"As for meaning it, I wish I didn"t." Ready for bed, Belle was much more completely and much less revealingly dressed than during her working hours. She slid into bed beside him, pulled the covers up to her chin, and turned off the light by glancing at the switch. "If I thought anything could ever come of it, though, I"d do it if I had to pound myself unconscious with a club. But I wouldn"t be here, then, either--I"d scoot into my own room so fast my head would spin."
"You wouldn"t have to. You wouldn"t be here."
"I wouldn"t, at that. That"s one of the things I like so much about you.
But honestly, Clee--seriously, screens-down honestly--can you see any possible future in it?"
"No. Neither of us would give that much. Neither of us can. And there"s nothing one-sided about it; I"m no more fit to be a husband than you are to be a wife. And G.o.d help our children--they"d certainly need it."
"We"d never have any. I can"t picture us living in marriage for nine months without committing at least mayhem. Why, in just the little time we"ve been paired, how many times have you thrown me out of this very room, with the fervent hope that I"d drown in deep s.p.a.ce before you ever saw me again?"
"At a guess, about the same number of times as you have stormed out under your own power, slamming the door so hard it sprung half the seams of the ship and swearing you"d slice me up into sandwich meat if I ever so much as looked at you again."
"That"s what I mean. But how come we got off on _this_ subject, I wonder? Because when we aren"t fighting, like now, it"s purely wonderful. So I"ll say it again. Good night, Clee, darling."
"Good night, ace." In the dark his lips sought hers and found them.
The fervor of her kiss was not only much more intense than any he had ever felt before. It was much, very much more intense than Belle Bellamy had either wanted it or intended it to be.
Next morning, at the workman"s hour of eight o"clock, the four Tellurians appeared in the office of Margonia"s Galaxian Field.
"The first thing to do, Deggi, is to go over in detail your blueprints for the generators and the drive," Garlock said.
"I suppose so. The funny pictures, eh?" Delcamp had learned much, the previous day; his own performance with the _Pleiades_ had humbled him markedly.
"By no means, my friend," Garlock said, cheerfully. "While your stuff isn"t exactly like ours--it couldn"t be, hardly; the field is so big and so new--that alone is no reason for it not to work. James can tell you.
He"s the Solar System"s top engineer. What do you think, Jim?"
"What I saw in the ship yesterday will work. What few of the prints I saw yesterday will fabricate, and the fabrications will work. The main trouble with this project, it seems to me, is that n.o.body"s building the ship."
"What do you mean by _that_ crack?" Fao blazed.
"Just that. You"re a bunch of prima donnas; each doing exactly as he pleases. So some of the stuff is getting done three or four times, in three or four different ways, while a lot of it isn"t getting done at all."
"Such as?" Delcamp demanded, and--
"Well, if you don"t like the way we are doing things you can...." Fao began.
"Just a minute, everybody." Lola came in, with a disarming grin. "How much of that is hindsight, Jim? You"ve built one, you know--and from all accounts, progress wasn"t nearly as smooth as your story can be taken to indicate."
"You"ve got a point there, Lola," Garlock agreed. "We slid back two steps for every three we took forward."
"Well ... maybe," James admitted.
"So why don"t you, Fao and Deggi, put Jim in charge of construction?"
Fao threw back her silvery head and glared, but Delcamp jumped at the chance. "Would you, Jim?"
"Sure--unless Miss Talaho objects."
"She won"t." Delcamp"s eyes locked with Fao"s, and Fao kept still.
"Thanks immensely, Jim. And I know what you mean." He went over to a cabinet of wide, flat drawers and brought back a sheaf of drawings. Not blueprints, but original drawings in pencil. "Such as this. I haven"t even got it designed yet, to say nothing of building it."
James began to leaf through the stack of drawings. They were full of erasures, re-drawings, and such notations as "See sheets 17-B, 21-A, and 27-F." Halfway through the pile he paused, turned backward three sheets, and studied for minutes. Then, holding that one sheet by a corner, he went rapidly through the rest of the stack.
"This is it," he said then, pulling the one sheet out and spreading it flat. "What we call Unit Eight--the heart of the drive." Then, tight-beamed to Garlock:
"This is the thing that you designed _in toto_ and that I never could understand any part of. All I did was build it. It must generate those Prime fields."
"Probably," Garlock flashed back. "I didn"t understand it any too well myself. How does it look?"
"He isn"t even close. He"s got only half of the constants down, and half of the ones he has got down are wrong. Look at this mess here...."
"I"ll take your word for it. I haven"t your affinity for blueprints, you know, or your eidetic memory for them."
"Do you want me to give him the whole works?"
"We"ll have to, I think. Or the ship might not work at all."
"Could be--but how about intergalactic hops?"
"He couldn"t do it with the _Pleiades_, so he won"t be able to with this. Besides, if we change it in any particular he _might_. You see, I don"t know very much more about Unit Eight than you do."
"_That_ could be, too." Then, as though just emerging from his concentration on the drawings, James thought at Delcamp and Fao, but on the open, general band.
"A good many errors and a lot of blanks, but in general you"re on the right track. I can finish up this drawing in a couple of hours, and we can build the unit in a couple of days. With that in place, the rest of the ship will go fast.
"_If_ Miss Talaho wants me to," he concluded, pointedly.
"Oh, I do, Jim--really I do!" At long last, stiff-backed Fao softened and bent. She seized both his hands. "If you can, it"d be too wonderful for words!"
"Okay. One question. Why are you building your ship so small?"
"Why, it"s plenty big enough for two," Delcamp said. "For four, in a pinch. Why did you make yours so big? Your Main is big enough almost for a convention hall."
"That"s what we figured it might have to be, at times," Garlock said.
"But that"s a very minor point. With yours so nearly ready to flit, no change in size is indicated now. But Belle and I have got to have another conference with the legal eagle. So if you and Brownie, Jim, will "port whatever you need out of the _Pleiades_, we"ll be on our way.
"So long--see you in a few days," he added, and the _Pleiades_ vanished; to appear instantaneously high above the stratosphere over what was to become the Galaxian Field of Earth.
"Got a minute, Gene?" he sent a thought.
"For you two Primes, as many as you like. We haven"t started building or fencing yet, as you suggested, but we have bought all the real estate.