Nick sat in a cushioned bucket seat in back watching the rock-candy towers of Averyville grow suffused with the glow of the setting sun. He could see Mutagen Labs in the distance, the mushroom-shaped buildings sharply defined against a background of soft green meadow and parkland. It was all very beautiful, and if he hadn’t felt so awful, he might have enjoyed it. He glanced across at his alien guest. Hali Hasan-nah, who was holding the precious case in her lap and staring straight ahead, her lips a straight line, her eyes fixed on the back of the cabby’s head.
“I’m . . he began, and saw it was useless.
At the moment she was concerned only with delivering the freezer case safely to Mutagen. Having carried it so many light-years she dared not allow a mishap now. Nick understood. He knew that time passed more slowly on a spaceship traveling at near-relativistic speeds. During her three-month galactic crossing twenty or thirty years might have elapsed on her home planet. If something happened to the samples in the freezer case, new samples might be another thirty years in arriving. And by the time the antidotal virus had been constructed and shipped back, the two or three Alta-Tyberians who were still alive might joke about it philosophically.
Nick studied her more closely. Her skin was sea-blue, so fine as to be almost transparent. The scintillation of light across it seemed to be caused by some sparkling oil, possibly cosmetic or else an effusion of the flesh. Her neck was long, thin and graceful; her face, surrounded by a halo of fleecy white hair, was dominated by huge almond eyes. Nose and mouth combined in a pliant beak, giving her the profile of a hawk. She wore billowy white robes which left her shoulders bare, and for jewelry a single sunstone stuck to her forehead.
How long, Nick wondered, would one have to stare at that face before it could be appreciated within its own aesthetic? Could a human ever see her thus? Or would he always judge her by human standards?
Human standards.
Her hands had four long fingers apiece, fingers grasping the edge of the freezer case so tightly that the ligaments stood out like wires.
“Faster, please, sir,” she called to the cabby.
“Lady,” the cabby called back, “I’ve got the booster on full—any faster and we'll jump the ribbon.”
Even as he spoke the cab swerved dangerously; then Nick felt it tear free of the track. Robbed of its magnetic cushion, it dropped suddenly, stomach-wrenchingly, onto its auxiliary wheels. But at that speed wheels were no use. With a hideous squeal of rubber they skidded and spun. A rush of adrenalin accelerated Nick’s brain until everything looked like a slow-motion movie: the other drivers beeping their horns, skimming out of the way; the looks of fright on their faces; Hali’s scream piercing his ears like some high-pitched siren . . .
And he thought, with incredible calm. Oh my God, it’s actually happening, we’re going to crash. If we hit the guard rail slowly the emergency magnets will hold us there—but if we’re going too fast we’ll smash through and topple off the arch, eighty meters to the ground. We’ll all be killed. And there’s so much I haven’t done! Why did I waste all that time working for Grim. . . ?
He felt as though minutes had passed; actually, it was only three seconds before they hit the guard rail and stuck there with a bone-rattling thunk! Airbags inflated into giant pillows, pinning them to their seats and cushioning the impact.
The doors sprang open. Nick punched down the airbags and grabbing Hali by the arm, pulled her out of the cab. Her arm felt as thin and light as a breadstick, and he worried it would crack under his grip. They staggered onto the concrete just as some short circuit ignited the upholstery; fabric and foam burned with an evil odor and a thick black smoke spewed from the open doors.
Hali was unsteady on her feet. Her entire body trembled. Nick helped her away from the wreck, back to a safe place where the cabby was standing, watching the column of smoke with misery.
“I just made the last down payment,” he said.
Nick was consoling. “At least we got out alive. In a minute that fire will reach the hydrogen tank. We’d have been flash-fried— What?”
Hali was mumbling something. She stood beside him, hypnotized by the sight of the burning car. She mumbled it again:
“My briefcase . .
Nick glanced at her wrist. The case was gone; the broken strap hung there like a piece of modern jewelry. The next instant he was running across the concrete and then he was disappearing into the thick black smoke which billowed from the cab’s doorways.
“Come back!” the cabby screamed. “You crazy?” Perhaps a half minute later he screamed, “Get out of there! It’s going to blow up!”
Hali wrapped her long fingers into fists and pressed them to her mouth.
Meanwhile a MagLev fire truck and an ambulance were arriving along the emergency rail. Traffic had been cleared for a radius of two-hundred feet and drivers left their cars and sat on the hoods, silent, hungry-eyed, waiting for the bouquet of blood and singed flesh to spice their daily fare, to make their pulses race and furnish talk for the dinner table.
“He better get out of there,” the cabby said to nobody in particular.
And out Nick tumbled, weaving and retching, clutching the briefcase to his chest. He staggered drunkenly some forty feet before the heat finally reached the hydrogen; then came the savage roar and the fireball, and the shock wave that knocked him on his face. Even as he fell he sheltered the briefcase with his body.
IV
“You have a visitor,” the nurse said. She was an older woman, plump and pink, with sculptured white hair and an infuriatingly efficient manner.
“Who?” '
Nick’s voice was muffled; he had to lie on his belly on the waterbed so that the raspberry jam which had once been his back could heal. It might have been a lot worse. He had suffered only minor lesions from his fall on the concrete. However, the heat of the fireball had seared through his clothes and his skin, leaving him with third-degree burns from the back of his neck clear down to his calves. The area had been covered with synthi-skin—an antibiotic spongy material, to soak up the pus, backed by a microporous film which kept out bacteria. An electroanesthetic filament had been slipped into his spine; he should have been numb but the placement had been slightly off and instead he itched unbearably. Needless to say, he could not scratch. To Nick it seemed that this must be what the ancient Terrans had called “Hell,” and despite his rational mind he found himself wondering what he had done to deserve it. Silly. The universe was a random occurrence on the road to entropy. Why look for sense or justice? Yet he did and came back, as man had for centuries, empty-handed.
“An alien.”
Nick couldn’t see the nurse wrinkle her nose in distaste, but he could detect it in her voice. He thought it funny that after living with aliens for so long people could still be bigoted. Fear of that which is different: the principle which keeps the small mind small.
“A lady with blue skin?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tell her I don’t want to see her.”
Even as he felt pleasure in reversing the situation—in making Hali the supplicant—he realized the pettiness of it. He had been hurt and he wanted to hurt back. He felt worse hearing the satisfaction in the nurse’s voice:
“I certainly will!”
Morgan came by later that day with a box of candies. Nick declined, explaining that he was on a special diet to promote healing (doctors were only beginning to understand the importance of diet to recuperation).
“Too bad,” Morgan said. He took a seat by the bed and popped a candy in his mouth. “Thal was beautiful. Heroic. When you saved that briefcase you saved a whole damned planet. That’s something to be proud of. I think you should get a special commendation. In fact I recommended a promotion and a raise.”