"No! So utterly—"
"Satisfying?" she asked.
"Stop interrupting! It was all of that and more. But what I want to say is that we've violated the prime restriction for space travellers. How could we do it?"
"You're forgetting that for some time we have been living upon this emotion-charged world," Ven said. "The steady erosion was more than our conditioning could take. The feedback was merely the last in a whole series of disruptive stimuli. It was the trigger, but our defenses had been weakened long before. Not that I'm sorry," she added quickly. "For weeks I've been wondering what sort of a mate you'd be when this trip was over. I'm not unhappy with the preview." She smiled at me and the whole of our living quarters was filled with a bright tender blue.
"The natives," I said worriedly. "We were in contact with them."
Ven's aura darkened. "I had forgotten them," she said. "I hope that the feedback wasn't intensified and returned to them. I'd better look." She started for the control room and I followed more slowly.
"There's no damage," she said from beneath the helmet. "Edith feels just as I do."
I took my helmet and coded Don's pattern on the selector. Peculiar, I thought with vague wonder. Most peculiar. For the first time Donald and I were in true rapport. His mind was slow, lazy, sluggish—even his ambition was sated for the moment. Could it be, I wondered, that we could find agreement through our emotions? Was it frustration that drove him? Whatever the block had been it was gone now. This was a true empathic meeting—something far more satisfying than our previous conflict.
I relaxed in it, feeling the slow langorous questings of his mind even as he felt mine. There was a sense of brotherhood that transcended differences in race and culture. We were down to basics, on the oldest meeting ground of life.
He was wondering idly what the outcome of this might be—conscious of me, but careless. It jolted me. He might be uncertain, but I knew Ven was from good family stock, and "good" to a Thalassan meant something entirely different than it commonly did to the natives of this planet!