The afternoon was pleasantly cool, but standing there alone on the balcony her cheeks were suddenly warm to the touch as she caught herself wondering what would be Gary Lane's reaction were he to realize how startlingly accurate was this analogy. During these last weeks, their past differences forgotten, she and the young physicist had fallen into a pleasant and easy camaraderie. Formalities had been swept away in the urgency of the moment, and on everything they worked together like lifelong friends.
But that, thought Nora with a thin stirring of rebelliousness, was just the trouble. That which within her had developed toward Gary Lane could not so easily be dismissed with the loose and meaningless term "friendship." It was something else, something deeper, stronger, more tremulously chaotic ... like the subdued inner strivings of those pleasantly placid mountains.
Did he, she wondered with a strained and baffled curiosity, feel that, too? Or was he always too much the scientist to be just a plain man looking upon her ... seeing her ... not as a friend, but as a woman?
The sound of crisp, firm footsteps spelled an end to her thinking. She whirled to the doorway.
"Gary! You're back!"
Then her heart chilled within her at the look on his face. Never had she seen Gary Lane like this. His features were hard as if they had been cast in a mold, then frozen. His lips were whitely set, his eyes twin glittering flints of anger.
"Yes," he said harshly, "I'm back. It's all over. We're done. Finished. Washed up."
Dr. Bryant rose from his chair swiftly. "What do you mean, Gary? The Council didn't—?"
"Oh, didn't they?" Lane's bark was a mirthless shard of laughter. "They turned me down cold. Said our conclusions were erroneous, my theory a fantastic figment of the imagination. The fools! The everlasting damned fools! Don't they realize they're condemning a universe to oblivion?"
Dr. Anjers patted the younger man's shoulder soothingly, his bright cherubic face soberly consoling.