Dan and Eva… they worked well together, liked each other, there was no burning romance but there was a growing attraction and certainly a marriage would make excellent sense from every standpoint. But then, for the first time since school days, he encountered Mary Lochaber.
This near summer solstice, at this middle latitude, daylight would endure for about forty-two hours. The searchers intended to lose none of them. Their aircar was aloft before the first eastward paling of the clouds.
Those had again covered the sky. Dan remembered Mary wondering how he could endure such almost perpetual gloom. “It’s not like that at all,” he answered. “Still another thing you ought to experience for yourself.”
Finally she had come, and—His knuckles stood white on the controls.
Eva turned her eyes from the forest. Beneath silver-bright heaven, in the absence of clear shadows, its treetop hues were an infinitely subtle and changeable intermingling. Their endlessness was broken by the upheaval of a plutonic tor, the flash of a waterfall and a great river, the splendid northward climbing of the entire land. Kilometers away, uncountable birds moved like a storm.
“You really are suffering, aren’t you?” she asked quietly.
He heard his own voice, rough and uneven: “I used to revel in the sheer bigness of the country. Now, when we have to find one speck that’s gotten lost somewhere, it’s horrible.”
“Don’t let it get to you that way, Dan. Either we learn to live with the fact of death—here—or we can never be happy.”
He recalled the tidal cross-chop that had capsized their boat when they were taking biological samples off the Hephaestian coast. Half-stunned, he might have drowned if she hadn’t come to his aid. Toshiro Hirayama, who had been like a brother to both of them, was indeed lost. The rest of the crew clung to the keel for hours before a rescue flyer found them. She got back her merriment as fast as any of the others. Nevertheless she still laid a wreath now and then before Toshiro’s little cenotaph.
“You’re a fine girl, Eva,” Dan said.
“Thanks,” she answered low. “However, it’s another girl on your mind, isn’t it?”
“And Ralph. And Bill.”
“Mainly her. Right?”
Brought up in his stepfather’s tradition that a man should not reveal his private feelings to the world, Dan had to struggle for a moment before he could nod and say: “Yes.”
“Well, she is beautiful.” Eva spoke without tone. “And a very charming, gracious person. But a wife for you?”
“We… haven’t discussed that… yet.”
“You’ve been giving it some mighty serious thought. And so has she.”
His heart stumbled. “I don’t know about her.”
“I do. The way her look dwells on you, the voice she speaks in when you are there—it’s obvious.” Eva bit her lip. “Is either of you in earnest, though? Truly?”
He thought of long talks, of hikes and horseback rides across her father’s lands, of dances in Wolfe Hall and afterward walking her home under frosty stars and hasty Sohrab and the bronze light of Raksh upon a clangorous river. There had been kisses, no more; there had been words like, “Hey, you know, I like you,” no more. Yet he had felt that when he came to dinner, her parents (and Ralph, her brother, who shared her blond good looks and sunny temperament) were studying him with a certain amiable intensity.
She herself? “I’m not sure,” he sighed. “They’ve got such a… a different style on High America.”
Eva nodded. “It might not count as a decent-sized village on earth,” she said, “but Anchor is where most of the population on Rustum centers, and where the industry and wealth and culture are. The alpine hinterland may be sparsely settled, but essentially it’s been tamed. People have leisure for fine manners. They may even be overcultivating that kind of thing, as a reaction against the early hardships. Meanwhile, we’re the raw frontier folk.”
“You’re hinting at a social gap? No, the Lochabers aren’t snobs. Nor are we yokels. We’re scientists, carrying out research that is both interesting and necessary.”
“Granted. I don’t want to exaggerate. Still, it was getting to know those friends of yours—a sort of overnight intimacy that never quite happens in their own safe environment—that drove home to me the fact that there is a difference.”
He could not kiss Mary at Moondance. A glassite bulb sealed off her head, maintaining an air pressure that was normal for her. The same pressure was kept in the station’s one small guesthouse; but it took discouragingly long to go through its decompression chamber when one’s own lungs were full of lowland atmosphere. Anyway, she shared it with her brother.
But there were rich compensations. At last he could show her something of his world, that overwhelmingly greatest part of the planet she had known only from reading, pictures, a few stereotyped tours, and his words. During five magical days, she and Ralph could wander with him and Eva through the templelike vastness, intricacy, and serenity of the woods, or go ahorseback on a laughing breakneck hunt, or see how biological engineering joined slowly with hard work and patience to make the soil bear fruit for man, or….
Rakshlight glimmered on the curve of her helmet and the long fair tresses within. It made a rocking bridge across the waters, which lapped against the boat louder and more chucklingly clear than ever waves did in the highlands. Wind had died, though coolness still breathed through the summer air, and the sail stood ghostly. That didn’t matter. Neither he nor she were in any hurry to return.
She asked him: “Where does the name Moondance come from?”
“Well,” he said, “the lake’s big enough to show tides when Raksh is as close as now; and then the reflections gleam and flash around the way you see.”
She caught his hand. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “it ought to be Moon-Dan’s. Yours. To me it always will be. What you’re doing is so great.”
“Oh, really,” he stammered. “I’m just a servant. I mean, the scientists give me instrument packages to plant and collect, experiments and observations to carry out, and I follow orders. That’s all.”
“That is not all, as you perfectly well know. You’re the one who has to cope and improvise and invent, in the face of unending surprises. Without your kind of people we’d forever be prisoners on a few narrow mountaintops. How I wish I could be one of you!”
“Me too,” he blurted.
Was she suddenly as half-frightened as he? She was quick to ask: “Where did Ralph and Eva go?”
He retreated likewise into the casuaclass="underline" “I’m not sure. Wherever, I’d guess their flit will pass over the Cyrus Valley. She’s mighty taken by your car. She’s been faunching to try it out under rough conditions. The updrafts there——”
Her tone grew anxious. “Is that safe?”
“Sure, yes. Eva’s an expert pilot, qualified to fly any vehicle at any air density. This model of yours can’t handle much unlike the H-17, can it? It’s only a modification.” Because there was around him the splendor of his country, he had to add: “You know, Mary, what worries me is not how well the craft performs, but what its engine may signify. I’ve read books about what fossil fuels did to the environment on Earth, and here you’re re-introducing the petroleum burner.”