Much nearer, a cluster of flat-roofed buildings with translucent green walls provided housing for the shuttle field’s support personnel and temporary shelter for the new arrivals. Chaney Field, in fact, had become an important suburb of Frasierville. Many had had hopes that it would soon take its place in the hierarchy of Glaktik Komm as a bonafide light-probe port. Hence the folly of the unusued gantry. Hence, too, the folly of the immense probeship hangar which was now in use principally as a warehouse for imported colony supplies.
‘Whom else must you meet?’ I asked Eisen as we neared the complex.
‘A new group of colonists,’ he responded without looking at me. ‘And, as I understand it, a friend of Elegy Cather’s whom I may wish to put in quarantine for a while.’
‘Quarantine!’ I exclaimed.
‘So the Wasserläufer IX’s captain informed me by radio last night.’
‘What the devil are you talking about?’
‘Patience,’ said Eisen. ‘Have patience, Ben.’
CHAPTER TWO
Jaafar, Elegy, and Kretzoi
Outside the terminal in the blistering midmorning heat we stood – Jaafar Bahadori and I – while Eisen awaited the shuttlecraft’s coming in the comfort of his air-conditioned Chaney Field office. He had invited us to join him without much enthusiasm, and we had politely declined in order to watch the shuttle put down on the landing strip.
Cracking his knuckles in anticipation, Bahadori shifted from foot to foot and peered into the pale recesses of sky above the Calyptran Wild. The wind blew in gusts past the field’s green-glowing support buildings, setting up an eerie lament in the titanium lyre of the gantry.
At last the shuttle appeared: a huge white fuselage descending on the treetops to the northwest and banking into the wind to align itself with Chaney Field’s main landing strip. It got down quickly. Then, distorted by heat haze, foreshortened by distance, the shuttle bumped toward Bahadori and me at high, whining speed.
Despite having watched a hundred such shuttles land, I was always surprised by how ungainly they appeared on the ground. In the newer probeships the shuttles slot into the cargo nacelles underslung aft and so become merely another modular component of the whole – but, independent of their parent ships, they have all the grace and aesthetic appeal of wounded pelicans.
Baggage lorries and passenger vans departed the shade screens of the terminal and scooted competitively across the polymac. The shuttle, meanwhile, began putting out its tubelike extensible ramps – a trio of them. Bahadori and I caught a ride on one of the passing baggage trucks. Then we jumped from its running board only ten or twelve meters from the shuttle’s central ramp.
Many of those disembarking were women – more women than men, in fact – and I knew that it was going to be no easy task finding Elegy Cather among all the attractive candidates. I understood, though, why the young Iranian had been so keen to greet the shuttle – he was nineteen or twenty and a long way from home. He blustered into the crowd surging out of the extensible tube opposite us and fought his way upstream like a randy salmon. I didn’t see him again for another forty or fifty minutes.
As soon as Bahadori was gone, I started asking each young woman who approached if she were Elegy Cather. No luck. My candidates shook their heads, or smiled and raised their eyebrows in apology, or gave me haughty looks as if I had indecently propositioned them. The men among whom they walked either grinned or pretended not to notice me.
One fellow, however, stopped and took my arm. ‘Go up the rear ramp,’ he told me, nodding. ‘Cather’s back there now, trying to get something straightened out with a Komm-service steward.’
This ramp was on the other side of the shuttle. I walked beneath the craft’s bloated, silver-white belly, then entered the antiseptic-smelling tube leading upward to the passenger compartment.
‘Who’s going to guarantee his safety?’ I heard a female voice demanding evenly. ‘You? Governor Eisen? Who?’
The steward responded, ‘If it isn’t quarantined, young woman, who’s going to guarantee the lives of the inhabitants of BoskVeld?’ This man, who was facing me from the rear of the passenger compartment, stood a good head and a half taller than his diminutive adversary. He looked, in his less-than-heartfelt belligerence, almost as old as I. My heart went out to him.
‘Not it,’ the young woman corrected him. ‘Kretzoi’s an utterly unique intelligent being who deserves your respect. Have the decency to use the masculine pronoun.’ She paused to glance over her shoulder at me before resuming her argument with the steward. ‘And who do you mean by “the inhabitants of BoskVeld,” anyway? The Asadi? If so, no one thought to quarantine the members of the First, Second, and Third Denebolan Expeditions before turning them loose like a . . . a swarm of renegade bacteria.’ That wasn’t the word she wanted, but she emphasized it nevertheless.
‘I didn’t mean the Asadi,’ the steward wearily parried. ‘I meant the human inhabitants of BoskVeld. The civkis, the colonists, the scientific and military support personnel. Would you care to be responsible for turning this planet into a ghost world?’
‘Kretzoi had a clean bill of health before we left Dar es Salaam. Do you think he contracted a plague virus aboard the Wasserläufer? Do you think he’s going to expose everyone here to some mysterious and lethal contagion?’
‘Civ Cather, I don’t think anything,’ the man tried to begin.
‘Apparently not,’ the young woman declared, ignoring the real import of his inflection. ‘I wonder who does.’
‘I mean,’ the haggard steward began again, ‘that the decision isn’t mine. It’s Governor Eisen’s. He wants to confine Krikorian – or whatever its name is – until your, ah, companion is thoroughly acclimated and at home. He also has the safety of others in mind.’
‘Acclimatize Kretzoi!’ the young woman exclaimed. ‘Why, this is almost exactly
