“Stacy, we’re not strangers. I’m his uncle.”
“Right. But she hadn’t seen you for eight years. And she didn’t even realize that Maria had died. And I’m certainly a stranger to her. She doesn’t know that I exist.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t.” There was the scraping of a chair on a wooden floor and the sound of footsteps, then Uncle Ryan went on, “Look, I’m not going to start us arguing by defending Lucy Kerrigan. It’s Joshua I’m concerned about.”
“And it’s Joshua that’ll be concerned about, too. Ryan, I never want to argue with you, about anything. But we don’t disagree at all. This is the best thing that could possibly happen to Joshua. There’s no future for him here at Burnt Willow—you know that even if you don’t want to admit it. Solferino is a whole new world. It will be marvelous for him. For Dawn, too.”
“Dawn can’t possibly go!”
“Well, if we go we can’t possibly leave her behind.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, Dawn can’t go before we do.”
“Oh, sure.” There was a pause, then Aunt Stacy went on in a thoughtful voice. “Mind you, Dawn will need special training anyway, because of—well, you know. She has her problems. It might help a lot if Foodlines agreed for her to go a little ahead of us, so they could take longer with her than usual. I’ll tell you what, why don’t I call Mort Langstrom tomorrow, and talk all this over with him? But I don’t want to discuss it any more tonight. It’s getting late, and I’m tired.” There was another scrape of a moving chair on the board floor, and an audible kiss. “Come on to bed, love. We’ll sort all this out in the morning.”
Josh heard footsteps, first on the lower level and then ascending the stairs. He tiptoed to his bed and lay down on top of the covers. There was the sound of running water, then the murmur of voices that gradually faded in the next few minutes.
Josh lay in the darkness with his eyes wide open. He felt too excited ever to sleep again. He knew what was going on, even if Uncle Ryan didn’t seem to. Aunt Stacy didn’t want Josh around, and the best way to do that was to make sure that Josh was twenty-seven light-years away, on Solferino.
Well, Josh wouldn’t say no to that. He could hardly wait. No place on Earth had anything to offer him. He would willingly go to Solferino tomorrow, or tonight, or as soon as they would let him.
But there was one other factor. Josh lay totally still, listening. There was not a sound inside the house. He eased himself off his bed and crept down the stairs to the next level. Uncle Ryan’s bedroom door was closed, but Dawn’s was open a crack.
Josh peeped in. She was asleep, her face pale and expressionless in the moonlight that slanted in through the window. He stared at her, and his earlier uneasiness changed to irritation.
He had a premonition about what was going to happen. Aunt Stacy didn’t just want Joshua out of the way; she wanted Uncle Ryan all to herself, for as long as she could get him. And that meant Dawn had to be out of the way, too.
By the sound of it, Aunt Stacy had some kind of deal going with Foodlines and Mort Langstrom. She would work them, as she was already working Uncle Ryan. And who would finish up dragging his dumb and retarded cousin after him through the node network, like a big dead weight around his neck?
Josh had his suspicions.
Chapter Five
Josh had thought of little else for two weeks. Now, with the reality sitting in front of him, he rather wished that it would go away. The node. There it was, right outside the ship, bright and threatening. To Josh’s eyes it loomed as big and cold as the summer moon on his last night at Burnt Willow Farm.
Dawn sat next to him, a sketch pad on her knee. He wasn’t sure that she knew he was there. She was staring out of the observation port and at the same time drawing furiously, totally absorbed. He glanced down at her pad, forcing his attention away from the node. She wasn’t sketching what she was seeing. She was, of all things, making a beautifully detailed picture of Burnt Willow Farm, as it had looked from the ridge.
What went on inside that smooth, dark-haired head? Did she even notice that they were in free fall? Did she realize that in another twenty seconds the ship would enter the glowing pearly sphere of a network node?
Other people were not as oblivious as Dawn. The row of seats held five reclining couches, all occupied. Josh looked past Dawn to the three Lasker brothers. He had been introduced to them for the first time at the spaceport, before they took off for orbit, and disliked them on sight. Like the five other trainee passengers on the ship, they had been ticketed by Foodlines for transportation to Solferino. They had been loud most of the time while they waited to board the ship, and when they were not shouting or fighting they were huddled together and whispering. If their sideways glances were anything to go by, they were sneering at the other travelers.
At the moment they were not sneering at anything. They were staring pop-eyed out of the port. Sig Lasker, only a year older than Josh but a head taller and forty pounds heavier, had a face the color of dirty snow. Rick and Hag, the thirteen-year-old twins, were not much better. All three of them had been throwing up off and on since the ship went into free fall. That was rather pleasing to Josh, because he and Dawn had had no trouble at all of that kind (so far, said a warning voice in his head). He wondered how the Karpov sisters were doing in the row behind. They didn’t say much, but Josh had the feeling that all four of them, even little Ruby, were pretty tough.
“Twenty seconds to node entry.” The prissy voice on the ship’s general address system belonged to Bothwell Gage. He was the Foodlines employee responsible for delivering the trainees to their destination. “Return to your assigned seats,” he went on. “Node entry can produce peculiar physical and mental effects.”
Gage was a company biologist who did not pretend to be thrilled with his present assignment. As he had pointed out, several times, he was headed somewhere else entirely. He had been given responsibility for the trainees only when someone at FoodLines headquarters realized that Gage knew Solferino well, and the planet was on the way to his final destination. Gage had made clear to the group the extent of his duties: He would tell them about Solferino, get them there in one piece, and hand them over to their teachers when they reached the planet. He seemed knowledgeable enough about facts, but when it came to people he was, in Josh’s opinion, totally naive. The biologist was small-boned, large-headed, and round-shouldered, and while he might do well on a place like Solferino, he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on a big-city street after dark.
“If you aren’t in your own seats now”—Gage’s voice turned coy—“in another half-minute I guarantee you’ll wish that you had been.”
On his final words, another voice chimed in. It was the control computer of the Cerberus, reading the record aloud for the benefit of the humans on board.
“Node surface distance two hundred meters. Velocity match twelve meters a second—eleven—ten—zero relative rotation—distance one hundred meters—velocity match eight meters a second—seven—six—separation forty meters—ship fields off, radio blackout commences—two meters a second, we are beyond abort option. Node entry beginning. Radio blackout is total.”
In other words, the ship was cut off from all contact with anything in the solar system. The pearly glow had grown until it filled the sky. Close up, it showed streaks and swirls of darkness, and within those, point scintillations of blue-white light.
“Node entry is beginning,” Bothwell Gage took over again from the computer. “The more you can relax, the better you will feel. We are doing fine.”