35
The lander was too small to have separate staterooms. There was a cubbyhole in the rear with a deceleration couch that pulled down from the wall. Stan had lain down there. When Julie came in he was asleep, his glasses still on, his round face momentarily untroubled. Julie bent over to shake him, then hesitated. Stan looked so peaceful there. His large face was calm, and quiet handsome. She noticed what long eyelashes he had, and what delicate skin, fine-pored like a young boy's.
The most recent ingestion of Xeno-Zip had taken Stan's spirit far away, into the limitless perspectives that were the psychic environment of the drug. He was traveling through a place of pure light and color, and he smiled at the friendly shapes around him.
Julie stared at him almost in awe. She knew that Stan was moving down the visionary trail in some impossible dreamtime, walking down a hall of memory filled with all the images of everything that had ever been or would be. And these images were melting like wax in the warmth of the soul's embrace. Stan was a sorcerer forcing time itself to stand still and be accountable to the moment. He had found eternity in an instant, and he was balancing it on a needlepoint. He was in his own time now, a time that had no duration and no limit. He was in a place she could never get to. But, she wondered, out here in the world of solid objects and fiery forces, how much time did he have left? How much time was at Julie's disposal, for that matter? Could Stan see their time lines in that strange place where he was?
“Stan,” she whispered to him, “what are you dreaming about? Am I in the dream with you? Are we happy?”
Stan mumbled something but she couldn't catch the words. She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. His eyes snapped open, as if he had been waiting for this signal. She watched his face tense as pain returned to his consciousness. Then he had himself under control and said, “Julie … What is it?”
“Captain Hoban wants to speak to you again. He's pulled a flight recorder from that wreck.”
“Okay, fine.” Stan sat up, then got somewhat unsteadily to his feet. Julie's slender, hard arm was around him, supporting him, her warm fragrant hair was at his shoulder, and he breathed her fragrance gratefully.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Hey, don't mention it. We're a team, aren't we?”
He looked at her. Her eyes were enormous, brilliant, with dark pools at the center. He felt himself melting into them. A wave of emotion came over him.
“Julie …”
“Yes, Stan, what is it?”
“If you're doing this for my sake … please don't stop.”
36
The voices on the flight recorder were very clear.
”
”
”
And then Badger had to turn down the volume as the recorded sound of the explosion shook the walls of Workshop D.
37
“What's the latest on the storm?” Stan asked.
Gill looked up, his long melancholy face half in a green glow from the ready lights on his control panel. On the screen above him, data waves danced in long wavering lines, the numbers changing with a rapidity that would defy the computational abilities of any but a synthetic man with a math coprocessor built into his positronic brain. Gill was such a man, and his computational abilities were enhanced by the rock-steadiness of his mind, which was not subject to the neurotic claims of love, duly, family, or country. Yet he was not completely emotionless. It had been found that intelligence of the highest order presupposes and is built upon certain fundamental emotional bases, of which the desire to survive and continue is the most fundamental of all. The designers of artificial men would have liked to have stopped there. But the uncertain nature of the materials they were using — in which minute differences in atomic structures eventually spelled big differences in output, as well as the inherent instability of colloidal structures — made this impossible. Gill was standard within his design parameters, but those parameters expressed only one part of him.
“The storm is abating,” Gill said. “There's been a twenty-percent diminution in the last half hour. Given the conditions here, I think that's about the best we're going to get. In fact, it's apt to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“Then let's get on with it,” Stan said. He turned to Norbert, the big robot alien, who still crouched patiently in a corner of the lander. Mac the dog, growing impatient, whined to be put down, and Norbert obliged. The dog investigated the corners of the little lander and, finding nothing of interest, returned to curl up at Norbert's taloned feet.
“You ready, Norbert?”
“Of course, Dr. Myakovsky. Being robotic, I am always ready.”
“And Mac?”
“He is a dog, and so he is always ready, too.”
Stan laughed, and remarked to Julie, “I wish now I'd had more time to talk with Norbert. His horrible appearance belies his keen intelligence.”
