Are you afraid? she thought at him.
Because I come out here to think? He hesitated a little then said ‘Yes, I am. It’s the Race’s last chance. If I fail—’
Are you afraid for yourself?
He looked at her in astonishment and Wenda’s thought stream fluttered with shame at her indecency.
She said, ‘I wish I were going instead.’
Roi said, ‘Do you think you can do a better job?’
‘Oh, no. But if I were to fail and – and never come back, it would be a smaller loss to the Race.’
‘The loss is all the same,’ he said stolidly, ‘whether it’s you or I. The loss is Racial existence.’
Racial existence at the moment was in the background of Wenda’s mind, if anywhere. She sighed. ‘The trip is such a long one.’
‘How long?’ he asked with a smile. ‘Do you know?’
She hesitated. She dared not appear stupid to him.
She said primly, ‘The common talk is that it is to the First Level.’
When Wenda had been little and the heated corridors had extended rther out of the city, she had wandered out, exploring as youngsters will. One day, a long distance out, where the chill in the air nipped at her, she came to a hall that slanted upward but was blocked almost instantly by a tremendous plug, wedged tightly from top to bottom and side to side.
On the other side and upward, she had learned a long time later, lay the Seventy-ninth Level; above that the Seventy-eighth and so on.
‘We’re going past the First Level, Wenda.’
‘But there’s nothing past the First Level.’
‘You’re right. Nothing. All the solid matter of the planet comes to an end.’
‘But how can there be anything that’s nothing? You mean air?’
‘No, I mean nothing. Vacuum. You know what vacuum is, don’t you?’
‘Yes. But vacuums have to be pumped and kept airtight.’
‘That’s good for Maintenance. Still, past the First Level is just an indefinite amount of vacuum stretching everywhere.’
Wenda thought awhile. She said, ‘Has anyone ever been there?’
‘Of course not. But we have the records.’
‘Maybe the records are wrong.’
‘They can’t be. Do you know how much space I’m going to cross?’
Wenda’s thought stream indicated an overwhelming negative.
Roi said, ‘You know the speed of light, I suppose.’
‘Of course,’ she replied readily. It was a universal constant. Infants knew it. ‘One thousand nine hundred and fifty-four times the length of the cavern and back in one second.’
‘Right,’ said Roi, ‘but if light were to travel along the distance I’m to cross, it would take it ten years.’
Wenda said, ‘You’re making fun of me. You’re trying to frighten me.’
‘Why should it frighten you?’ He rose. ‘But I’ve been moping here long enough—’
For a moment, one of his six grasping limbs rested lightly in one of hers, with an objective, impassive friendship. An irrational impulse urged Wenda to seize it tightly, prevent him from leaving.
She panicked for a moment in fear that he might probe her mind past the conversational level, that he might sicken and never face her again, that he might even report her for treatment. Then she relaxed. Roi was normal, not sick like herself. He would never dream of penetrating a friend’s mind any deeper than the conversational level, whatever the provocation.
He was very handsome in her eyes as he walked away. His grasping limbs were straight and strong, his prehensile, manipulative vibrissae were numerous and delicate and his optic patches were more beautifully opalescent than any she had ever seen.
3
Laura settled down in her seat. How soft and comfortable they made them. How pleasing and unfrightening airplanes were on the inside, how different from the hard, silvery, inhuman luster of the outside.
The bassinet was on the seat beside her. She peeped in past the blanket and the tiny, ruffled cap. Walter was sleeping. His face was the blank, round softness of infancy and his eyelids were two fringed half-moons pulled down over his eyes.
A tuft of light brown hair straggled across his forehead, and with infinite delicacy, Laura drew it back beneath his cap.
It would soon be Walter’s feeding time and she hoped he was still too young to be upset by the strangeness of his surroundings. The stewardess was being very kind. She even kf:pt his bottles in a little refrigerator. Imagine, a refrigerator on board an airplane.
The people in the seat across the aisle had been watching her in that peculiar way that meant they would love to talk to her if only they could think of an excuse. The moment came when she lifted Walter out of his bassinet and placed him, a little lump of pink flesh encased in a white cocoon of cotton, upon her lap.
