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false to the other."
He darted upright and moved toward the door.
"Please, Crewman, let's say no more about it."
"I was hoping for more." Keth ached with disappointment, still wistfully
longing to discover the way to some enchanted valley where he might find Nera
Nyin, but he followed Brong reluctantly. "At least we can set up the tachyon
compass. It has a language people should believe."
With Brong's secrets out of danger now, he bustled cheerily to help unpack the
instrument. They first set it up outside, on the second-floor terrace, but the
counterbalanced beam spun crazily there. Moved inside, out of the wind, it
steadied, pointing almost east.
In his old files, Brong found a copy of the radar chart on which he had
plotted the early sanicraft surveys. When Keth drew his direction line, it ran
parallel with his mother's route toward the eastward bend of that great river
the glaciers fed.
They moved the compass down to the north perimeter, and down again to the
south. All three compass bearings intersected at a point just beyond the
riverbend. Brong squinted sharply at it and uneasily back at him.
"Crewman, your needle is pointing at a feyo tree. The brain-tree your mother
saw beyond that river before her signals were cut off."
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"A rhodo source," Keth told him. "Which means it could be something humanoid.
Perhaps an observation probe or a communications device, protected against the
rockrust. I want a look at it-"
"Not this whiter."
It was late by then, and Brong took him to eat at a noisy all-night place hi a
tunnel two levels down, where the diners came mostly from the spacedeck and
the thorium mine. They sat in a booth at the rear, and he kept pressing for a
way to the braintree.
Perhaps they could wait for the river to freeze and cross on the ice. Perhaps
they could take a boat or pontoons to float the sanicraft. Perhaps they could
swing south across the glacier and strike back north beyond the river.
Brong allowed him no hope. Snows had already fallen on the glacier; the
crevasses would be drift-hidden and treacherous. The late-model sanicraft were
already overloaded with safety equipment; the weight of pontoons would stall
them. Even in the midsummer, a trip to the tree would carry them beyond the
point of no return. Now in winter, even the normal maintenance work around the
perimeter was difficult enough.
"Better admit, Crewman. You're stuck till summer if the humanoids give us that
long."
He saw no way not to admit it. They returned to the station and he went to bed
on a hard cot in that narrow upper room. Heavy with Malili's gravity, he lay a
long time, turning restlessly, fretting about humanoids and feyo trees and
Bosun Brong.
Asleep at last, he dreamed of that magic valley with its crimson titan trees.
Brong was with him, and they were searching for Nera Nyin. They heard her
voice at last, singing hi a yellow glade. She saw them and ran to meet them,
tall and nude and beautiful.
Brong darted ahead of him, reaching out to greet her. When his metal hands
touched hers, he began to change, growing more and more mechanical until he
was a golden humanoid. She left Brong and came on to him, her bright smile
alluring, her arms open wide.
He fled from her, in terror of being changed.
"Crewman!" The real Brong woke him. "Zone Command wants you on the holophone."
"News for you, Crewman Kyrone." It was Vythle Klo, sleek and tall and very
grave. "Your father has called the Admiral from Kai. About some sudden
emergency he was not specific, but you're to return at once. We've arranged
your passage back, on the same ship you came out on. The Admiral is sending
your father two kilograms of palladium. You may pick it up here, on your way
to catch the shuttle. You will travel again as Shipman Vesh."
19
Rhodar A system for determining direction and distance through tachyonic
radiation effects.
When he stepped off the ramp at Terradeck, Cyra was waiting, muffled so
heavily hi a hooded winter cloak that he hardly knew her. She hugged him hard.
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For a moment, smiling through her tears of delight, she looked young and
strong and happy, but then he saw her haggard pallor and felt the weight of
trouble on her.
"Don't talk," she breathed. "Just come with me."
They picked up his bag and took the Terratown tubeway. Halfway there, she led
him off the pod and up through a surface entrance. Here in the south of Kai,
with Summersend past, the air was already sharp with frost. The blood-red sun
barely cleared the black north horizon and the summer shrubs were naked sticks
jutting out of the first thin snow.
Nobody else had got off with them. Walking against a bitter wind toward a
walled summer villa on a little hill above the station, they were alone. Cyra
glanced back and began to talk.
"Your father didn't want us to call you." She caught his arm and clung. "I
suppose it hurts bis pride to admit how much we need you now."
"Why now?" Dread brushed him. "In the Zone, nobody told me what the trouble
is."
"They're here!" The wind had begun to take her breath, and her voice had sunk
to a husky whisper. "The humanoids. Not yet on Kai, but in space near Malili.
We were afraid they would intercept your ship."
He had stopped to listen, but she tugged him anxiously on. The shallow snow
crunched under their boots and the purple sky ahead seemed suddenly
foreboding.
"I didn't get much from the Admiral "
"That may not may not matter now." Still tramping doggedly on, she had to gasp
for breath. "We must do with what we have."
They came to a stone bench niched into the villa wall, and he made her stop to
rest. Warily watching the path behind, she whispered again: "We've been
trying, Keth. Everything we could. We finished the rhodar and picked up
another moving source it must be a humanoid ship approaching from the Dragon
at tachyonic velocity when we picked it up."
"The one the Bosun saw them building?" The wind felt colder. "If he had been
believed "
"No matter now." She shrank from the wind. "We did try, Keth. I went to
Bridgeman Greel. A friend back at the academy, long ago he wanted to marry me
once. Still too sentimental to turn us in for murder. I got him to listen to
your father."
Her bent head shook.
"He didn't listen, really. Said he never took much stock in the humanoids.
Wouldn't try to understand the rhodar demonstration. Half convinced in spite
of me that your father is the con man the shipwatch calls him. Con man and
killer.
"For my sake, he did set up a meeting for us. A few space engineers and junior
fleet officials, all warned not to turn us in. The Zoor engineer asked more
about the rhodar than we wanted to tell him, but nobody else was much
impressed.
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"Though Greel had promised to protect us, somebody tipped off the shipwatch.
They picked up Nurse Vesh the day after the meeting. Pretty harsh with her,
but she outguessed them. Got a message to the hideout hi tune for us to get
away.
"So here we are. Creel's gone on to Northdyke, letting us stay here for now in
the keeper's lodge, though our welcome's wearing thin. Officially, if the
shipwatch gets back on our trail, he doesn't know we're here."
Cold fingers quivering, she clutched his arm again.
"That's why, Keth, why we had to call you back. Because we've done all we can.
There's nobody even to laugh at us now, with the Bridge already scattered for
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