Arnie sipped at his. “I hope you will excuse all the guards and fuss, but they treat me like a national treasure—”
“As you damn well are!” Nils broke in. “With all the Daleth equipment on the Moon, you are worth a billion kroner on the hoof to any country with the money to buy you. I wish I weren’t so patriotic. I would sell you to the highest bidder and retire to Bali for life.”
Arnie smiled, almost relaxing.
“They had a conspiracy. The doctors, Skou, your husband, all of them. They thought if they made an armed fort of your home that I could come here. The weather could not be better.”
“Sailing weather,” Nils said, and drained his drink. “Where’s the boat?”
“In the water, like you asked, tied up on the south side of the harbor.”
“What a day for sailing! Why don’t we all go down there—no, damn, Arnie’s supposed to stay in the house.”
“You two go, I will be fine right here,” Arnie insisted. “I will get some sun in the garden, that is what Nils promised me.”
“No such thing,” Martha said. “Nils is going to the harbor and get all hot and tarry. He never sails the boat, just caulks seams and things. Let him get it out of his system while we loaf in the garden.”
“Well—if you don’t mind?” Nils was already leaning ›ward the door.
“Go on,” Martha laughed. “Just come back in time for inner.”
“I’ll find Skou and tell him where Fm going. Not that hey care about me, since all I know about a Daleth drive s how to push the buttons.”
Martha had to find him his work trousers, then a paint-stained shirt, then his swim trunks before he was ready and slammed out of the house. Arnie had gone to his room to change and, at the sight of all the delicious sunlight, Martha put on a bathing suit too. All Danes were sun worshipers on a day like this.
Arnie was on a lounge on the patio, and she pulled the other one up next to him.
“Wonderful,” he said. “I did not realize how much we miss color and being out of doors.” The shadow of a gull slid across the grass and up the high wooden fence. The air was still. Someone laughed, far away, and there was the distinct plock-plock of a tennis ball being played.
“How is the work going? Or as much of it as you can tell me about.”
“The only secret is the drive. For the rest it is like running a steamship company and opening up the wild West at the same time. Did you read about our Mars visit?”
“Yes, I was so jealous. When do you start selling passenger tickets?”
“Very soon. And you will have the very first one. There really are plans being made along those lines. In any case, those surface veins of uranium on Mars made the DFRS stock soar tremendously on the world markets. Money is being poured into the super-liner that the Swedes are building, mostly for cargo, but with plenty of cabins for passengers later. We will lift her by tug to the Moon and put the drive in there. The base is almost a city now, with machine shops and assembly plants. We do almost all of the manufacturing of the Daleth units there, except for standard electronics components from here. It is all going so well, no one can complain.’* He looked around for a piece of wood to touch, and found none among tf chrome-and-plastic garden furniture.
“Shall I bring you a board or something?” Marth asked, and they both laughed. “Or better yet bring you , cold drink. The yard, closed in like this, cuts off th‹ breeze, and you can actually work up a sweat in this kinc of weather.”
“Yes, please, if you will join me.”
“Try and stop me. Gin and tonic since we already started on gin.”
She came back with the drinks on a tray, silently on her bare feet, and Arnie started when he saw her.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” she said, handing him a glass.
“Please do not blame yourself. I know that it is I. There has been a great deal of work and tension. So it is really very good to be here. In fact it is almost as hot as Israel.”
“Do you miss Israel?” she asked, then quickly said, “I’m sorry. I know that it’s none of my business.”
The smile was gone, his face set. “Yes, I miss the country. My friends, the life there. But I think that I would do the entire thing over again in the same manner if I were given a second chance.”
“I don’t mean to pry…”
“No, Martha, it is perfectly all right. It is on my mind a good deal of the time. Traitor or hero? I myself would rather die than cause injury to Israel. Yet I had a letter, in Hebrew, no signature. ‘What would Esther Bar-Giora have thought?’ it said.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes. She looked very much like you. The same kind of hair and”—he glanced at her figure, more flesh than fabric in the diminutive bathing suit, and looked away and coughed—“the, what you might call, the same sort of build. But dark, tanned all the time. A sabra, born and grew up in Israel. One of my graduate students. She married the professor, she used to always say.” His eyes had a distant, haunted look. “She was killed in a terror raid.” He sipped his drink. In the silence that followed the distant louring of children could be heard.
“But do not let me sound too gloomy, Martha. It is too ice an afternoon. I would like to have known who sent lat letter. I wanted to tell whoever it was that I think isther would have been angry at me, but she would have aderstood. And in the end she might even have agreed with me. There must be a time when the issue of all nankind should come ahead of our concerns with our own country. You should know about that, what I mean. Born in American, now a Dane, a real citizen of the world.”
“No, not really.” She laughed to cover her confusion. “I mean I am married to a Dane, but I am still an American citizen, passport and all.” Now why had she told him about that?
“Papers,” he said, lifting his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Meaningless. We are what we think we are. Our deeds reflect our ethos. I am stating it badly. I never did well in philosophy, or in anything other than physics and mathematics. I even failed stinks once, forgot a retort on the burner and let it explode. And I never thought much about anything other than my work. And Esther, of course, when we were married. People used to call me a dry stick, and they were right. I never played cards, nothing like that. But I could see and I could think. And watch the attempts to destroy Israel. And when the idea of the Daleth drive came closer and closer to reality, I thought more and more about what should be done with it. I remembered Nobel and his million-dollar guilty-conscience awards. I thought of the atomic scientists who had been certified or who had committed suicide. Why, I kept thinking, why can’t something be done before the discovery is revealed? Can I not turn it to the benefit of mankind instead of the destruction? The thought stayed with me, and I could not get rid of it, and—in the end—I had to act upon it. I did not think that it would be easy, but I never thought it would be this hard…”
Arnie broke off and sipped at his drink. “You must excuse me; I am talking too much. The company of men. A woman, a sympathetic ear, and you see what happens. A joke.” He smiled a twisted grin.
“No, never!” She leaned over impulsively and took h hand. “A woman would go mad if she couldn’t tell ht troubles to someone. I think that’s the trouble with me! They hold it all in until they explode and then go out and kill someone.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you. Thank you very much.” H patted her hand clumsily with his and lay back heavily eyes closed. A fat bumblebee hummed industriousl) around the hollyhock that climbed the side of the house. the only sound now in the still of the afternoon.