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He left Delp gaping and swung himself with apish speed down into the canoe. “Now, boys,” he said, “row like hell.”
They were almost back to their own fleet when Wace saw clotted wings whirl up from the royal raft. He gulped. “Has the attack… has it begun already?” He cursed himself that his voice should be an idiotic squeak.
“Well, I am glad we are not close to them.” Van Rijn, standing up as he had done the whole trip, nodded complacently. “But I think not this is the war. I think they are just disturbed. Soon Delp will take charge and calms them down.”
“But — Delp?”
Van Rijn shrugged. “If Diomedean proteins is deadly to us,” he said, “ours should not be so good for them, ha? And our late friend T’heonax took a big mouthful of me. It all goes to show, these foul tempers only lead to trouble. Best you follow my example. When I am attacked, I turn the other cheek.”
XXII
Thursday Landing had little in the way of hospital facilities: an autodiagnostician, a few surgical and therapeutical robots, the standard drugs, and the post xenobiologist to double as medical officer. But a six weeks’ fast did not have serious consequences, if you were strong to begin with and had been waited on hand, foot, wing, and tail by two anxious nations, on a planet none of whose diseases could affect you. Treatment progressed rapidly with the help of bioaccelerine, from intravenous glucose to thick rare steaks. By the sixth Diomedean day, Wace had put on a noticeable amount of flesh and was weakly but fumingly aprowl in his room.
“Smoke, sir?” asked young Senegal. He had been out on trading circuit when the rescue party arrived; only now was he getting the full account. He offered cigarettes with a most respectful air.
Wace halted, the bathrobe swirling about his knees. He reached, hesitated, then gri
“Well, no, sir—”
“Hey! Gimme that!” Wace sat down on his bed and took a cautious puff. “I certainly am going to pick up all my vices where I left off, and doubtless add some new ones.”
“You, uh, you were going to tell me, sir… how the station here was informed—”
“Oh, yes. That. It was childishly simple. I figured it out in ten minutes, once we got a breathing spell. Send a fair-size Diomedean party with a written message, plus of course one of Tolk’s professional interpreters to help them inquire their way on this side of The Ocean. Devise a big life raft, just a framework of light poles which could be dovetailed together. Each Diomedean carried a single piece; they assembled it in the air and rested on it whenever necessary. Also fished from it: a number of Fleet experts went along to take charge of that angle. There was enough rain for them to catch in small buckets to drink — I knew there would be, since the Drak’honai stay at sea for indefinite periods, and also this is such a rainy planet anyhow.
“Incidentally, for reasons which are now obvious to you, the party had to include some La
Wace shrugged. “Having seen them off,” he finished, “we could only crawl into bed and wait. After the first few days, it wasn’t so bad. Appetite disappears.”
He stubbed out the cigarette with a grimace. It was making him dizzy.
“When do I get to see the others?” he demanded. “I’m strong enough now to feel bored. I want company, dammit.”
“As a matter of fact, sir,” said Senegal, “I believe Freeman van Rijn said something about” — a thunderous “Skulls and smallpox!” bounced in the corridor outside — “visiting you today.”
“Run along then,” said Wace sardonically. “You’re too young to hear this. We blood brothers, who have defied death together, we sworn comrades, and so on and so forth, are about to have a reunion.”
He got to his feet as the boy slipped out the back door. Van Rijn rolled in the front entrance.
His Jovian girth was shrunken flat, he had only one chin, and he leaned on a gold-headed cane. But his hair was curled into oily black ringlets, his mustaches and goatee waxed to needle points, his lace-trimmed shirt and cloth-of-gold vest were already smeared with snuff, his legs were hairy tree trunks beneath a batik sarong, he wore a diamond mine on each hand and a silver chain about his neck which could have anchored a battleship. He waved a ripe Trichinopoly cigar above a four-decker sandwich and roared:
“So you are walking again. Good fellow! The only way you get well is not sip dishwater soup and take it easily, like that upgebungled horse doctor has the nerve to tell me to do.” He purpled with indignation. “Does one thought get through that sand in his synapses, what it is costing me every hour I wait here? What a killing I can make if I get home among those underhand competition jackals before the news reaches them Nicholas van Rijn is alive after all? I have just been out beating the station engineer over his thick flat mushroom he uses for a head, telling him if my spaceship is not ready to leave tomorrow noon I will hitch him to it and say giddap. So you will come back to Earth with us your own selfs, nie?”
Wace had no immediate reply. Sandra had followed the merchant in.
She was driving a wheelchair, and looked so white and thin that his heart cracked over. Her hair was a pale frosty cloud on the pillow, it seemed as if it would be cold to touch. But her eyes lived, immense, the infinite warm green of Earth’s gentlest seas; and she smiled at him.
“My lady—” he whispered.
“Oh, she comes too,” said Van Rijn, selecting an apple from the fruit basket at Wace’s bedside. “We all continue our interrupted trip, maybe with not so much fun and games aboard—” He drooped one little sleet-gray eye at her, lasciviously. “Those we save for later on Earth when we are back to normal, ha?”
“If my lady has the strength to travel—” stumbled Wace. He sat down, his knees would bear him no longer.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “It is only a matter of following the diet as written for me and getting much rest.”
“Worst thing you can do, by damn,” grumbled Van Rijn, finishing the apple and picking up an orange.
“It isn’t suitable,” protested Wace. “We lost so many servants when the skycruiser ditched. She’d only have—”
“A single maid to attend me?” Sandra’s laugh was ghostly, but it held genuine amusement. “After now I am to forget what we did and endured, and be so correct and formal with you, Eric? That would be most silly, when we have climbed the ridge over Salmenbrok together, not?”
Wace’s pulse clamored. Van Rijn, strewing orange peel on the floor, said: “Out of hard lucks, the good Lord can pull much money if He chooses. I ca
If she could remember one chilled morning beneath Mount Oborch, thought Wace, he, for the sake of his manhood, could remember less pleasant things, and name them in plain words. It was time.
He was still too weak to rise — he shook a little — but he caught Van Rijn’s gaze and said in a voice hard with anger:
“That’s the easiest way to get back your self-esteem, of course. Buy it! Bribe me with a sinecure to forget how Sandra sat with a paintbrush in a coalsack of a room, till she fainted from exhaustion, and how she gave us her last food… how I myself worked my brain and my heart out to pull us all back from that jailhouse country and win a war to boot — No, don’t interrupt. I know you had some part in it. You fought during that naval engagement: because you had no choice, no place to hide. You found a nice nasty way to dispose of an inconvenient obstacle to the peace negotiations. You have a talent for that sort of thing. And you made some suggestions.