there's something about a space drunk that makes you babble. You talk your head off; you talk your heart out.

A space drunk is a good catharsis for all the mental quirks and repressions that have been bothering you, and maybe I needed such a catharsis. Possibly Kei did, too. At any rate, we chattered to each other like boyhood chums, telling our dreams, our aspirations, revealing our most secret vices and meannesses.

I was not shocked, but duly sympathetic, to learn that Kei had knifed his brother to death in his teens, and had taken up space service to escape the resulting complications. Beside this revelation of fratricide, my own selfishness and my cold-blooded reasons for marrying Dori seemed tame. But I made it as strong as I could.

"She thinks I love her!" I shouted, laughing uproariously, and Kei laughed with me. "Think of that! I'm a brilliant, hard-headed, practical man, and look at her: nice enough, but washed-out, colorless. She's useful. She's made me rich. But if I'd pick out a woman to fall in love with...."

Floating in the air as I talked, I had swung around gradually, and now my eyes fell on the companionway to the centerdeck above us. Dori was clinging to it, and from her expression I could tell she had heard everything I said about her.

Her eyes were enormous from the shock, and her face was as grief-stricken as though I had stabbed her callously through the heart without cause. She turned without a word and left the deck.

In my drunken exaltation, it seemed funny to me. I laughed about it, and made jokes about it to Kei. I felt quite smart and heartless. Later, during the hangover, it didn't seem so funny, but, on the other hand, I was so miserable I didn't care one way or the other.

Dori spoke of it to me only once, and that was just before we blasted down to Mars in the G-boat. She looked at me levelly and said, without a trace of emotion:

"I hate you, Samlaan. Always remember that."

Mars was a wild frontier planet then, where violence was not out of the ordinary. The spirit of the adventurer and the pioneer pervaded it, as it does the outer moons today. But the frontier has its own code, which makes it safer sometimes than the steel and stone jungles of civilization.

I had what I wanted now—riches—and I had no desire to be forced to leave Mars, too. There was 

 Prev. P 9/15 next