“You were gone so long!”
Wide and glazed and dark, her bronze eyes stared at me.
“I thought you’d been lost in space.
When I heard something moving, I was afraid—afraid it was an invader—come to capture me—”
She clung to me, shuddering and sobbing.
“Lars!
Lars!
I’m so terribly glad it’s you!”
I kissed her again, this time not to stop her mouth.
After a while she laughed softly in my arms.
“Captain Ulnar, your first duty is the security of AKKA.”
Her breathless voice mocked Ken Star’s brusque command.
“I like the way you’re attending to it.
You’ve saved my life—and made me human again!”
I held her alive and wonderful in my arms.
“Never—destroy yourself!”
The words even were so painful that I could scarcely whisper them.
“The invaders will be taking care of that,” I told her bleakly.
“Too soon now—unless Ken Star and Giles do better than I expect.”
“Don’t speak of that!” she breathed.
“Let’s forget!”
We tried to forget.
For a little time, we almost did forget.
But the stillness of the station was a monstrous voice of warning, and our thudding hearts were tramping feet of terror.
Imperative dread drove us back to the laser dome.
We were deep in the anomaly.
That black funnel had covered half the northward stars.
With the electron telescope I searched its long rim for the invading machines hanging there. I found nothing.
They were nearer now, I knew, but we had no light to see them by.
When they sterilized our asteroid, I thought bleakly, its glow would make them visible again, but not to us.
“Lars—it’s the shot!”
Crouching back against me in the chill red gloom of that null-G space, Lilith pointed at the dome.
Beyond it, against that vast and featureless pit of blackness, I saw a sudden pale blue flare.
“It’s the sterilizing shot!”
“I don’t—don’t think so.”
An unbelieving relief took away my voice.
“I think it’s the retro-rockets of that capsule.”
“Giles and Ken?”
She hung peering at me, a pink and adorable ghost in that lifeless night.
“Can they really be coming back?”
She caught a sobbing breath.
“Can you call them?
Find out what they’ve found?”
“I’m afraid to risk a call,” I said.
“Any signal might draw another shot.
But it is the capsule—in braking flight toward the station hub.”
We were waiting in the hub when the capsule nudged its way back into the lock.
The drive motor for the hull valve was still dead, but I stood ready to cycle through the man-lock and seal the valve by hand.
Air roared into the chamber.
Shucking off the space suit, I stumbled around the capsule to help with the hatch.