No one wished to bring up the business of the ship.
Richtler had taken every opportunity of avoiding what might prove to be an embarrassing question. No blame attached to him. The ship was gone. His ship!
“You’ve been a great help, Mr. Buchanan,” Richtler complimented Buchanan.
“Mr. Chairman,” a sharp voice called out.
The members of the Board—and Buchanan—shifted their attention to a frail, elderly woman who so far had said nothing. Buchanan had been in the large, boardroom for an hour, and so far she had not impinged on his consciousness. If he had looked at her with attention, he would have assumed that she was one of those well-heeled elderly women for whom committees were a pleasing diversion from the social round; she had been part of the background, nothing else, so he had not noticed her. Now, he looked.
She looked like anybody’s indulgent, aged aunt, come to nod amiably as others made decisions for the public good. Buchanan saw the startling intelligence in her faded blue eyes. She was anything but a benevolent relative.
She was trouble.
“I have a question, Mr. Chairman, if Mr. Buchanan would bear with me.”
“Of course,” said Richtler.
“Certainly, ma’am,” Buchanan said warily.
She looked from one to another, self-contained, quite unselfconscious: Buchanan could feel the aura of confident authority about her.
“I’m not familiar with your sphere of operations, Mr. Buchanan,” she said briskly. “On the contrary, I’ve spent most of my working life on one planet, here at Center, with only rare excursions to the nearer settled constellations. I’m almost untraveled. Yet I believe I’m qualified to sit on this Board.”
“Mrs. Blankfort,” began Richtler.
“I’m a species of psychologist, Mr. Buchanan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” she said, silencing Richtler.
“The particular variety I belong to concerns itself with decision-making procedures.” Kochan neatly inserted a comment:
“Mrs. Blankfort is very eminent in her field, Buchanan. Very eminent.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kochan,” she said sharply, dismissing him. “I am retired now, of course, otherwise I shouldn’t be serving on this Board. It fills an old lady’s time, in part. Well, that’s enough about me, Mr. Buchanan. And now you do know, that is if you’re prepared to accept our Chairman and Mr. Kochan’s recommendations, that I am qualified to question you—”
“Naturally, ma’am.”
“Very well.” Kochan’s piercing gaze swept back to Buchanan’s craggy face, and Buchanan felt a sense of foreboding as Mrs. Blankfort considered her questions. Buchanan dismissed the subtle alarm that Kochan had induced: Kochan was one member of the Board, no more. But what did the old lady want?
Hadn’t the psychologists—the whole scalpel-minded crew of them!—had enough from him? Hadn’t there been the months of tests, analyses, reruns of the last moments of his former command?
“Mr. Buchanan,” he heard the sharp voice begin, “have you any thought of trying to find what happened to the Altair Star?”
Buchanan’s mind was a clamoring torment. The years fell away. He gripped hard onto the edges of the chair he had occupied so uncomfortably while pretending to be relaxed. He moved back three years and saw it all again. He could see once more the uncanny emptiness of the ship’s screens, the total absence of any fixed point of reference as the scanners tried to show him just how the Altair Star and its doomed passengers were being drawn into the fearful abyss within the Jansky Singularity. The terrible time was here again. He could not speak.
Then, like a moment of longed-for sanity in the middle of a nightmare, there came a memory of Liz Deffant. Liz, the first time he had seen her. He could fasten on that memory. He cleared his throat and began to answer: “So far as I am concerned—” He paused, looked about the faces of the members of the Board for the Regulation of Space Hazards, and knew that he had made a foolish and irrevocable decision. The awareness of being alone was a pit of despair inside his body. He could feel it, cold and gripping, like a monstrous crab in his intestines, cold and clawing.
He would never see her again.
Liz Deffant was still in a state of furious incomprehension. There had been anger. Of course anger! She was a forthright person who had no hang-up at all about expressing her views on anything that concerned her deeply. And Aloysius Buchanan had concerned her ever since, just over three years ago, she had stumbled out of the spaceport car, hair disheveled, reels of spindle-tape flying from her hands as her heel caught on the edge of a door; her by no means inconsiderable weight had taken the unprepared lean figure of Buchanan right in the midriff, bringing an explosive grunt of displeasure. She saw the too-bushy eyebrows, the angular strength of the face, a strength which continued through the muscular, bony frame, and then she was as embarrassed as sixteen—red-faced, stuttering an apology and wondering if the squeaky voice coming from her mouth could be hers. To her horror, she heard herself suggesting that they’d both feel better after a drink.
He had refused.
For a week she had combed the area for him—he was a deep-space man, she was sure of that—but he was not to be found. He knew her name—“Liz Deffant, that’s me” she’d told him, but there had been no offer of the intimacy of his name: just a disdainful look and nothing else. But had it been disdainful, she had argued. Could it be that the look was simply that of a man caught in the solar plexus by her hundred and thirty pounds? Or was it that he disliked forward women? Had it been that he was so badly winded that he couldn’t speak? (She learned later that he’d been shocked, but not in that way; he’d been dazed by the sheer panache of her introduction; he had been quite as lovingly shocked as she. Most lovingly belted in the midriff, most amazingly and deliciously slammed into silence. His refusal to accompany her had been a reflex action, like a hurt animal’s. He was still in a state of withdrawal from humankind, women included, women especially. And there were good, solid, ineluctable reasons.)
It took a week for her to identify him and learn that he was the captain of the Altair Star. Buchanan, captain and sole survivor of the big infragalactic ship lost in the worst accident for a half century. That was the man with whom she had fallen in love.
When she did finally track him down it had been hard work to get him to speak. She recalled his bitter smile with a shudder of pity. He was defeated and cold, slightly suspicious of her for looking up a man who had given up his career. He thought she was another journalist on the hunt for the final, definitive version of how Al Buchanan, superb navigator, fieldman extraordinary, had managed to save himself as six hundred and eighty-three men, women, and children had been clawed into the abyss. She had persuaded him that he had nothing to fear from her. Not immediately, of course. Weeks of small persistent attentions had helped him to forget the horrors that strode through his mind, Until the Board of Space Hazards commissioned the Jansky permanent outpost, Buchanan seemed to have regained his self-assurance. For three years they had worked hard to prepare a way of life that would enable them both to live happily.