"Why my wife, though? She owes you nothing; she owes me everything.
The first woman of the streets you picked up would have made a safer
confidante."
"Maybe I trusted her."
"Maybe you had no right to trust her!" Mattern cried, almost with
sincerity. "It would have been wrong of her not to tell me."
"Maybe it was because I--I love her," Alard said, looking down at the
thick rugs that covered the cabin floor. "If you fall in love with
somebody, you tell them things."
Mattern couldn't help smiling. "I never do," he said.
"Maybe you've never been in love. Maybe you don't have any human
feelings at all."
There was an uncomfortable feeling in Mattern's shoulders, as if his
tailor had made a mistake for once. Had he, during sixteen years of
alien trade, changed into something not quite human? Was there then a
solid basis for the anti-extraterrestrial prejudice? He picked up a
slender, sharp thike and ran his thumb absent-mindedly along the blade.
Alard stiffened in his effort not to flush.
Mattern smiled and laid the thike down on the table. It was only a
paperknife and had never been used for anything more. If he ever had
need for such a thing to be done, the time was long past when he would
have needed to do it himself. He looked at the crewman.
"One would almost think you told my wife because you wanted her to tell
me," he suggested.
"That's ridiculous!" Alard flashed. "I may be a fool, but not that much
of a fool!"
"Why are you on my ship with forged papers then?" Mattern demanded.
"I wanted--I wanted to bring you to justice."
"By committing a crime yourself? Surely a roundabout way. And why have
you taken it upon yourself to help rid humanity of me?"
"Why shouldn't I?" Alard asked. "I'm a human being; isn't that enough?
But, as a matter of fact, that wasn't the reason I came to your ship. I
only found out later what you were doing."
Mattern waited patiently.
"You killed my father!" the boy burst out. And then tension seemed to
ebb from him, as if the worst had happened. "So now you know who I am!"
Mattern picked his words delicately. "If you have proof that I murdered
your father, why don't you prosecute? There's no statute of limitation
on murder on any of the planets. Or don't you have proof?"
Alard's voice broke slightly. "Everybody on Fairhurst knows you killed
him, but they won't do anything about it. They say he deserved what he
got."
* * * * *
Mattern sighed, knowing now who the young man was. His brother. Another
responsibility, another vain tie. "How do you know, he didn't deserve
what he got?" Mattern asked.
Suddenly Alard grew shy. He lowered his eyes to the rug again. "Because
_I_ didn't deserve what _I_ got."
And there, Mattern thought, Alard had him. Whatever the boy was now,
he certainly had not deserved what he'd got then. _But I was only
sixteen_, Mattern argued with himself; _how could I have been held
responsible?_ And then he told himself, _You haven't been sixteen for
twenty-four years._
"I thought one of the women in the village would have adopted you," he
said.
"One of 'em did. They took me away from her after she beat me so hard
she practically killed me. Every little thing I did wrong, she said it
was the bad blood coming out in me, and beat me so hard the blood did
come. I went from one family to another, but nobody really wanted me."
His voice cracked wide across. "You don't know what it's like to grow
up with nobody caring for you!"
"It so happens I do," Mattern said, "but I can't expect you to believe
me."
Alard wasn't interested in Mattern's life story; he wanted to wallow in
his own in front of a captive audience. "The only hope I had was that
you would come back for me some day. They told me you were probably
dead, but I wouldn't believe it, see? It was all I had to hang onto."
"I thought you were part of a family," Mattern tried to defend himself.
"I thought you belonged to somebody." He almost convinced himself that
this was true, but, at the back of his mind, something whispered, _You
ditched him._
"When I was sixteen, like you'd been, I ran away to look for you. I
found out where you'd gone and I followed. I even stayed a while with
the flluska. I liked them better than my own people. They said I should
try looking for you in hyperspace."
"They are a very wise people," Mattern said.
Alard hadn't had his brother's luck. None of the great starships
offered him a berth. But there were unchartered vessels--smugglers and
pirates and worse--that would hire anybody who didn't value his life
very highly and knew how to keep his mouth shut. He got jobs on them.
And as the bandit ships he sailed on took Jumps closer and closer in to
the more sophisticated sectors, Alard began to hear of a Len Mattern.
It took him a long time before he could bring himself to believe that
this king of finance was the brother whom he had imagined finding
derelict and penniless. Instead, he was rich and oblivious, not needing
anything the younger man could give him.
It was then that Alard determined revenge. It took him years to save up
enough money to buy the false papers he needed--more years to buy his
way into Mattern's crew. And, finally, he had achieved his end; he was
there.
* * * * *
"But you've been with me almost a year now," Mattern pointed out, "and
done nothing except talk to Lyddy against me. What were you planning to
do?"
"I don't know," the boy said hopelessly. "Lots of times I thought of
killing you, but then I'd be killing the only relative I had."
"You could have told me who you were. I'd have done something for you."
Alard's eyes blazed. "Yes, you _would_ have. When it's easy, when it
wouldn't mean a damn thing to you, you'd do something for me!"
Len pulled out a smokestick and offered it to the boy. Alard shook
his head impatiently. Len lit one for himself. Neither of them said
anything.
Lyddy was sobbing softly. "You never really loved me," she whimpered.
"It was just a way of getting back at Len."
Alard looked away from her, met his brother's eye, and dropped his gaze
to the rug, without denying the impeachment.
Mattern exhaled smoke. "All right, you had a grudge against me, but
what did you have against her? If you _were_ using her to get back at
me, then I think you have no cause to reproach me for anything I did.
Maybe your foster-mother was right; there _is_ bad blood in the family."
The young spaceman was still silent.
Lyddy lifted her head. There was resolution on her tear-smudged face.
"I'm going to leave you, Len! I can't go on living with a man who does
the awful, evil, _unnatural_ things you do...." Her voice petered out
as her vocabulary proved unequal to her emotions. _Poor Lyddy_, he
thought. And then, _Poor Len, with emotions unequal to his vocabulary._
"Everything I did, I did for your sake, Lyddy," he told her softly, but
no longer with any hope of her comprehension. "It was because I was
poor and couldn't afford your love that I went into hyperspace." He
couldn't help adding, "Doesn't it mean anything to you that I risked a
whole universe for your sake, and that now I have worlds to offer you?"
"Don't put the blame on _me_, Len Mattern!" Angry tears stood in her
eyes. "I never wanted anybody to do _that_ much for me. All I wanted
were nice things and somebody to take care of me and maybe love me. I
never wanted to have the whole universe risked for me." Her voice broke
on the truth. "Nobody's worth all that!"
She was right, he thought--being given too much can be worse than
being given too little. The words spilled out of her; he'd been
so disenchanted by her stupidity that he gave her credit for less
understanding than she did have.
"You wouldn't've been able to wait fifteen-sixteen years for me if you
really loved me. But you were _happy_ the way you were--you and that
extraterrestrial of yours. All you wanted was to dream about me. You
were a fool ever to have come back for me; you shoulda stuck with your
dreams."
* * * * *
And again, he knew, she was right. He felt very tired and empty,
the way he'd felt after Schiemann and Balas had died, as if nothing
mattered any more. He didn't argue with her.
"What would you do if you left me, Lyddy?" he asked gently.
"I can always--" she swallowed--"go back to my old job, I guess."
Alard gave an exclamation of horror, and Mattern agreed in his mind
that that solution would never do. Beyond a doubt, she was his
responsibility. And so was Alard. Why had he ever longed for a family?
And then an outside mind joined in with his and he knew what to do.
"Alard," he said, "before, I offered to do something for you. Now I'm
not going to do anything for you, not a damn thing."
Alard drew himself erect. "I wouldn't expect you to, see? Even if you
wanted to, I wouldn't take--"
"I want you to do something for me," Mattern cut in.
Alard paled, then flushed with anger. "If this is some half-baked way
of thinking you can make up for things without me feeling--"
"Hear me out before you leap to conclusions. You said that you loved my
wife...."
Lyddy gave a moan. "You know he was only stringing me along to get back
at you."
"He wouldn't have done that," said Mattern. "Not a fine, upstanding
boy like Alard, no matter how much he hated me. You really love Lyddy,
don't you, Alard--as you said before?"
The boy looked frightened. "Only in a manner of speaking," he said
quickly. "I was trying to make you jealous. I think of her as a
sister--a sister-in-law."
"She's very beautiful," Mattern reminded him. And the xhindi _had_ done
their work well. She hadn't changed; they had preserved her for him
just as she had been sixteen years before. If only they had let her
change, then things might have worked out. They could have kept the
body from growing old without holding back the mind--or had they not
held back the mind? Was this the fullest maturity it was capable of?
"A man who has her as his wife should be very happy," Mattern pointed
out. "You wouldn't want her to go back to what she'd been doing, and
she won't stay with me."
"Yes, sure." There was a desperate note in the boy's voice. "But she's
not young. I mean for me--although, of course, she _looks_ young," he
added, with a wild glance in her direction. "And she's not very--she
isn't--"
Mattern got up and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. "Then if you
feel that way about her and do as I ask, it will really be a favor to
me."
"Why should I do you a favor?" Alard demanded. His eyes darted back and
forth like an animal that is beginning to realize it is caught in a
trap.
"To prove you're the better man," Mattern told him. "To heap coals of
fire on my head. To prove that if there's bad blood in the family, it
exists only in me."
Alard didn't ask what Mattern wanted him to do. He knew already.
* * * * *