Alicia sat down on the corner of Reith's desk. "By the time of our last night together, on the boat, you'd made up your mind, hadn't you?"
"Let's say, ninety-five percent. The frying-pan incident made it an even one hundred."
"So I've got to spend the rest of my life being miserable?"
"Oh, rubbish! With your looks, brains, charm, and energy, you can get anybody you want."
"Damn it!" she cried. "I don't just want anybody. If I'm all that good, why can't I have the one man I really want?"
"Because marriage between us is like a beautiful yacht, all fresh paint and shining brasswork, that won't float. We've been all through it and know how it works—or rather, doesn't work. You're an adorable creature, but I can't take the treatment you deal out to the one who adores you."
She pounded her knees. "Fergus, why can't I make you understand how miserably sorry I am for all those incidents? Every time I lose my temper, or make an idiotic decision, I go through hell afterwards."
"I know; you're always frightfully sorry after you've done something that can't be undone. That doesn't stop you next time."
Not yet ready, even then, to concede defeat, she argued further. She proposed that they live together on a trial basis; that Reith come back to Earth with her; or that he marry her but keep a mistress to comfort him when Alicia was difficult. To all of her suggestions, Reith turned a deaf ear. At last she cried:
"Oh, damn! Why must you be so realistic?"
"If I had been truly realistic, darling," he said gently, "I'd have come to a firm decision much sooner and stuck to it. But I couldn't leave you broke in the middle of nowhere, and you're such a damnably desirable woman."
They sat in silence for a time. At last Alicia gave a long sigh. "Well, if I can't change your mind, wouldn't you like to make love, just one last time?"
Reith shook his head, although in her prim black-and-white outfit she seemed more desirable than ever. "No, dearest love. It would only make the parting harder." He rose. "I'll see you at breakfast. Good-night, Lish." He did not voice his real reason for rejecting her suggestion: a lively fear that, if she renewed her importunities while he lay in her arms, he would weaken and yield after all.
Wordlessly, Alicia fled the room. When he was alone, quietly, and for the first time in many years, Reith wept.
In the cafeteria, Reith and Alicia were dawdling over their breakfast. They said little but stared at each other as if to store up memories of every detail of the other's appearance. At last Reith said:
"Besides all those xenological treatises you're determined to write, why don't you compose a personal memoir of your years on Krishna? You've had adventures enough for three. The book could be a best-seller."
"But I'd have to tell the world how horrid I was to you!"
"Actresses are always confessing how beastly they were to their husbands and lovers, of whom they seem to have hundreds apiece. Or you could blame me for all our troubles; or tactfully skim over the parts about us."
"Oh, Fergus, I couldn't bear to blame you ..." But even as she spoke, her sapphire eyes took on the gleam of a writer who sights a viable book idea. "I may try it at that. I'll confess all my follies. Would you mind if I published it under the name of Alicia Dyckman Reith? I have a sentimental attachment to the name."
"Use any name you like, darling. I'd be honored."
"And I'll dedicate it to—to 'My once and future—' " She broke off, pressing her lips together, her eyes brimming with tears. Then she glanced at the wall clock. "I'd better get out to the boarding ramp. Coming to see me off?"
At the foot of the ramp, Reith drew himself up. "Goodbye, Lish, and the best of luck. I hope your books on Krishna set Terra afire."
"Thanks. Oh, Fergus dear, you haven't changed your mind?"
"No. This is it."
"Then good-bye." They kissed, an endless, ardent kiss, clinging to each other.
"I'll come back some day," she said at last. "And as long as I live, I'll remember our great adventure together, and what a fine person you are, and what a splendid lov—" Her voice broke and she turned away, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
With head up, Alicia ascended the ramp, very slowly, as if she were mounting a scaffold. Reith, with a knife twisting in his entrails, watched her go. Within him rose a surge of emotion, a burning wish to call out: Alicia, come back! We'll work something out! He tried to suppress the urge, knowing it to be irrational and self-destructive. It would be an invitation to another disaster. But the emotion grew and swelled until, like a tidal bore racing up a river, it swept away all prudential considerations. As she turned to wave, and even while he told himself: stop, you fool! he filled his lungs to shout.
At that instant, a familiar voice said: "Ah, mon ami!" Marot held up a small bag of fossil fragments, each freed from its surrounding burden of stone. "See our Ozymandias? Some pieces were doubtless lost when Foltz broke up the fossil, but I think there are enough left to settle the dispute. I shall name it Parodosaurus reithi, meaning 'Reith's transitional lizard.' It will go down in history as one of the most important discoveries in Krishnan biology. I will see to it that you are given credit for, first, finding it and, second, for getting it back to Novo-recife through ghastly perils.
"If you return to Terra, mon cher, you must come to see me in Paris. Perhaps we shall go out on a dig together. Au revoir!"
Marot kissed Reith on both cheeks and strode briskly up the ramp. Alicia had already disappeared into the lock.
Back in the customs building, Reith ran into Kenneth Strachan, the civil engineer. Strachan was in his professional-Scotsman mood, larding his speech with "braid Scots."
"Ye dinna look happy, ma billie! Parting from the little blond dynamo, eh?"
Reith nodded. "Ken, if there's a more miserable feeling than learning that the one great love of your life is someone you can't possibly live with, I hope I never know it." He blew his nose, muttering: "If that damned Frenchman hadn't come along ... but maybe it's just as well he did."
"Ah, stuff!" said Strachan. "I dinna believe in the one great love of your life. It disna exist; it's an invention of romantical storytellers. Man, there'll be anither along in a minute! Why, a braw pair of lassies came in on the Juruá to work here, and incidentally to look for husbands."
"Wait till you meet your true love," said Reith. "You'll sing a different tune."
Strachan waved away the notion. 'Tell you what. Next to a glass of guid Scots whiskey, which canna be had on this world, there's nocht like a guid fuck to cheer a man up. I know a bonny little hoor in the Hamda', so fasteejus she makes her clients bathe before she screws 'em. I'll introduce ye—"
"Wouldn't help," said Reith. "The way I feel, I'd be as limp as a wet noodle. Anyhow, I've got to round up my new batch of tourists. We've supposed to start down the Pichidé tomorrow, and Captain Zarrash's Chaldir is two days overdue. I must keep my charges busy till he comes."
"That's the spirit!" said Strachan. "This might be considered a happy ending after all."
"How do you figure?"
"Weel, from all I've heard and seen about the pair of ye, as miserable as you were at the parting, you'd have been a sight unhappier yet if you'd tried to live together again."