But now the Val-Rion and her crew were home, after an odyssey so long overdue that the Space Commission had officially declared the expedition lost.
Ky-Tann had never mourned for his missing friend. Sense told him that the Val-Rion was gone, atomized by its own engines, shriveled by some alien sun or demolished on the terrain of some unfriendly world. But he refused to make the admission, even after official hope was gone; he continued to envision Deez at the controls of his ship, grinning cockily into space, eyes challenging the void.
He left the spaceworks early and flew his Sked home at just above the legal airspeed. If he had expected to find his wife excited by the prospect of Deez' visit, he was mistaken. Su-Tann had a new tooth, and Devia was more elated by the sight of the little white stump in the baby's mouth than she could be by all the extra-illyrian worlds in the known galaxies. But when Deez arrived as promised, right after the second sunset, she burst into tears at the sight of him.
Ky-Tann himself swallowed hard as he embraced his friend. Deez was gaunt inside his spaceman's coveralls, the bones in his face pronounced. The skin of his right cheek and neck had been burned, and the hair whitened on that side, giving him a strangely off-balance look. He grinned as Deez always grinned, but when he stopped grinning his eyes were weary.
"You must rest, Deez," Devia said sorrowfully. "It must have been awful for you."
"No," Deez answered. "I want to talk, Devia, I can't tell you how much I've wanted to see you both, to tell you about it."
Ky-Tann said: "The Administrators must have given you a rough time."
"I've turned over all our film records to them, and the artifacts we stored aboard. But I haven't really talked to anyone." He licked his dry lips, and brushed a hand over the whitened side of his hair. "The baby," he said softly. "Could I see the baby?"
"What?" Ky-Tann seemed surprised at the request.
Devia leaped to her feet. "Of course, Deez, I'll bring her." To Ky-Tann, she said: "Ky, you idiot, get Deez a drink or something."