"I want to be a woman. Do you think that if I went in there—" she gestured toward the cavern, "that you could help me be a—woman?" The appeal in her eyes and in her voice begged for one answer.
"I have never worked with a human woman—"
"Then use me as a guinea pig!" As if the answer were predetermined, her chin up, with not a look behind her, she moved through the misty light and out of sight—like Eve stepping into the Garden of Eden in the dawn of a new world.
Les Ro's hands moved over the switches.
Jim Ronson dropped the needle gun. For a split second, he hesitated. Then he walked toward the swirling light.
Les Ro's voice stopped him. "When you are cured, my son, when you are finished in there, come back, and we will work together on the problems of your world and mine. This I have dreamed of since the first day I began work here, that someone with sufficient intelligence might come to work beside me."
Ronson smiled, nodded. As he stepped into the mistiness, Les Ro's face beamed at him, enhaloed, like a saint.
The girl was wandering through the shrubbery. She seemed not to see him but when he came into step beside her, she looked up and smiled. Arm in arm, they walked together, in a place that had been hell, but was now heaven, waiting for the miracle to take place within them. And little by little, in minute bursts of spurting quanta, Jim Ronson felt the pain in his chest go away.
The girl beside him was no longer the bitter harriden who had almost turned Pluto Dome upside down when she had been ejected from a space ship that never returned. She was no longer the unhappy roamer who had wandered the paths of the planets, defying all creation and herself. She was becoming something else—a woman. The fact showed in the gentleness of her smile.
His arm went around her and she came closer without hesitation. A glow came up inside of both them, and grew stronger.