Christiansen rushed for it, sealed himself in, and rattled the door to make sure of it. Muller, astonished, heard retching sounds, and then something that could have been a series of dry sobs. He was about to signal the traffic station that the pilot was sick, when the door opened a little and Christiansen said in a muffled voice, “Would you hand me my helmet, Mr. Muller?”
Muller gave it to him.
“I’m going to have to go back to my station, Mr. Muller.”
“I’m sorry you reacted this way. Christ, I hope I’m not carrying some kind of contagion.”
“I’m not sick. I just feel-lousy.” Christiansen fastened the helmet in place. “I don’t understand. But I want to curl up and cry. Please let me go, Mr. Muller. It-I-that is-it’s terrible. That’s what I feel!” He rushed into the hatch. In bewilderment Muller watched him cross the void to the nearby traffic station.
He got on the radio. “You better not send another pilot over just yet,” Muller told the controller. “Christiansen folded up with instant plague as soon as he took his helmet off. I may be carrying something. Let’s check it out.”
The controller, looking troubled, agreed. He asked Muller to go to his medic chamber, set up the diagnostat, and transmit its report. A little while later the solemn chocolate-hued face of the station’s medical officer appeared on Muller’s screen and said, “This is very odd, Mr. Muller.”
“What is?”
“I’ve run your diagnostat transmission through our machine. No unusual symptoms. I’ve also put Christiansen through the works without learning anything. He feels fine now, he says. He told me that an acute depression hit him the moment he saw you, and it deepened in a hurry to a sort of metabolic paralysis. That is, he felt so gloomy that he could hardly function.”
“Is he prone to these attacks?”
“Never,” the medic replied. “I’d like to check this out myself. May I come over?”
The medic didn’t curl up with the miseries as Christiansen had done. But he didn’t stay long, either, and when he left his face was glossy with tears. He looked as baffled as Muller. When the new pilot appeared twenty minutes later, he kept his suit on as he programmed the ship for planetary descent. Sitting rigidly upright at his controls, his back turned to Muller, he said nothing, scarcely acknowledged Muller’s presence. As required by law, he brought the ship down until its drive system was in the grip of a groundside landing regulator, and took his leave. Muller saw the man’s face, tense, sweat-shiny, tight-lipped. The pilot nodded curtly, and went through the hatch. I must have a very bad smell, Muller thought, if he could smell it through his suit like that.
The landing was routine.
At the starport he cleared Immigration quickly. It took only half an hour for Earth to decide that he was acceptable; and Muller, who had passed through these computer banks hundreds of times before, figured that that was close to the record. He had feared that the giant starport diagnostat would detect whatever malady he carried that his own equipment and the traffic station medic had failed to find; but he passed through the bowels of the machine, letting it bounce sonics off his kidneys, and extract some molecules of his various bodily fluids, and at length he emerged without the ringing of bells and the flashing of warning lights.
Boardman had come to meet him. Marta was with him. A thick brown robe shot through with dull metal enfolded Boardman; he seemed weighted down with rings, and his brooding eyebrows were thick as dark tropical moss. Marta’s hair was short and sea-green; she had silvered her eyes and gilded the slender column of her throat, so that she looked like some jeweled statuette of herself. Remembering her wet and naked from the crystalline lake, Muller disapproved of these changes. He doubted that they had been made for his benefit. Boardman, he knew, liked his women ornate; it was probable that they had been bedding in his absence. Muller would have been surprised and even a little shaken if they had not.
Boardman’s hand encircled Muller’s wrist in a firm greeting that incredibly turned flabby within seconds. The hand slipped away even before Muller could return the embrace. “It’s good to see you, Dick,” Boardman said without conviction, stepping back a couple of paces. His cheeks seemed to sag as though under heavy gravitational stress. Marta slipped between them and pressed herself against him. Muller seized her, touching her shoulder- blades and running his hands swiftly down to her lean buttocks. He did not kiss her. Her eyes were dazzling as he looked within them and felt himself lost in rebounding mirror images. Her nostrils flared. Through her thin flesh he felt muscles bridling. She was trying to get free of him. “Dick,” she whispered. “I’ve prayed for you every night. You don’t know how I’ve missed you.” She struggled harder. He moved his hands to her haunches and pushed inward so fiercely that he could imagine her pelvic cage yielding and flexing. Her legs were trembling, and he feared that if he let go of her, she would fall. She turned her head to one side. He put his cheek against her delicate ear. “Dick,” she murmured, “I feel so strange—so glad to see you that I’m all tangled up inside—let go, Dick, I feel queasy somehow—”
Yes. Yes. Of course. He released her.
Boardman, sweating, nervous, mopped at his face, jabbed himself with some soothing drug, fidgeted, paced. Muller had never seen him look this way before. “Suppose I let the two of you have some time together, eh?” Boardman suggested, his voice coming out half an octave too high. “The weather’s been getting to me, Dick. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. Your accommodations are all arranged.” Boardman fled. Now Muller felt panic rising. “Where do we go?” he asked.
“There’s a transport pod outside. We have a room at the Starport Inn. Do you have luggage?”
“It’s still aboard the ship,” Muller answered. “It can wait.”
Marta was chewing at the corner of her lower lip. He took her by the hand and they rode the slidewalk out of the terminal room to the transportation pods. Go on, he thought. Tell me that you don’t feel well. Tell me that mysteriously you’ve come down with something in the last ten minutes.
“Why did you cut your hair?” he asked.
“It’s a woman’s right. Don’t you like it this way?”
“Not as much.” They entered the pod. “Longer, bluer, it was like the sea on a stormy day.” The pod shot off on a bath of quicksilver. She kept far to her side, hunched against the hatch. “And the makeup, too. I’m sorry, Marta. I wish I could like it.”
“I was prettying for your homecoming.”
“Why are you doing that with your lip?”
“What am I doing?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Here we are. The room is booked already?”
“In your name, yes.”
They went in. He put his hand on the registration plate. It flashed green and they headed for the liftshaft. The inn began in the fifth sublevel of the starport and went down for fifty levels; their room was near the bottom. Choice location, he thought. The bridal suite, maybe. They stepped into a room with kaleidoscopic hangings and a wide bed with all accessories. The roomglow was tactfully dim. Muller thought of months of woman cubes and a savage throbbing rose in his groin. He knew he had no need to explain any of that to Marta. She moved past him, into the personal room, and was in there a long while. Muller undressed.
She came out nude. All the tricky makeup was gone, and her hair was blue again.
“Like the sea,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t grow it back in there. The room wasn’t programmed for it.”
“It’s much better now,” he told her.
They were ten meters apart. She stood at an angle to him, and he studied the contours of her frail but tough form, the small up-jutting breasts, the boyish buttocks, the elegant thighs.
“The Hydrans,” he said, “have either five sexes or none, I’m not sure which. That’s a measure of how well I got to know them while I was there. However they do it, I think people have more fun. Why are you standing over there, Marta?”
Silently she came toward him. He put one arm around her shoulders and cupped his other hand over one of her breasts. At other times when he did that he felt the nipple pebble-hard with desire against his hand. Not now. She quivered a little, like a shy mare wanting to bolt. He put his lips to her lips, and they were dry, taut, hostile. When he ran his hand along the fine line of her jaw she seemed to shudder. He drew her down and they sat side
