Irinia looked at him, at the expression on Trase's face, and then suddenly she could read the whole story written there in plain characters. Right there in his eyes she could see the soul of a spaceman penned up in a moon-bound cage.
And suddenly Irinia Custer felt sorry for the hardness that was in her spirit, sorry for her bitter, cynical attitude, sorry for the dirty, laughing nicknames she had fashioned among space-crews for vice-president Trase Barnes.
They looked at each other for a long time. Then Trase got out the thick words slowly. "Well, I'm stuck, Irinia," he smiled. "You know the way I feel—the secret's out, and I know you'll tell it."
Irinia started to talk, but something was lodged in her throat and her mouth felt dry, strangely dry. She walked over to Trase and her trembling hand reached out and touched the features of his face, and the fierceness of what she felt inside her made her whole body shake.
"Yes, I know, Trase," she breathed. "I know." Then suddenly she put her head on his shoulder and cried.
Well, that's the way it goes, you know. The two toughest people in spacing ran together, and it was like joining two ribbons of molten steel. It was a love such as the Moon-Station had seldom seen, and the talk ran through the space-lines like it had never gone before. It had been bound to happen to Trase, yet all the worlds wept for the two of them. Because everyone knew that nothing was worse than for a spaceman or woman to be mated with a ground-bounder.
At first their happiness was untouchably supreme, and Trase walked about in a kind of warm haze, deliciously aware of things he had never before noticed—the pleasant coughing sound of a Moon-Dog barking, the tinny clatter of dishes that rang out from the Spacemen's Mess; all small things which never before had meaning, but which now made him seem like part of the world.
Yet, it caught up with them, for they both knew that Irinia couldn't give up space and Trase couldn't go to space. Or could he?
It got Trase to thinking. Hadn't there been something about a doctor, or an operation ... maybe now he had the money to pay. He went back to see the space doctor who told him that, and found that he was dead. He asked other doctors and they told him that it was a bunch of foolishness, that they had never known of a successful operation of that type, that the only thing to remember was the phrase, "Spacemen are born—not made."
Trase got kind of tired of hearing it, but no doctor would risk his reputation on the operation.