Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. “Coming up.”
He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of the cigaret on his tongue.
Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So long a road, he thought, from then to now.
Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their Rorschach blots.
“You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”
“Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”
How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?
Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.
The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——