"Can I sit with you?"
"Yes, sure."
* * * * *
He was a different-looking lad now. We had given him clean clothes;
he was cleanly shaved; his face and his body, though still thin, had
filled out a bit. A handsome, sensitive-looking young fellow. But in
his eyes was the same hunted look.
"That's Zura," he said. "Looks quite a bit bigger now, doesn't
it?" Then suddenly he swung on me. "I'm going to stay there,
John--understand? You can't stop me--not any of you--because I won't go
back."
Pathetic damn words to come from a boy--to give up his world, his
people, everything to which he was born, because he had made himself,
all in ten minutes, unfitted for everything.
"Zura may not be habitable," I said. "No food. Maybe you can't even
breathe that air down there. We don't know."
"I don't care. I'm not going back to earth." And then he added, "I--I
guess I'd rather be there even without food." He muttered it with a
grim bitterness. "The only man in my world--I couldn't do anything
wrong then, could I?"
For an hour after that I think we both sat almost in silence. I was
busy with the electro-telescope, trying to see down into the swirling
Zurian clouds. On the stool beside me, Alan Grant just sat brooding.
And then suddenly, as though he had been struggling all this time to
reach some momentous decision, he burst out:
"I've got to tell you, that's all. John, listen--"
I was absorbed with the telescope so that I hardly heeded him.
It seemed that the clouds of Zura, in one place in the northern
hemisphere, were breaking into a little rift. At Alan's words, I saw
out of the tail of my eye that he had flung an apprehensive look at
the little spiral staircase of alumite which wound down into the lower
levels of the _Planeteer_.
"What?" I said idly.