He hit a Litson wrench against a fitting in anger. "All this talk of Rudra. The eternal werwile! Blah! How do I know there is any such person?"
The thought stopped him. He lay there in the cramped space between jet-sheathing and baffles and grinned at his own stupidity. "How do I know she's the one I came out here to find, even? I never saw her in the calyx!" Deep in the heart of him, he knew that Nuala was—Nuala. Her eyes told him that. He muttered, "Just the same, I don't have any proof about this werwile!"
He crawled out of the rocket-room and stood up in the narrow corridor, wiping sweat from his eyes. Under his feet the floor quivered as the rockets thundered into life. Travis put a calloused hand on a wall-rail. The rockets blasted faster, turning the corridor into a maelstrom of sound.
The ship was lifting, leaving the blackened planet and the ruined temples far below it. There was a sudden weightlessness to his body that told him they were out in space, now, slipping along with vertiginous speed.
He clanked the lock on the rocket-chamber door and went to find Nuala.
She was bent over the control panel, moving her white fingers across the dials. She did not look up when he came to a stop beside her. She merely said, "I'll have to take this all apart. Your wiring system is only 87 per cent efficient."
"That's pretty good," Travis rasped, "On the first trampers that went to the moon, 35 per cent was hot stuff."
Nuala sniffed and reached for a kit of tools. Travis put out a hand and closed it on her wrist. She looked up at him from under long yellow eyelashes.
"How do I know there is a Rudra?" he said harshly. "How do I know you aren't just using me for ... for...."
"For what?" she asked serenely, not moving to draw her wrist away. "Where in all your worlds would I want to go? I know everything there is to know about them—and you."