Hunter entered the municipal building and joined the line of people moving slowly toward the customs booth. Anxiously he scanned the mass of faces in the lobby. Ann Saymer wasn't there.
He felt the keen, knife-edge disappointment, and something else—something he didn't want to put into words. He had sent Ann a micropic telling her when his ship would be in. Of course, there was that commission-job she had taken—
Abruptly he was face to face again with the vague fear that had nagged at his mind for nearly a month. This wasn't like Ann. Always before she had sent him every two or three days a chatty micropic, using the private code they had invented to cut the unit cost of words. But four weeks had now passed since he had last heard from her.
In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she had simply not had the time to send him a message.
Not even five minutes to send a micropic?
It didn't occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs. A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer held a First in Psychiatry.
Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket—the goal he and Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious man.
At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both been in the last semester of the general school. They could have married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent companionship-union.
In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single men and Ann could not have afforded the university.
It hadn't mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of her own. The plan she worked out was very practical—for Ann was in all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.