Tsu laughed up into his face, long eyes bright.
"Why not? It is Torl's house, too!"
"But ... but ... yesterday...." He couldn't bring himself to say that
yesterday Torl had died and he had seen her buried.
Tsu seemed to divine the thought in his mind.
"Yesterday was yesterday, _sintaha_ Rowley. Yesterday, Torl died, and
you saw how it was. We hope you could make a good report of it."
He was silent as they walked. He stole occasional glances at her,
wondering. Somehow, the death and resurrection of Torl provided a key.
His brain was swamped with conjecture.
* * * * *
They left the village and climbed the hill. He had meant to sit with
Tsu and Smarin, to share their grief a while this morning, if they
would let him. Why he walked now, he could not say, save that his brain
was in a whirl. And Tsu accompanied him gaily, chattering nonsense
about the death of her mother.
He stopped, looked at the village below. While they were here, he would
ask Tsu for information about who lived where. He had already sketched
the village from his tent. He would write in the information as an
addition to his notes.
A thought struck him. Why label the props on the stage set? Labels
meant nothing ... unless you could see the set from the wings. It would
help, if he could do that.
"Let's sit here, Tsu," he said.
She sat, obediently, among the tall grasses, folding slim, long legs
under her like a child. He sat at her side, noting with relief that a
slight hump in the slope hid the village from sight. He took her hand
in his.
"I have thought of something," he said carefully. "Tell me about the
children. Let's take Yanek ... is that his name? He lives in the house
next to you. How old is he?"
She regarded him from the corners of her long eyes.
"Old? Yanek is as old as a child. He is as old as he is."
"How old is Yanek in years?"
She hesitated, biting her lip in puzzlement. "There is always Yanek,
_sintaha_ Rowley. Why should there be anything about him of years?"
She didn't know what he was talking about. Rowley felt excitement creep
along the channels of his veins.
"Can you remember when Yanek was born?"
The look in her eyes made his heart pound harder. She was alarmed!
He pressed on, relentlessly. "Yesterday, Torl died. Today, she lives.
You do not understand a simple thing like age. You do not remember when
Yanek was born, but he is not over seven or eight. Tsu ... tell me ...
are you and your people immortal?"
There was an anguish in his tone that made her drop her eyes.
"No," she said, without moving her lips.
That was the truth. His inner sense told him it was. And the truth
was disappointing. What had he expected? The key to immortality? The
Fountain of Youth? Men had sought it in ages past and never found it.
His thoughts darted. "If you cannot remember Yanek being born, perhaps
he was not born. Yet, you have families. There must be love...."
"Love, yes! We love each other, we love our world, our trees...."
"And if a young man loved you, Tsu, how would he say it?"
His heart was pounding fiercely now. A fierce zeal possessed him that
was not born of her nearness, the intimacy of their seclusion. His
conditioning against emotional storms had been too thorough for him to
break it now. It was something else that possessed him--the excitement
of the hunter viewing the first, sparse tracks of the game he seeks.
He had asked. It all depended now on her answer, for the mystery was
coming clear to him.
Her long eyes were heavy-lidded, candid, without guile.
"How would he among your people, _sintaha_ Rowley?"
He thought, wildly, _she doesn't know!_ He thought, she is
inexperienced. He thought again, she would _never_ know, unless...."
He slipped an arm around her bare shoulders and drew her to him.
"Like this," he said, looking down into her tip-tilted eyes.
Then he kissed her. Her sarong slipped....
* * * * *
"I am unhappy with you, Cliff," Commander Spliid said with chilly
formality. Rowley leaned back in his chair in Spliid's office aboard
the Survey ship. Spliid laid his pipe in the tray on his desk. He said,
"What happened to your daily reports?"
Rowley stuffed his own pipe, lit it.
"I thought you knew. I didn't make any."
Spliid's look of exasperation wavered and dimmed through the swirls of
blue smoke. It was all over now, and Rowley felt no sense of hurry.
Hume was a pinpoint of light in the star-carpeted vestibules of space
behind them. In another hour, they would shift into overdrive. Hume
would vanish from their lives forever.
"I assume," he said, "that Hume is now officially closed."
Spliid nodded. He fixed questioning gray eyes on Rowley.
"Good," said Rowley. "That's the way it will always be."
"Always?" Spliid fumbled with his pipe. "For our life-times, maybe...."
"Always," Rowley repeated. He drew on his pipe, enjoying the luxury of
keeping the Commander's curiosity at bay. "Human beings have no place
on Hume. I found that out the day after you dropped in on me. That's
why I made no reports. I just sat around, waiting for the pilot boat."
Spliid held a lighter to the dark-stained bowl of his pipe.
"So you're satisfied now, too?"
Rowley nodded noncommittally. "At first," he said distantly, "I
imagined crazy things--like a super-advanced race living underground,
giving us the bum's rush with a play-show they had rigged up."
"And you found out you were wrong," suggested Spliid.
"I found out I was partly right."
"I won't buy supermen living in caves, Cliff."
"Neither would I. The next crazy thing I thought was that the natives
were immortals and they didn't want us to share in it. Silly, huh?"
"Pretty silly," Spliid agreed drily.
"I knew they wanted to get rid of us," Rowley went on earnestly. "I
could feel it. But why? Most inferior races we run against _want_
contact with the galaxy...."
"They want refrigerators and washing machines, tractors, railroad
trains and automobiles," Spliid interrupted. "If we gave them, their
culture would go to pot in a generation. There's a reason for our
methods."
"A lot of little things about Hume didn't jibe," Rowley continued.
"Bathrooms, for instance."
"No bathrooms on Hume?" Spliid grinned.
"_Bath_ rooms, yes. Just bathing went on in there. And outside, where
the little house in back ought to be ... nothing." Rowley tamped the
ashes in his pipe, withdrew a blackened finger. "We take that sort of
thing for granted, you know. We assume proper facilities are around
someplace and don't give them a second thought. They weren't present in
the stage setting because they weren't needed."
"Come, now...!"
"Fact. Another fact: grass growing in the streets. The way those kids
played on it, it would have been worn away in a week. Slim evidence,
but it's part of the picture."
* * * * *
"What I'm interested in," said Spliid, "is the death. Did you learn
what they did with the body?"
"You were right," Rowley said. "There wasn't any. I saw Torl the next
day, alive and kicking. That's what put me off on the immortality
tangent."