"This is going to be a hard day. You will need the food."
He tried to stare her down, but couldn't. He accepted the plate, feeling like a chided school boy.
Lucifer ate in silence, and when he had finished, he wandered out into the mossy patio behind the bungalow. There was a milky opaqueness, without obvious form or solidity, that walled the area off from the bungalow on either side. The rear of the patio, facing the forest, was clear, but when he walked too far in that direction, an invisible force shocked him warningly, and he leaped back.
The trees were incredibly high; their canopy of branches and leaves was tightly interwoven. The rain had stopped momentarily, but water dripped unceasingly from the canopy to the mat of leaves on the forest floor. Spidery root tendrils crawled upward to mesh with tree boles and hanging vines. There was a smell of eternal dampness. Somewhere back in the shadows, an animal cried out. It sounded like a woman in pain.
Lucifer shivered. He wished forlornly that he had left matters up to the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency. He reviewed his prospects, and did not find them good. In a narrow sense, he had succeeded. He had found his positives and positive positives, but he did not yet know why they had been kidnapped. Nor was it likely that the knowledge would do him much good. He was on a strange planet, in the system of a distant star, apparently destined to spend the rest of his life with a woman who had been a nightclub fortune teller.
As a doctor of parapsychology, Lucifer was appalled. As a confirmed bachelor, he was horrified.
But a more immediate problem clamored for consideration. What happened to non-positives on Melus?
He would soon know.
The two attendants who came to take them to Center were much younger than Huth. They carried themselves with military stiffness. Nina and Lucifer were led to what vaguely resembled a motorboat, covered with a transparent bubble. The conveyance hovered in the air, about two feet above a narrow pathway that was surfaced with a dark, burnished metal. Lucifer accepted the vehicle without surprise. Physical scientists had always reminded him of boys playing with erector sets, and their accomplishments bored him.
Center was a series of low slate-metal buildings scattered over several acres. Some were inter-connected; some were separated by mossy areas. The outer walls were broken by tall casement windows that extended from just above the ground to just below the eaves.