We're delighted that you're well again, and we both rejoice in the new felicity you should discover now.
Ruth and Frank
Felicity - that was a pet word of hers.
The plaque had a faint, haunting hint of Sweet Delirium.
He read the message twice, before a stinging in his eyes blurred her clean printing.
"Please thank them both." His voice was quiet, surprisingly, as if his tears had been for nothing. "Please tell them I wish them happiness together."
"We are telling them," the machine said. "But there is a picture also, if you wish to see it."
He began to shake his head, recoiling from the pain of old emotions, and found again that they had vanished.
Quickly he whispered,
"Let me see."
The humanoid pressed a stud at the base of the plaque, and the green printing dissolved.
The golden veinings faded, and the dark surface became a window, through which he saw a simple gay pavilion cupped in a green valley beneath the silver towers of the Institute.
Frank Ironsmith and Ruth came out of it, waving at him gaily.
The man looked heavier, pink with health and calmly self-content, his sunburned jaws moving as if he still were chewing gum.
Ruth was straight and radiant, the clean planes of her face firm with a quiet strength he had not seen there before.
They came on toward him, smiling in the picture, until the stud clicked softly back again and that tiny window closed itself.
Even then the image of Ruth stayed in his mind.
She had never looked quite so young, he thought, not even on the day of their own wedding back at Starmont, never quite so light and free.
"Tell them I'm glad to see their own felicity." He grinned at the grave machine.
"Now please put the picture away for me - and open this window."
Nodding a casual farewell to that curiously youthful and untroubled reflection of himself, he watched the mechanical press another button. The mirror became a wide transparency, which slid down silently. A clean morning breeze came in to cool his face, and it brought him a sense of free well-being.
"There's the cruiser." The machine pointed gracefully.
"Mr. White is landing now."
Turning to look, Forester gaped again. The red-paved landing stage, still empty, was just as he had known it.
Far away, however, beyond the uneven edge of the mountain's flat crown, he could see the rolling vastness of the desert he once had known - now no longer a tawny desolation. For new lakes shone blue in the valleys, above dams the humanoids must have built, and scattered villas made gay islets of color in a new sea of tender green, and now dark forests clad the higher summits, which had been harsh fangs of naked stone.
New forests, grown since he was here!
"That grid!" he breathed. "How long?"
He was turning, still almost afraid to put that question to the humanoid, when he caught a shimmer of color moving against the sky.
The cruiser was dropping silently, the oval mirror of its hull aglow with blue and flowing green and the red reflection of the stage.
It touched gently and Mark White jumped lightly down from the deck, not waiting for the humanoid behind him.
"Well, Clay!"
Forester stared, too breathless to reply to that boom of greeting, for White showed no trace of the time for forests to grow.
The luxuriant beard and shaggy head were fiery as ever, and he came striding across the stage with a young man's buoyancy.
"Confused?"
White's chuckle rumbled. "I know how you feel."
Forester stepped slowly over the low window ledge, to take the huge man's offered hand.
Looking up from the merry light in those blue eyes which he had last seen smiling out of cold forgetfulness, he whispered huskily:
"How long has it been - how many years?"
"This is the fiftieth Awakening Day."
A cold wind blew on his spine.
"That's the day the grid releases its yearly crop of graduates, ready for independent life," White added genially.
"Quite a holiday, and we've arranged a party for you.
We're getting together at Dragonrock. Mansfield will be there, and our old friends Ford and Graystone and Overstreet - who all finished a year ago."
"And - Jane Carter?"
"Not there." Disappointingly, White shook his head.
"But we're going on to join her - and you'll find her changed from the ragged little waif we used to know!"
"Grown up, I suppose." Forester caught the light of admiration in White's eyes, and began to wonder what the grid had done to her.
If the impulses of creative energy channeled through those platinum relays could stimulate the mending of every human defect and blemish, and even knit back all the wear of time - a breathless eagerness caught him.
"Join her?" he whispered anxiously. "Where?"
"A million light-years from here, more or less."