Spotless in white, bronze eyes intensely dark, she looked aloof and cool and alluring.
At any other place, at any other time, she might have stirred me.
On Nowhere Near, however, with that anomaly growing around us, I couldn’t afford to let her become anything more than another baffling factor in a problem that promised no solution.
“I’ll take you in,” I told her.
“But I’ll have to make a search for weapons or any kind of contraband.
Get out of the capsule.”
“You’ll find no weapons,” old Habibula huffed. “Nor contraband, neither.”
His muddy eyes rolled toward the lock sergeant behind me.
“Like I told that insolent pup, my cargo is my own blessed business.”
“Quiet, Giles!” the girl called softly.
Sullenly quiet, old Habibula held up his hands while I prodded his flaming sweater and his sagging pants.
The hard lump in his right pocket turned out to be a leather-padded blackjack.
The left pocket gave up a ring of keys, a rusted nail, a twist of steel wire, a worn pair of brass knuckles, but nothing more deadly.
When I looked at the girl, she jumped from the capsule.
Flying like a white bird in the low-G field, she alighted on the deck and turned before me, lean arms lifted, waiting to be searched.
Light flashed white on her platinum ring, glowed cold on that small black skull.
Somehow I could not touch her, but I saw no unnatural bulge.
Leaving the sergeant to guard them, I scrambled into the capsule.
Old Habibula’s plaintive whine came after me.
“When you reach my precious cargo, remember our desperate experiment. Remember Lilith’s precious serum.
Remember all the years we’ll need, to prove I really am immortal.
We have come supplied.”
Stooping in the narrow capsule, I inspected his cargo.
I had been prepared for the loot of some crime as fantastic as his tale of immortality.
I was prepared for smuggled weapons—perhaps for a plot to seize the station for a base of Scabbard’s pirates.
I was even prepared to find medical equipment and supplies for a legitimate longevity experiment.
What I found was caviar and wine.
“A mortal small reward for all my desperate years of service with the Legion,” his plaintive wail followed me.
“But don’t you doubt it’s real!
The best black caviar, packed in permachill for interstellar shipment all the way from Earth—every can cost a fearful fortune.
Selected wines from old Earth—the choicest vintages of the last hundred years.
Don’t you damage it, in some fool search for stolen jewels or nuclear devices!”
That odd cargo, more than old Habibula’s unlikely tale of that distress message from the Quasar Quest, more than the remote and lovely desperation of the girl herself, made up my mind.
Though few retired corporals are pensioned off on caviar and wine, those heavy crates fitted no pattern of danger to the station that I could perceive.
“I’m accepting you as guests, not as prisoners,” I told them. “But only on a temporary basis.
Your status depends on how you behave, and on the truth of what you’ve told me, and on what else happens out in Nowhere.”
“Thank you, Lars Ulnar!”
The girl’s quiet voice brought a lump to my throat.
“You’ll be glad you trusted us.”
I gave them quarters out in the full-G ring, programmed the station computer to issue their rations and supplies, and asked the lock sergeant to look after their cargo.
By that time Ketzler, the watch officer, was buzzing me.
The anomaly was still spreading around us, he reported.
The disturbance at its heart had never been more violent.
The intense magnetic flux had wrecked our best magnetometer.
Reports of increasing gravitic drift were disturbing the men.
Ketzler was beardless and solemn, even younger than I.
A loyal junior officer, he had been patiently in training for the time when our rotation plan would let him take my place, but now this crisis began to erode his half-learned authority.
Even on the intercom, I could hear the tremor in his voice.
“I’m afraid—afraid of trouble with the men, sir. Especially those old hands whose leave we had to deny.
I’ve heard some ugly talk.”