"Can't you remember happiness, Karl?"
He whispered to her of things he had forgotten. Shadows and shapes appeared in the cloudy whiteness, ghostly and strange. Wavering outlines darkened and altered. He remembered. He hadn't for a long time, but he did now. In the asteroids where his Father had been a mucker, mining heavy beryllium, paired-atom stuff. And his Mother calling to him and he was running, laughing. Happiness. That was a long time back, and that was where happiness ended.
That was when the cops came and tried to take his Father for mining illegally and he had resisted. That was in the Old System, and they had shot him with an electron rifle. His body exploding, spraying the cold rocks with red and awful memory. And his Mother screaming and running, falling, drifting down a thousand feet into darkness, her screams fading ... fading....
Marian's voice came to him, softly. Music sang too, poignant, eery. Caressing, gentle, and indefinably sad.
"Poor Karl," she whispered. "Poor Karl." Dimly he saw her face, like a part of mist, and then he saw the gun reaching toward him out of the vapor.
Instinctively he started to reach for it, but he couldn't move. Drugged. He whispered. He felt very tired, tired and old. "What's the play? What—"
"I'm going to kill you, Karl."
"Kill me—"
"I felt sorry for you; I still do. But not sorry enough. I decided to kill you back there on Mars, and then when you came here, I thought of something else. I thought you would reveal something, something that would justify what you are. There wasn't enough. You never had a chance, Karl. You knew happiness, but it was too long ago. We're alone in this room, left to our dreams. But I'm not dreaming."
"I wish I was," Barstac said.