"I'll speak to director today, sir." The throbbing in his cheek was becoming evident again, and he touched his face gently.
"What's matter, Pehn?" said his mother.
"Nothing. My face hurts, little."
"Ignore it!" his father ordered. "I won't have any maladjustment in Lord Karn's family!" He picked up the gold-headed cane which was his badge of office, and strode out of the room.
Pehn managed to spend a second night with the sleepless group of experts at the signal dome, but fatigue, and the growing pain in his cheek sent him home again just before dawn. Softly he ran up the ramp to the second floor and into his bathroom, to the medicine closet.
In Pehn's family, a transient illness was an embarrassment, a persistent illness a disgrace. It had always been his mother's pride, and his father's boast, that in the Karn household the contents of the medicine shelves were never needed, and that the doors of the cupboard remained closed from one year to the next.
It was with a sense of guilt, then, that Pehn pressed a spot on the green-tiled wall to slide back the cupboard doors, and picked up an ivory box, from which he took a bolus of pain-killing plant extract.
He swallowed the huge pill, then took another. A double dose, this time, for he knew the pain would never yield to anything less. He stood shivering for a few moments, waiting for the drug to take effect. He looked up, and realized that his sister was standing at the open door, watching him sympathetically.
"Pehn," she said, "you're ill. Won't you talk it over with me?"
"I would talk it over with one of Evil Ones if I thought it would help this pain. It grows worse and worse."