He looked at her curiously. “You know, I think you must have some ghoul blood in you somewhere? I tell you again, those girls are friends of ours!”
“So what?” she grinned at him, entirely unabashed. “You’ll have to get rid of that squeamishness some day; it’s the biggest roadblock there is on the Way of Knowledge. If not them, how would Nadine suit you?”
“Worse yet. She’s just as good at this business as we are, maybe better, and she probably wouldn’t like it.”
“You may have something there. We’ll save her for last, and call on her formally, with announcements and everything. Vesta, then?”
“Now you’re squeaking, little mouse. But no deep digging for a while. We’ll take it easy and light—we don’t want to do any damage we may not be able to undo. As I told you before, my brain is firing on altogether too damn many barrels that I simply don’t know what are doing. Let’s go.”
They fused their minds—an effortless process now—and were at their objective instantaneously.
Vesta was primping; enjoying sensuously the physical feel of her physical body even as dozens of parts of speech of dozens of different languages went through her racing mind. And, one layer down, she was wishing she were old enough to be a newlywed; wishing she had a baby of her own . . . babies were so cute and soft and cuddlesome. . . .
Then Tommie. Cloud and Joan enjoyed with her the strong, rank, sense-satisfying flavor of a Venerian cigar and studied with her the intricate electronic equations of a proposed modification of the standard deep space drive. And, one layer down, the Tomingan engineer, too, was thinking of love and of babies. What was all this space hopping getting her, anyway? It didn’t stop the ache, fill the void, satisfy the longing. As soon as this cruise was over, she was going back to Tominga, tell Hanko she was ready, and settle down. A husband and a family did tie a woman down something fierce—but what price freedom to wander when you wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming of a baby in your arms, only to find the baby isn’t there?
Then Thlaskan and Maluleme. They were seated, arms around each other, on a davenport in their own home on Chickladoria. They were not talking, merely feeling. They were deeply, truly, tremendously in love. In the man’s mind there was a background of his work, of pilotry, of orbits and charts and computations. There was a flash of sincere liking for Cloud, the best boss and the finest figure-man he had ever known; but practically all of his mind was full of love for the wonderful woman at his side. In hers, at the moment, there were only two things; love of her husband and longing for the child which she might already have succeeded in conceiving. . . .
Cloud wrenched their linked minds away.