The planet of the graybeard had gone to seed; nothing new, nothing not hallowed by tradition had a chance in its decrepit social order.
His home, Halsey's Planet, was rapidly, calmly, inevitably depopulating itself.
And Azor had fallen into a rigid, self-centered matriarchal order that only an act of God could break.
Was there a pattern? Were there any similarities?
Ross searched desperately in his mind; but without result. The image of Helena kept intruding itself between him and his thoughts. Was he getting sentimental about that sweet little chucklehead? Who, he hastily added, had come near to criminally assaulting him, who had climbed the. . . .
He turned to the little waiter and demanded: "Will she —Helena—be on the orbital station with us if we're all convicted?"
"Hmm—no, I should think not. As a responsible person, she gets the supreme penalty."
Ross numbly asked after a long pause, "How? Nothing —painful?" It was hard to think of Helena dangling grotesquely at a rope's end or jolting as she sat strapped in a large, ugly chair. But there were things he had heard of which were horribly worse.
Bernie had been watching him. "I'm sorry," the little man said soberly. "It's up to the judge.
She's a foreigner, so they may consider that an extenuating circumstance and place some quick-acting poison aboard for her to take. Otherwise it's slow starvation."
A faint, irrational hope had begun to dawn in Ross's mind. "Aboard what? Exactly how does it work?"
"They'll put her aboard some hulk with the rockets disabled, fire it off into space—and that's that. I suppose they'll use the ship she came in———"
Ross was frantically searching his pockets. He had a stylus. "Got any paper?" he briskly demanded of Bernie.
"Yes, but———?" The waiter blankly passed over an order book. Ross sprawled on the floor and began to scribble: "Never mind how or why this works. Do it. You saw me work the big fan-shaped computer in the center room and you can do it too. Find the master star maps in the chart room. Look up the co-ordinates of Halsey's System. Set these co-ordinates on the twenty-seven dials marked Proximate Mass. Take the readings on the windows above the dials and set them on the cursors of the computer——" He scribbled furiously, from time to time forcing himself deliberately to slow down as the writing became an unreadable scrawl. He filled the ruled fronts of the order pages and then the backs—perhaps ten thousand closely-written words, and not one of them wasted. Haarland's precise instructions, mercilessly drilled into him, flowed out again.
He flung the stylus down at last and read through the book again, ignoring the gaping Bernie. It was all there, as far as he could tell. Grant her a lot of luck and more brains than he privately credited her with, and she had a fighting chance of winding up within radar range of Halsey's Planet. GCA could take her down from there; an annoying ship-like object hanging on the radarscopes would provoke a reconnaissance.
She knew absolutely nothing about F-T-L or the Lyesley drive, but then—neither did he. That fact itself was no handicap.
He might rot on "Minerva," but some word might get back to Haarland. And so would the ship. And Helena would not perish miserably in a drifting hulk.
Bernie saw the mysterious job was ended and dared to ask, "A letter?"
"No," Ross said jubilantly. "By God, if things break right they won't get her. It's like this——"
He happily began to explain that his F-T-L ship's rockets were only auxiliaries for fine maneuvering, but he counted on the court not knowing that. If he and Helena could persuade. ...
As he went on the look on Bernie's face changed very slowly from hope to pity to politely-simulated interest. Correspondingly Ross's accounting became labored and faulty. The pauses became longer and at last he broke off, filled with self-contempt at his folly. He said bitterly, "You don't think it'll work."
"Oh, no!" Bernie protested with too much heartiness. "I could see she's awfully mechanically-minded for a woman, even if it wouldn't be polite to say so. Sure it'll work, Ross. Sure!"
The hell it would.
At least he had disposed of a few hours. And—perhaps some bungling setting would explode the ship, or end a Wesley Jump in the heart of a white dwarf star—sudden annihilation, whining Helena out of existence before her body could realize that it had died, before the beginning of apprehension could darken happy absorption with a task she thought would bring her to safety.
For that reason alone he had to carry the scheme through.
The courtroom was a chintzy place bright with spring flowers. Ross and Helena looked numbly at one another from opposite corners while the previous order of business was cleared from the docket. A wedding.
The judge, unexpectedly sweet-faced and slender though gray, obviously took such parts of her work seriously. "Marylyn and Kent," she was saying earnestly to the happy couple, "I suppose you know my reputation. I lecture people a bit before I tie the knot. Evidently it's not such a bad idea because my marriages turn out well. Last week in Eleanor one of my girls was arrested and reprimanded for gross infidelity and a couple of years ago right here in Novj Grad one of my boys got five hundred lashes for nonsupport. Let's hope it did them some good, but the cases were unusual. My people, I like to think, know their rights and responsibilities when they walk out of my court, and I think the record bears me out.
"Marylyn, you have chosen to share part of your life with this man. You intend to bear his children. This should not be because your animal appetites have overcome you and you can't win his consent in any other way but because you know, down deep in your womanly heart, that you can make him happy. Never forget this. If you should thoughtlessly conceive by some other man, don't tell him. He would only brood. Be thrifty, Marylyn. I have seen more marriages broken up by finances than any other reason. If your husband earns a hundred Eleanors a week, spend only that and no more. If he makes fifty Eleanors a week spend only that and no more. Honorable poverty is preferable to debt. And, from a practical standpoint, if you spend more than your husband earns he will be jailed for debt sooner or later, with resulting loss to your own pocket.
"Kent, you have accepted the proposal of this woman. I see by your dossier that you got in just under the wire. In your income group the antibachelor laws would have caught up with you in one more week. I must say I don't like the look of it, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to talk to you about the meaning of marriage. Not just the wage assignment, not just the insurance policy, not just the waiver of paternity and copulation 'rights', so-called. Those, as a good citizen, you will abide by automatically—Heaven help you if you don't. But there is more to marriage than that. The honor you have been done by this woman who sees you as desirable and who wishes to make you happy over the years is not a sterile legalism. Marriage is like a rocket, I sometimes think. The brute, unreasoning strength of the main jets representing the husband's share and the delicate precise steering and stabilizing jets the wife's. We have all of us seen too many marriages crash to the ground like a rocket when these roles were reversed. It is not reasonable to expect the wife to provide the drive—that is, the income. It is not reasonable to expect the husband to provide the steering—that is, the direction of the personal and household expenditures. So much for the material side of things. On the spiritual side, I have little to say. The laws are most explicit; see that you obey them—and if you don't, you had better pray that you wind up in some court other than mine. I have no patience with the obsolete doctrine that there is such a legal entity as seduction by female, despite the mouthings of certain so-called jurists who disgrace the bench of a certain nearby city.