She felt a cheap victor as with difficulty she made her way back to her cabin. Nor was her self-esteem lifted when Joanna, sitting up in her bunk, said, "You must be real zwirch, Fenlay, if Marcein came for you. He's Communications Integrator for the whole ruddy planet—a real big bomb. How about introducing me before we land?"
V
To her considerable surprise in view of her emotionally upset condition, Lynne slept like the proverbial top. It took the combined efforts of Joanna and the stewardess to get her awake and up and dressed in time for the landing outside of New Samarkand. After a momentary breathless hovering pause the big ship set itself down so gently there was a hardly perceptible jar as it touched ground.
Feeling cumbrous in cold-resistant parkaed coverall and curiously alone despite the cluster of passengers that waited with her in the airlock foyer, Lynne looked about her for Rolf Marcein. She felt a certain residue of guilt for her treatment of him during their last session, despite the justification of her anger. Here, on the threshold of an alien planet—his planet—she needed him.
He might have betrayed her and her brother, kidnapped her, all but seduced her—yet he was the sole human being she knew here. Her eyes sought him desperately, finally saw him working his way through the waiting passengers toward her.
He thrust an oddly-shaped little packet toward her, said, "Here—fasten it on. It's an oxyrespirator—you'll need it. Use it whenever you feel faint."
His manner was gravely polite and his thoughts were carefully masked. He hadn't, she decided, forgiven her for that armlounge admiral insult of the night before. She sent her apologies mentally, received only a curt acknowledgement. She began to feel miserable.
Then, abruptly, the port was opened. With his arm steadying her Lynne stepped out onto the escaramp platform, a couple of hundred meters above the flat blast-scarred surface of the field. A thin chill wind cut her face, a wind from out of a sky darker than that of Earth.
Her first reaction was of gauntness, of barrenness beyond anything she had known on her home planet. The grounds around the Sahara brain-center in which she had served her apprenticeship had been lush with tropical growths—and even the desert around them had been warm. But the vast reddish expanse of the spaceport looked cold and uninviting—even the row of oddly-shaped metal buildings at its edge had a shabby eroded untended appearance.