Ellen knew all this, but it didn't seem important. What mattered was that her man was out there on the frontier fighting the Eglani. She wanted him home with all the blind possessive selfishness of her sex. She wanted to feel his arms around her and later in the quiet of their home to tell him what he had a right to know. She laid down her cards and ran her hands over her abdomen with a curious half protective half possessive gesture, a wry smile touching her lips. She was doing her part just as Alton was doing his. Life was needed. Life had to be replaced.
Another keening shriek from the sky. Another ship was in.
And Ellen was standing up. Her face was glory.
"It's Alton!" she said with odd softness. "I'd know the sound of those drives anywhere in the galaxy." And then—quietly—she fainted....
Within minutes after landing, interrogation teams from Central Intelligence swarmed over ship and crew like vultures on a dead carcass. For hours the questioning and examination went on and not until the last tape, the last instrument, and the last crewman of the "Dauntless" had been wrung dry of information did the torture stop. Literally nothing was overlooked but the results as usual were negative—three strikes, three kills, two boardings, and nothing to show for them but Eglan corpses. As usual the aliens were thorough. They fought while they could and died when they could fight no more, and headless bodies were no use to Central Research. Reluctantly, Intelligence released the officers and crew.
The Eglan Enigma was no closer to solution than it was five years ago when the aliens had blasted a Confederation exploration ship and had started the war. But Commander Alton Fiske wasn't worried about that. Ellen was out there waiting for him and he'd been delayed too long already.
A week is never long at best,—and this had been shorter than most, Fiske decided as he picked up a ground car at fleet headquarters and directed the driver to take him to his quarters. It was a little better than an hour until blastoff, which would give him time enough to pick up his kit and say goodbye, to Ellen for the fourth time. He'd been lucky. The "Dauntless" needed modification and repair and the week planetside was his longest time ashore since his honeymoon. Of course, Ellen wasn't going to like his sudden departure, but she was a Navy wife and she knew what she was getting into before they were married. It was an abiding wonder that she had married him in the face of his Cassandra prophecies of trouble and heartache. But then—Ellen was an unusual woman.
As he left the forbidding grimness of Fleet Headquarters he almost smiled. In a way it was a relief to get away from the long-faced brass whose professionally preoccupied air was merely a camouflage for the worry that ate at the linings of their stomachs. Fiske was glad that he wasn't one of the Ulcer Echelon, that his worries involved relatively simple things such as fighting a ship and getting home alive.
As it was, the pain of leaving again was bad enough, and if it weren't for Ellen's "get-togethers" it would be greater. They were the one fault in her otherwise perfect character. How a perfectly sane and sensible woman could endure those gabfests where every blessed female was talking at the same time was more than he could understand. But Ellen not only took them in her stride, she took them three or four times a week.