“Now what about us?” she said disconcertingly, leaning back in his arms, “I must say you have the highest body temperature of any one I have ever touched. It’s positively exciting.”
This jarred Brion even more. He didn’t have her ability to put past horrors out of the mind by substituting present pleasures. “Well, just what about us?” he said with masterful inappropriateness.
She smiled as she leaned against him. “You weren’t as vague as that, the night in the hospital room. I seem to remember a few other things you said. And did. You can’t claim you’re completely indifferent to me, Brion Brandd. So I’m only asking you what any outspoken Anvharian girl would. Where do we go from here? Get married?”
There was a definite pleasure in holding her slight body in his arms and feeling her hair against his cheek. They both sensed it, and this awareness made his words sound that much more ugly.
“Lea—darling! You know how important you are to me—but you certainly realize that we could never get married.”
Her body stiffened and she tore herself away from him.
“Why, you great, fat, egotistical slab of meat! What do you mean by that? I like you, Lea, we have plenty of fun and games together, but surely you realize that you aren’t the kind of girl one takes home to mother!”
“Lea, hold on,” he said. “You know better than to say a thing like that. What I said has nothing to do with how I feel towards you. But marriage means children, and you are biologist enough to know about Earth’s genes —”
“Intolerant yokel!” she cried, slapping his face. He didn’t move or attempt to stop her. “I expected better from you, with all your pretensions of understanding. But all you can think of are the horror stories about the worn- out genes of Earth. You’re the same as every other big, strapping bigot from the frontier planets. I know how you look down on our small size, our allergies and haemophilia and all the other weaknesses that have been bred back and preserved by the race. You hate—”
“But that’s not what I meant at all,” he interrupted, shocked, his voice drowning hers out. “Yours are the strong genes, the viable strains—mine are the deadly ones. A child of mine would kill itself and you in a natural birth, if it managed to live to term. You’re forgetting that you are the original homo sapiens. I’m a recent mutation.”
Lea was frozen by his words. They revealed a truth she had known, but would never permit herself to consider.
“Earth is home, the planet where mankind developed,” he said. “The last few thousand years you may have been breeding weaknesses back into the genetic pool. But that’s nothing compared to the hundred millions of years that it took to develop man. How many newborn babies live to be a year of age on Earth?”
“Why… almost all of them. A fraction of one per cent die each year—I can’t recall exactly how many.”
“Earth is home,” he said again gently. “When men leave home they can adapt to different planets, but a price must be paid. A terrible price is dead infants. The successful mutations live, the failures die. Natural selection is a brutally simple affair. When you look at me, you see a success. I have a sister—a success too. Yet my mother had six other children who died when they were still babies. And several others that never came to term. You know about these things, don’t you, Lea?”
“I know, I know… ” she said sobbing into her hands. He held her now and she didn’t pull away. “I know it all as a biologist—but I am so awfully tired of being a biologist, and top of my class and a mental match for any man. When I think about you, I do it as a woman, and can’t admit any of this. I need someone, Brion, and I needed you so much because I loved you.” She paused and wiped her eyes. “You’re going home, aren’t you? Back to Anvhar. When?”
“I can’t wait too long,” he said, unhappily. “Aside from my personal wants, I find myself remembering that I’m a part of Anvhar. When you think of the number of people who suffered and died—or adapted—so that I could be sitting here now… well, it’s a little frightening. I suppose it doesn’t make sense logically that I should feel indebted to them. But I do. Anything I do now, or in the next few years, won’t be as important as getting back to Anvhar.”
“And I won’t be going back with you.” It was a flat statement the way she said it, not a question.
“No, you won’t be,” he said. “There is nothing on Anvhar for you.”
Lea was looking out of the port at Dis and her eyes were dry now. “Way back in my deeply buried unconscious I think I knew it would end this way,” she said. “If you think your little lecture on the Origins of Man was a novelty, it wasn’t. It just reminded me of a number of things my glands had convinced me to forget. In a way, I envy you your weightlifter wife-to-be, and your happy kiddies. But not very much. Very early in life I resigned myself to the fact that there was no one on Earth I would care to marry. I always had these teen-age dreams of a hero from space who would carry me off, and I guess I slipped you into the pattern without realizing it. I’m old enough now to face the fact that I like my work more than a banal marriage, and I’ll probably end up a frigid and virtuous old maid, with more degrees and titles than you have shot-putting records.”
As they looked through the port Dis began slowly to contract. Their ship drew away from it, heading towards Nyjord. They sat apart, without touching now. Leaving Dis meant leaving behind something they had shared. They had been strangers together there, on a strange world. For a brief time their lifelines had touched. That time was over now.
“Don’t we look happy!” Hys said, shambling towards them.
“Fall dead and make me even happier then,” Lea snapped bitterly.
Hys ignored the acid tone of her words and sat down on the couch next to them. Since leaving command of his rebel Nyjord army he seemed much mellower. “Going to keep on working for the Cultural Relationships Foundation, Brion?” he asked. “You’re the kind of man we need.”
Brion’s eyes widened as the meaning of the last words penetrated. “Are you in the C.R.F.?”
“Field agent for Nyjord,” he said. “I hope you don’t think those helpless office types like Faussel or Merw really represented us there? They just took notes and acted as a front and cover for the organization. Nyjord is a fine planet, but a gentle guiding hand behind the scenes is needed, to help them find their place in the galaxy before they are pulverized.”
“What’s your dirty game, Hys?” Lea asked, scowling. “I’ve had enough hints to suspect for a long time that there was more to the C.R.F. than the sweetness-and-light part I have seen. Are you people egomaniacs, power hungry or what?”
“That’s the first charge that would be levelled at us if our activities were publicly known,” Hys told her. “That’s why we do most of our work under cover. The best fact I can give you to counter the charge is money. Just where do you think we get the funds for an operation this size?” He smiled at their blank looks. “You’ll see the records later so there won’t be any doubt. The truth is that all our funds are donated by planets we have helped. Even a tiny percentage of a planetary income is large—add enough of them together and you have enough money to help other planets. And voluntary gratitude is a perfect test, if you stop to think about it. You can’t talk people into liking what you have done. They have to be convinced. There have always been people on C.R.F. worlds who knew about our work, and agreed with it enough to see that we are kept in funds.”
“Why are you telling me all this super-secret stuff,” Lea asked.
“Isn’t that obvious? We want you to keep on working for us. You can name whatever salary you like—as I’ve said, there is no shortage of ready cash.”
Hys glanced quickly at them both and delivered the clinching argument. “I hope Brian will go on working with us too. He is the kind of field agent we desperately need, and it is almost impossible to find.”
“Just show me where to sign,” Lea said, and there was life in her voice once again.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it blackmail,” Brion smiled, “but I suppose if you people can juggle planetary psychologies, you must find that individuals can be pushed around like chessmen. Though you should realize that very little pushing is required this time.”
“Will you sign on?” Hys asked.
“I must go back to Anvhar,” Brion said, “but there really is no pressing hurry.”
“Earth,” said Lea, “is overpopulated enough as it is.”
