But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care could have made a great and honored scientist out of him.
They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible.
I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone. Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are impossible to work out ever could.
I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came over to where I was sitting.
"You knew we wouldn't find her," he said.
"That's what I kept telling you."
"Where is she?"
"In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in veils for the depraved—"
"Cut out the kidding! Where is she?"
"What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?"