"Oh, I'm sure it is; and I'm so happy for you, Fao!" And it would have taken the mind of a Garlock to perceive anything either false or forced in thought or bearing.
Nevertheless, when Belle went into Garlock's room that night, storm signals were flying high in her almost-topaz eyes.
"Fao Talaho-Delcamp is pregnant!" she stormed, "and it's all your fault!"
"Uh-huh," he demurred, trying to snap her out of her obviously savage mood. "Not me, ace. Not a chance in the world. It was Deggi."
"You ... you weasel! You know very well, Clee Garlock, what I meant. If you hadn't given her that treatment she'd have kept on fighting with him and they wouldn't have been married and had any children for positively years. So now she'll have the first double-Prime baby and it ought to be mine. I'm older than she is—our group is 'way ahead of theirs—we have the first and only starship—and then you do that. And you wouldn't give me that treatment. Oh, no—just to her, that bleached-blonde! I'd like to strangle you to death with my own bare hands!"
"What a hell of a logic!" Garlock had been trying to keep his own temper in leash, but the leash was slipping. "Assume I tried to work on you—assume I succeeded—what would you be? What would I have? What age do you think this is—that of the Vikings? When SOP in getting a wife was to beat her unconscious with a club and drag her into the longboat by her hair? Hardly! I do not want and will not have a conquered woman. Nor a spoiled-rotten, mentally-retarded brat...."
"You unbearable, conceited, overbearing jerk! Why, I'd rather...."
"Get out! And this time, stay out!"
Belle got out—and if door and frame had not been built of super-steel, both would have been wrecked by the blast of energy she loosed in closing the door behind her.
In her own room, with Gunther blocks full on, she threw herself face down on the bed and cried as she had not cried since she was a child.