At midtrip, Trella made a rueful confession to Jakdane.
“It seems I was taking unnecessary precautions when I asked you to be a chaperon,” she said. “I kept waiting for Quest to do something, and when he didn't I told him I loved him.”
“What did he say?”
“It's very peculiar,” she said unhappily. “He said he can't love me. He said he wants to love me and he feels that he should, but there's something in him that refuses to permit it.”
She expected Jakdane to salve her wounded feelings with a sympathetic pleasantry, but he did not. Instead, he just looked at her very thoughtfully and said no more about the matter.
He explained his attitude after Asrange ran amuck.
Asrange was the third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion … until the day Quest squirted coffee on him.
It was one of those accidents that can occur easily in space. The passengers and the two crewmen on that particular waking shift (including Jakdane) were eating lunch on the center-deck. Quest picked up his bulb of coffee, but inadvertently pressed it before he got it to his lips. The coffee squirted all over the front of Asrange's clean white tunic.
“I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest in distress.
The man's eyes went wide and he snarled. So quickly it seemed impossible, he had unbuckled himself from his seat and hurled himself backward from the table with an incoherent cry. He seized the first object his hand touched—it happened to be a heavy wooden cane leaning against Jakdane's bunk—propelled himself like a projectile at Quest.