Petersen shook his head. "Woller married a widow. A wealthy one, with a
daughter. They didn't get along too well. The woman died. Some people
thought it might be suicide."
The quick joy flooded up in Nolan. Petersen saw it and his face
grew somber. "That's one of the things, Steve," he said. "The other
one--Hell, this is hard to say."
Nolan stood up and the joy was gone from his face. "Damn you, Pete,"
he said emotionlessly. "Don't break things gently to me."
Petersen shrugged. "Ailse wasn't anywhere we could find her--and we
know a lot of places to look in. The ship left to come here. She was at
Woller's home till just before then. Woller sent men to bring something
from his apartment to the ship. I thought it was papers at the
time--but it could have been a girl. So--where does that leave Ailse?"
Where? Nolan stood rocklike as the thought trickled through the
automatic barrier his mind had set up. Where did it leave Ailse?
A charred fragment of what had once been beauty. A castoff target for
TPL's searching pyros.
"I'll say it again, Steve. You know what was at stake. If the Junta had
time--Well, we didn't know what kind of weapons they had there. That
was one reason why I was sent ahead in that crazy disguise. If I had
had time to scout around it might have been possible to do things less
bloodily. I didn't have time. We couldn't take chances."
There was no anger in Nolan, no room for it. He sat there, waiting for
Petersen to start the jets and send them back to the dome. He knew how
he would scour the ashes, hoping against hope. And he knew what he
would find.
It would have been better, he thought, almost to have died under
Woller's pyro, or the TPL ships'. If he'd stayed behind--if Woller had
put him in the sleep-box as Vincennes had suggested, and he had shared
obliteration with her....
The sleep-box! The casket!
* * * * *
It took Petersen a full second to recover from his surprise when the
frozen face of Nolan suddenly glowed with hope, when he leaped up and
dashed into the cargo hatch. It took him minutes to follow him. Minutes
spent in making the difficult decision of whether or not he should
prevent a man from taking his own life.
The decision was wasted, he found. Behind the scattered boxes of pyro
shells, wedged into a corner of the hold, Nolan knelt beside a long,
narrow casket. Fiber shock-wrapping was scattered about. Nolan's
fumbling fingers were working the latch of the casket, lifting the
lid....
The shout that left his lips was deafening in the small hold. Petersen
looked closer, tiptoed up--
And all the way back to the waiting ships of the TPL Petersen was
grinning to himself. Though his hands guided the ship skillfully as
ever, though his gaze was outward at the flowing terrain beneath, he
saw but one thing.
The tableau as he had approached the casket and seen Nolan, face
indescribably tender, shutting off the sleep currents, reaching for the
ampoule of stimulant that would revive the unconscious dark-haired girl
within.