“No, no,” Gretana breathed. She caught the handgrips at the back of the chair, turned it and began pushing it towards the station’s reception chamber. Lines of tesserae pulsed amber and white beneath her feet as she overcame the chair’s inertia and began to pick up speed. There was a movement of silhouettes ahead, accompanied by shouts and the sound of running feet, then Ichmo tye Railt was beside her and using his superior strength to drag the chair to a halt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ichmo’s ill-proportioned face was taut with anger and shock. “You’ve got to go back.”
Gretana shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“You haven’t any choice in the matter,” he shouted, overwhelming her with the sheer volume of sound as he pushed both her and the wheelchair back towards the centre of the plaza. “You’re going right now.”
“There were Terrans near the node. They might have seen me leave.”
“You’ll just have to wait till they leave.”
“That could take an hour,” Gretana insisted. “This man will be dead by then—and you’ll be responsible.”
“I’ll be…!” Ichmo released his hold and stepped back from Gretana, looking bemused. “That’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. You’re pulling me down with you.”
“You’ve got to decide your priorities,” she said coldly, two decades on Earth having accustomed her to verbal in-fighting. “Is your career more important than the life of another human being?”
“This is the first time anybody has done this.” Ichmo looked at the inert figure in the wheelchair and averted his gaze, but not before Gretana had seen the flicker of revulsion in his eyes. “Why are you here? Your next deposition isn’t due for some time.”
“I have to make a special report.”
“If it’s about the space colony business, we already have a…”
“I don’t care what you have,” Gretana snapped. “This man needs attention right now, and I’m going to see that he gets it.” She pushed the wheelchair past Ichmo, knowing as she did so that she was acting out of character, compensating for the uncertainties and alarms that were growing within her. It was quite possible that in the entire history of the Bureau no observer had ever broken the rules so flagrantly and spectacularly as she had just done, and she had no idea what the consequences would be. In particular, she could not anticipate Vekrynn’s reactions. All she could do for the moment was try to avert the final tragedy for the man in the wheelchair.
“Is this somebody you got friendly with?” Ichmo said, pacing beside her.
“I don’t even know his name.”
Ichmo looked distraught. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”
“I’m not sure. He’s been ill most of his life, but right now he’s suffering from exposure.”
“What do you expect us to do for him?”
“He needs heat most of all. And medical aid.”
“But we haven’t any doctors here.” Ichmo moved ahead to open the door to the reception chamber. “And even if we had, they wouldn’t know anything about Terran medicine.”
Gretana made no attempt to conceal her impatience. “Are you telling me that after five thousand years of stuffing data banks with information about Earth we haven’t the means to diagnose and treat a single illness?”
“That isn’t our function,” Ichmo grumbled.
“Well, I suggest that we start being flexible about our function,” Gretana said in a deceptively mild voice, “otherwise you’ll have a corpse to dispose of.”
Only later, while sitting alone beside the Terran’s bed, did she appreciate how heedlessly wilful she had been in threatening Ichmo with having to see a cadaver, a bleak experience which rarely befell any Mollanian. Another surprising aspect of her behaviour was that, for the first time in her life, she had interacted with other Mollanians without even once remembering her lack of beauty and letting herself be influenced by it. Am I changing? she wondered. Is this what Vekrynn was talking about when he said the Lucent Ideal was a parochial concept?
The room in which she was sitting was quiet except for occasional snuffles from the unconscious Terran, but for an hour it had been a centre of activity. Doctors had been summoned across light years from other Bureau establishments, specially prepared medication had been administered, officials of unknown rank had conferred with each other and had departed without speaking to Gretana. She had been isolated, made to feel as alien as the Terran himself, and knew without being told that she was to be dealt with by Vekrynn in person.
It was ironic, she decided, that her wish to meet Vekrynn again was being granted under such strange circumstances. He was bound to be angry, and the thought of it filled her with foreboding. She could only hope that the importance of what she had to report about Lorrest tye Thralen would be weighed against the seriousness of her crime.
In the confusion following her arrival at Station 23, Ichmo had neglected to enquire further into the reasons for her return, and now she was regarding the information as something like a trump card to be played at the most advantageous moment. And underlying her concern for her own future was the question of what was to be done with the pitifully frail Terran. Dennis Hargate, former inhabitant of Aristotle—as his papers identified him—appeared to be sleeping off a deep exhaustion, and if he remained unconscious until after Vekrynn could be consulted it might be allowable to teleport him back to Earth. He had seen little and possibly would remember or understand less, and it was almost certain that any story he told on Earth would be regarded as a product of delirium. That being the case, there was room to hope that the whole incident could be tidied up and forgotten, and that…
“Where am I?” Hargate said abruptly, disturbing the utter silence of the room with a thin nasal voice. He had not moved in any way, but his eyes were open and staring at the featureless ceiling.
Gretana, her nerves tingling, glanced around the room and saw there was little to distinguish it from any apartment on Earth. There was nothing about her Terran clothing to arouse suspicion, and if Hargate could be induced to go back to sleep—perhaps to be kept sedated—it could still be possible to return him to his own world.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she soothed. “You’re in hospital.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“If I’m in hospital, why have I been laid out in my street clothes?”
The observance of the little Terran complicated Gretana’s tentative plans. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I can tell I’m going to be all right—that wasn’t the question,” Hargate said. “I want to know where I am.”
The note of impatience in his voice was another surprise—she would have expected bewilderment or panic. “Not far from Carsewell,” she floundered.
Hargate raised his hands a short distance and allowed them to fall. “How many light years?”
“I don’t understand,” Gretana said, suddenly aware that the fragile occupant of the bed, physically handicapped though he was, had an uncompromising flinty intelligence and that her chances of manipulating him were approximately nil.
“The place I saw isn’t on Earth—you aren’t keeping it secret—and there aren’t any other suitable worlds in the solar system.” Hargate’s voice was weak and he continued to stare at the ceiling. “That means I’m in a different star system—so I’m asking you if it’s close to Sol…or in a far part of the galaxy…or in a different galaxy altogether. It’s important for me to know where I am. Do you understand?”