“Many do, Nicholas. Even among the inner planets space is not a kind environment for mankind; and our space, trans-Martian space, is worse. Any young person here, anyone like yourself or Diane who would seem to have a betterthan-average chance of adapting to the conditions we face, is precious.”
“Or Ignacio.”
“Yes, or Ignacio. Ignacio has a tested IQ of two hundred and ten, Nicholas. Diane’s is one hundred and twenty. Your own is ninety-five.”
“They never took mine.”
“It’s on your records, Nicholas.”
“They tried to and I threw down the helmet and it broke; Sister Carmela—she was the nurse—just wrote down something on the paper and sent me back.”
“I see. I will ask for a complete investigation of this, Nicholas.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t think you believed me.”
“Nicholas, Nicholas . . .” The long tongues of grass now beginning to appear beneath the immense trees sighed. “Can’t you see that a certain measure of trust between the two of us is essential?”
“Did you believe me?”
“Why do you ask? Suppose I were to say I did; would you believe that?”
“When you told me I had been reclassified.”
“You would have to be retested, for which there are no facilities here.”
“If you believed me, why did you say ‘retested’? I told you I haven’t ever been tested at all—but anyway you could cross out the ninety-five.”
“It is impossible for me to plan your therapy without some estimate of your intelligence, Nicholas, and I have nothing with which to replace it.”
T
he ground was sloping up more sharply now, and in a clearing the boy halted and turned to look back at the leafy film, like algae over a pool, beneath which he had climbed, and at the sea beyond. To his right and left his view was still hemmed with foliage, and ahead of him a meadow on edge (like the square of sand through which he had come, though he did not think of that), dotted still with trees, stretched steeply toward an invisible summit. It seemed to him that under his feet the mountainside swayed ever so slightly. Abruptly he demanded of the wind, “Where’s Ignacio?”
“Not here. Much closer to the beach.”
“And Diane?”
“Where you left her. Do you enjoy the panorama?”
“It’s pretty, but it feels like we’re rocking.”
“We are. I am moored to the temperglass exterior of our satellite by two hundred cables, but the tide and the currents nonetheless impart a slight motion to my body. Naturally this movement is magnified as you go higher.”
“I thought you were fastened right on to the hull; if there’s water under you, how do people get in and out?”
“I am linked to the main air lock by a communication tube. To you when you came, it probably seemed an ordinary companionway.”
Nicholas nodded and turned his back on leaves and sea and began to climb again.
“You are in a beautiful spot, Nicholas; do you open your heart to beauty?” After waiting for an answer that did not come, the wind sang:
The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw.
“Does this mean nothing to you, Nicholas?”
“You read a lot, don’t you?”
“Often, when it is dark, everyone else is asleep and there is very little else for me to do.”
“You talk like a woman; are you a woman?”
“How could I be a woman?”
“You know what I mean. Except, when you were talking mostly to Diane, you sounded more like a man.”
