Imperial Earth

surfaces. Other shipboard activities, it was widely believed, were not quite so harmless. There were reports of tobacco-smoking-not actually illegal, of course, but hardly sensible behaviour when there were so many safe alternatives. Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board Mentor. The so-called joy machines were ba

Notwithstanding the horror stories radioed ahead from other ports of call,

Titan had looked forward to welcoming its young visitors. It was felt that they would add color to the social scene, and help establish some enjoyable contacts with Mother Earth. And anyway, it would be for only a week…. Luckily, no one dreamed that it would be for two months. This was not

Mentor’s fault; Titan had only itself to blame.

When Mentor fell into her parking orbit, Earth and Titan were involved in one of their periodical wrangles over the price of hydrogen, FOB. Zero

Gravitational Potential (Solar Reference). The proposed 15 percent rise, screamed the Terrans, would cause the collapse of interplanetary commerce.

Anything under 10 percent, swore the Titanians, would result in their instant bankruptcy and would make it impossible for them to import any of the expensive items Earth was always trying to sell. To any historian of economics, the whole debate was boringly familiar.

Unable to get a firm quotation, Mentor was stranded in orbit with empty fuel tanks. At first, her captain was not too unhappy; he and the crew could do with the rest, now that the passengers had shuttled down to Titan and had fa

four weeks before the next launch window opened. Meanwhile, the five hundred guests were enjoying themselves, usually much more than their hosts.

But to the younger Titanians, it was an exciting time which they would remember all their lives. On a small world where everyone knew everybody else, half a thousand fascinating strangers had arrived, full of tales, many of them quite true, about the wonders of Earth. Here were men and women, barely into their twenties, who had seen forests and prairies and oceans of liquid water, who had strolled unprotected under an open sky beneath a sun whose heat could actually be felt…. This very contrast in backgrounds, however, was a possible source of danger. The Terrans could not be allowed to go wandering around by themselves, even inside the habitats. They had to have escorts, preferably responsible people not too far from their own age group, to see that they did not inadvertently kill either themselves or their hosts.

Naturally, there were times when they resented this well-intentioned supervision, and even tried to escape from it. One group succeeded; it was very lucky, and suffered no more than a few searing whiffs of ammonia.

Damage was so slight that the foolish adventurers required only routine lung transplants, but after this exploit there was no more serious trouble.

There were plenty of other problems. The sheer mechanics of absorbing five hundred visitors was a challenge to a society where living standards were still somewhat Spartan, and accommodation limited. At first, all the unexpected guests were housed in the complex of corridors left by an abandoned i i g operation, hastily converted into dormitories. Then, as quickly as arrangements could be made, they were farmed out-like refugees from some bombed city in an ancient war-to any households that were able to cope with them. At this stage, there were still many willing volunteers, among them Colin and Sheela Makenzie.

The apartment was lonely, now that Duncan’s pseudo sibling Gly

Yuri, had been gone for a decade. Though Number 402, Second Level, Meridian Park was hardly spacious by Terran standards,

Assistant Administrator Colin Makenzie, as he was then, had selected one of the homeless wafes for temporary adoption.

And so Calindy had come into Duncan’s life-and into Karl’s.

THE FATAL GIFT

Catherine Linden Ellerman had celebrated her twenty-first birthday just before Mentor reached Saturn. By all accounts, it had been a memorable party, giving the final silvery gloss to the captain’s remaining hairs.

Calindy would have sailed through untouched; next to her beauty, that was her most outstanding characteristic. In the midst of chao seven chaos that she herself had generated-she was the calm center of the storm.

With a self-possession far beyond her years, she seemed to young Duncan the very embodiment of Terran culture and sophistidation. He could smile wryly, one and a half decades later, at his boyish naievete but it was not wholly unfounded. By any standards, Calindy was a remarkable phenomenon.

Duncan knew, of course, that all Terrans were rich. (How could it be otherwise, when each was the heir to a hundred thousand generations?) But he was overawed ‘by Calindy’s display of jewels and silks, never realizing that she had a limited wardrobe which she varied with consummate skill.

Most impressive of all was a stu

That was typical of Calindy; no one else would have dreamed of taking a fur coat aboard a spaceship. And she had not done so—as malicious

rumor pretended-because she had heard it was cold out around Saturn. She was much too intelligent for that kind of stupidity, and knew exactly what she was doing; she had brought her mink simply because it was beautiful.

Perhaps because he could see her only through a mist of adoration, Duncan could never visualize her, in later years, as an actual person. When he thought of Calindy, and tried to conjure up her image, he did pot see the real girl, but always his only replica of her, in one of the bubble stereos that had become popular in the ‘50’s.

How many thousands of times he had taken that apparently solid, yet almost weightless sphere in his hands, shaken it gently, and thus activated the five second loo pI Through the subtle magic of organized gas molecules, each releasing its programmed quantum of light, Calindy’s face would appear out of the swirling mists-tiny, yet perfect in form and color. At first she would be in proffle; then she would turn and suddenly-Duncan could never be sure of the moment when it arrived-there would be the faint smile that only

Leonardo could have captured in an earlier age. She did not seem to be smiling at him, but at someone over his shoulder. The impression was so strong that more than once Duncan had looked back, startled, to see who was standing behind him.

Then the image would fade, the bubble would become opaque, and he would have to wait five minutes before the system recharged itself. It did not matter; he had only to close his eyes and he could still see the perfect oval face, the delicate ivory skin, the lustrous black hair gathered up into a toque and held in place by a silver comb that had belonged to a

Spanish princess, when Columbus was a child. Calindy liked playing roles, though she took none of them too seriously, and Carmen was one of her favorites. when she entered the Makenzie household, however, she was the exiled aristocrat, graciously accepting the hospitality of kindly provincials, with what few family heirlooms she had been able to save from the

Revolution. As this impressed no one except Duncan, she quickly became the studious anthropologist, taking notes for her thesis on the quaint