The two on the bench by the fountain rose, and for a long minute were locked in an embrace. Then they turned toward the dark-shadowed trees and disappeared beneath them, in the direction of the nearby space port.
Negu Mah silently turned back into the house. Sliss shuffled after him. The uranium merchant led the way back to the vitrite covered garden and there, a little wearily, resumed his seat and picked up his mug again. Sliss climbed back into his tub of water, sighed gratefully at the comfort it gave him, and then turned his pop-eyes toward his host. He blinked once, inquiringly, and Negu Mah understood that the intelligent amphibian was asking if he intended to do nothing to stop the pair who were running away.
Negu Mah sipped pensively at his drink.
"If she had only told me," he murmured. "If she had only come to me and said she desired her freedom. If they had only both come together and faced me, saying that though it meant giving up all they had, they wanted only each other! I would have been generous. I would have been indulgent. But they did not. They had not the courage. They were afraid of me. And they hated me."
Negu Mah was silent for a moment. Both he and his guest stared toward the graceful shaft of the Vulcan, now fully silhouetted against the whole tremendous bulk of Jupiter, sitting like a titanic scarlet egg upon the horizon of Callisto. The Jupiter light flooded the vitrite garden, gave the plants there, chosen with an eye to this, strange, exotic, glowing colors, flushed Negu Mah and Sliss with a ruby radiance.
Towards that dark, waiting craft the two they had watched were even now stealing, tense with the weight of their daring and their crime. In a moment they would reach her, enter her, actuate machinery that was miraculous in its complex simplicity, and be gone then on the wings it gave them into the concealing embrace of universal space.
"You see, my friend Sliss," Negu Mah said finally, "Nanlo is beautiful, but there is nothing within. Her beauty deceived me. I thought that where such loveliness existed, there must be a soul to animate it. I was wrong. She is like an imitation gem—beautiful on the surface, paste within. Yet the mistake was mine, and I did not blame her. I indulged her, and still hoped that something real would bloom within her."
He drained the molkai in his mug, one great gulp, and slumped back.
"The young man, too, Hugh Neils. I thought he would be a companion for her. But he too is weak. Yet they say they love each other. They swear—we heard them—that they want only each other and their love for all time."