The clay stores heat all spring, summer, and most of the fall, then we pump the heat back into the city all winter long.”
“I’d really like to see that, if you’d be willing to show it to me,” Horeger said.
“Of course, Hans. You too, Mercy, if you’d like it?”
“I don’t care much about power plants. I’d rather poke around the city,” MacDonald said. “If Blundy doesn’t mind showing me, I mean.”
Blundy didn’t, at all. When the other two had gone, he said, “I could start by showing you where I lived ” And when she nodded, “But I’m hungry right now, aren’t you? Let’s get some sandwiches first. We can take them with us and eat them in one of the apartments, then you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to live in this place for ten dreary months on end.”
In the huge elevator going back to the hospital level, walking down the cafeteria lines to choose their food, Blundy held Mercy MacDonald’s arm not aggressively; just confidently, because things were working out as well as he could have hoped. They chatted on the way about non-essentials. He asked her how her shipmates were enjoying Slowyear, and she told him they all seemed to love it “All of them; even old Captain Hawkins came down with his wife and Sam Bagehot he’s one of our medics got someone to give him a ride to some fishing village on the coast. He said he’s always wanted to go fishing.”
He looked at her affectionately. “It’s interesting for you to be here?”
“You bet, Blundy. I’d almost forgotten what a planet was like. All this space - well, not here in this place, of course; but out in the open “
He nodded. “Then you’ll understand how much I hate being cooped up here all through the winter.
Here, let’s see if we can get into our old apartment.”
He selected a door, no different from any other door in the hall as far as MacDonald could see, then scowled apologetically. “I’m sorry; I forgot we locked it, and I don’t have the key. But all the apartments along here are pretty much the same.”
He tried three or four other doors before he found one that opened, shook his head, tried a dozen more until he found the one he was looking for. “This’ll do,”
he said, and held the door open for her.
She looked around the room, no bigger than her own cabin on Nordvik. It was almost as bare as the one they had seen on the other level, though it did contain a stripped-down bed.
“So we’ll have something to sit on,” he said.
“Of course,” she said, and he saw her nose wrinkling.
“Stinks, doesn’t it?” he said. “They turn off most of the ventilation when people are outside but it’s not much better in the winter.”
“I was just thinking that it looks pretty crowded,”
she said, half apologizing. “And well dreary?”
“It was dreary. Crowded, too,” he said sourly, gazing around. “Well, we might as well sit down.”
They sat on the edge of the bed, since there was no other place to sit, and opened their sandwiches.
There wasn’t much room. Their elbows touched from time to time, and Blundy could feel, or imagined he could feel, the warmth that came from her body.
He was surprised when she asked him, “Are you sure you want to be here?”
He blinked at her; that wasn’t the question on his mind at all.
“You seem well, I don’t know. Depressed, maybe. Is it seeing the hospital?”
He shook his head, then thought for a moment.
“Maybe a little,” he said, avoiding the truthful answer.
“Maybe it’s this whole place. I can’t tell you how much it begins to look like a prison after the first few weeks.
Of course, Murra and I were lucky because we had our work. We kept pretty busy all winter long with Winter Wife, and we got to spend a lot of time in the studios.
We even went outside on location, for a couple of episodes, though that wasn’t much fun, either; if you’re going to be out for more than a few minutes you have to dress really warmly, with electrically heated boots and gloves.”
She looked at Blundy quizzically. “And that was a big success? Winter Wife, I mean?” He shrugged. She studied him for a moment. “I don’t understand, Blundy. You’re a famous playwright “
“Video dramas,” he corrected her.
“Same thing; and yet you work as a shepherd.”
“But I enjoy that,” he said, surprised. “After you spend seven hundred winter days crowded together in this place a little solitude is a good thing. Besides, it’s beautiful out there. You see all the stars at night, and in daylight the mountains are always there on the horizon. They’re really spectacular to look at. And the air’s so pure, and it’s quiet, and by now the flowers are springing up all over and everything smells so sweet “
He stopped, surprised. She was almost laughing.
“That’s quite a sales talk,” she said.
“Sales talk?”
“It sounds like you’re saying I ought to go out with you,” she amplified.
“Well,” he said, touching her arm, “I suppose I am.
If you’d like to.”
“I accept,” she said gravely. “But in that case and because it’s still a little chilly in here if you and I are going off into the boondocks together, don’t you think that now it’s about time you put your arms around me?”
Blundy slept in his own bed that night, with Murra peacefully sleeping beside him. If she knew he had bedded Mercy MacDonald that afternoon, as he was convinced she always did, she had had the grace to keep silent about it. She had asked no questions when he came home, offered no criticism, invited no sexual advances. She was a model winter wife, Blundy thought glumly as he drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately it was now spring.
The next morning he rose early, wakened by the thunder of the departing shuttle, and headed for the marketplace.
As he had expected he would, he found Petoyne idly looking through the scanty remaining stocks of scrimshaw. When she saw Blundy, and put down the carved plastic statuette she’d been looking at to come over to him, there was something in her face that told Blundy she knew as well as Murra that he had found a new lover.
Unlike Murra, she didn’t pretend not to. She said, her tone hostile, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do know. And, listen ” getting it over with “I’m going to take Mercy MacDonald out to the flocks with me.”
Petoyne nodded as though she had expected it.
“You won’t want me along, then.”
“Well, I think “
“I know what you think.” Then she gave him a look which he could not decipher. It was neither angry nor amused. It was, if anything sympathetic? Sad?
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“There’s something I think you should know. That old captain from the ship? I saw him taking his clothes off in the marketplace this morning.” He stared at her, and she nodded. “So if you’re going anywhere with Mercy MacDonald,” she said, “my advice is, do it pretty soon.”
Chapter Nine
Up to the very last minute, Mercy MacDonald had not really decided whether to have an affair with this conspicuously married little man; in fact, she had decided quite a long time ago that going to bed with married men was the sort of mistake she had outgrown long since. But there were always extenuating circumstances, weren’t there? Obviously this particular man’s marriage to that slinky, pretentious woman had become a burden to him, while Blundy himself had seemed so down and also so very male…. No, there was something about this Blundy that was worth pursuing, she was sure of it.