Their lips came together, gently at first, then fiercely, as if this were their first kiss of love and perhaps their last. "Oh, Alan. Yes, Alan. I love you. So you can't...."
"No," Alan told her quietly. "I've got to. Once a great poet of Earth put it so clearly, so much better than I could ever say it. How did it go? Something about 'I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov'd I not honor more.' Do you think for a minute we could live with ourselves or ever look each other in the eye again if we let this happen without trying to stop it?"
"I'm begging you, Alan. They will kill you as soon as you set foot on Earth."
"I said I'm going down there. I am going. But not before I convince you." He spoke long and persuasively. He told her about other lovers, everywhere, about the men and women of Earth, the five billion helpless people who had a right to live their own lives too and fall in love and marry, about the hundreds of millions of Outworlders whose minds and hearts would be fettered by Bennett Keifer if he had his way, about how a man had this double allegiance all his life, to the people he loved and to freedom and democracy and the ideas in which he believed. How the one allegiance might make a man think of an island somewhere or a small asteroid where the rest of the world wouldn't matter but how the other allegiance always brought him back to the crowded places, the dangerous places.
Laura kissed him again, sobbing, clinging to him. When finally he let her go, she whispered so low he hardly could hear the words: "You are right, Alan. It's your duty to go."
"Whatever happens, Laura, I love you."
"Keep telling me that all the time, Alan. I don't want to hear anything else. I'm going with you."
He smiled, then shook his head. "You're going to Earth all right. But you're going where you'll be safe."
Then Alan took the ship down, watching the great green globe of Earth swelling up toward them and then the wondrous sight of the continents swimming into view and the vast blue-green seas and the white cottony puffs of cloud formations and wondering if he soon would be saying goodbye to Laura for the last time.