"You are Geoffrey Thorne, International?" she insisted, sitting on a fallen trunk and dropping her hat at her side. Leaning forward, she watched his pallor darken. "You are the pilot who pioneered the Jupiter and Pluto runs, who rescued the Argonaut expedition, who broke up the Wind River and Merton gangs?"
He looked at her and she shrank from the pain in his glare. "You heard Atlee. I'm Thorne, if that's anything. You saw him, a green space-kid fresh from the Lunar way-stations with two-year ratings on his pretty red uniform ... saw him drag a sodden bum from what passes for a gutter here. He was nice to me, Atlee. They're all nice to me. But I can't even enter Vulhan City any more. One of the worst sink-holes in the System and I can't get in ... I can't get in ..." his voice trailed away aimlessly and he picked at a thread dangling from his burst tunic.
"But—is there anything for you?" she asked. "It is a sink-hole. I suppose that's why Mr. Atlee was detailed to take us out to these caves on the stop-over. But there's no work there, no good chance for a pilot such as you."
He laughed. It was a better effort than the one he had achieved on the beach, but she preferred the former. "No chance, indeed! But there's t'ang. There's always t'ang!" he laughed, then caught at his ribs as a shuddering spasm tore at him.
"Please!" She touched him, ever so slightly, shaking his trembling body. "You mustn't! Is there nothing you can do? Nothing? Can you not go home?"
He faced her squarely and his eyes, she noted, were less bloodshot and oddly steady as he looked into hers. "You don't know. It isn't generally known, I suppose, anywhere in the System. We can't go back."
"You can't give it up?"
"That among other things. But no ship will take a t'anger, even as a passenger. That's what they call us, when not worse. They say it's incurable. Lord knows I couldn't disprove it. I can't give it up, and, if they took it away from me ..." he shrugged and a chill rippled up her spine. "You might say we're marooned here, on Mars, on Pluto, on Venus ... all who take up with these weird native brews and weirder natives. We don't go back. We can't. And we don't want to."
"I can't believe that," she protested. Then, at his tragic, sidelong glance, she hastened on. "But this t'ang? What is it? How—how did you ever come to—to get mixed up with such...?" She floundered helplessly, and some inborn instinct of gentility prompted him to rise and scan the sea for a moment. Then he turned, watching her. Again his eyes and fingers sought a ragged strip of scarlet tunic to twist aimlessly.