungry. He was going to have to do something about it soon. "We don't have a videophone," she said, "or a telephone, or even a radio."
"That's okay. I don't want to call anyone." "Why not?"
He did not answer.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I want you to get out of here before your father or one of your brothers gets the wrong idea." "This is my room."
That did not surprise him. The room did not look as though it belonged to a young woman. There was no clothing in sight, no perfume or makeup, no frills. But it smelled of her. The bed smelled of her.
"I was in Barstow with my brothers overnight," she said. "There are some supplies my brothers can't be trusted to buy,
even with a list." She gave him a sad smile. "So I went to the big city."
"Barstow?" Like most desert towns, it had been water-short and shrinking for years-not that it had ever been big. "Anything bigger would be too sinful. It might tempt me or contaminate me or something. You know, I've only been to L.A. twice in my life."
He wiped his wet face with dripping hands. She did not know how she tempted him to contaminate her. His compulsion was to touch her, take her hands perhaps, scratch or bite if she pulled away. Sex would have been very satisfying with her, too, though not as satisfying as when she reached her fertile time. She was not the kind of woman who would have attracted him in any way at all before. Now all a woman had to do to attract him was smell uncontaminated.
He looked away from her, sweat soaking into his borrowed clothing. "You're not missing anything by keeping away from cities," he said. He had been born in a so-called middle-class residential area of that same vast, deadly Los
Angeles she wanted more of, and if not for his grandfather, he would probably already have died there. Many of the
people he had grown up with had died of too much L.A. A girl like this one, not pretty, eager for attention and excitement, would not survive a year in L.A.
"We barely have running water here," she grumbled.
Fool. She had clean, sweet well water here, free for the taking. In stinking L.A., she would have a limited amount of flat, desalinized, purified, expensive ocean water. In L.A., you could tell how little money a man had by how bad he smelled. "You don't know when you're well off," he told her. "But if you're crazy enough to want to try city life, why don't you just move?"
She shrugged, looking surprisingly young and vulnerable. "I'm afraid," she admitted. "I guess I haven't cut the umbilical yet. But I'm working on it." She fell silent for a moment, then said, "Asa?"
He looked at her sidelong. "Girl, even my enemies have more sense than to call me that." "Elias then," she said, smiling.
"Eli."
"Okay."
"You tell anybody?" "No."
That was true. She was enjoying having the secret too much to give it away. Now he had to keep her quiet.
"Why are you here?" she asked. "Why aren't you being debriefed or paraded down some big city street or something?" Why was he not in isolation, she meant. Why was he not waiting and contending with a misery no one but him could understand while a dozen doctors discovered what a dangerous man he was? Why was he not dead in an escape attempt? And considering the loss of the ship, its wealth of data, its frozen, dead crew, and its diseased, living crew, debriefing was a laughably mild name for what he would have been put through.
"What's the matter?" Meda asked softly. She had a big voice, not intended for speaking softly, but she managed. She had come closer. God help her, why didn't she go away? Why didn't he order her away or leave himself?