it occasionally, but Eugenia was quite apparently sunk in sorrow, with an infant daughter to raise, and he was reluctant to intrude. Then he was sent to Erythro and that ended even the possibility of renewal. He had periodic vacation time on Rotor, but he was never at ease there any longer. Some old Rotorian friendships remained, but only in lukewarm fashion.
Now Eugenia was coming with her daughter. Genarr, at the moment, didn't remember the girl's name - if he had ever known it. Certainly, he had never seen her. The daughter should be fifteen by now, and he wondered, with a queer little interior tremble, if she was beginning to look anything like the young Eugenia had.
Genarr looked out his office window with an almost surreptitious air. He had grown so used to Erythro Dome that he no longer saw it with a critical eye. It was the home of working people of both sexes - adults, no children.
Shift workers, signed up for a period of weeks or possibly months, sometimes returning eventually for another shift, sometimes not. Except for himself and four others who, for one reason or another, had learned to prefer the Dome, there were no permanents.
There was no-one to take pride in it as an ordinary abode. It was kept clean and orderly as a matter of necessity, but there was also an air of artificiality about it. It was too much a matter of lines and arcs, planes and circles. It lacked irregularity, lacked the chaos of permanent life, where a room, or even just a desk, had adjusted itself to the hollows and waverings of a particular personality.
There was himself, of course. His desk and his room reflected his own angular and planar person. That, perhaps, might be another reason he was at home in the Erythro Dome. The shape of his inner spirit matched its spare geometry.
But what would Eugenia Insigna think of it? (He was rather pleased she had resumed her maiden name.) If she were as he remembered her, she would revel in irregularity, in the unexpected touch of frippery, for all she was an astronomer.
Or had she changed? Did people ever change, essentially? Had Crile Fisher's desertion embittered her, twisted her-
Genarr scratched the hair at his temple where it had gone distinctly gray and thought that these speculations were useless and time-wasting. He would see Eugenia soon enough, for he had left word that she was to be brought to him as soon as she had arrived.
Or should he have gone to greet her in person?
No! He had argued that with himself half a dozen times already. He couldn't look too anxious; it wouldn't suit the dignity of his position.
But then Genarr thought that that wasn't the reason at all. He didn't want to make her uneasy; he didn't want her to think he was still the same uncomfortable and incompetent admirer who had retreated in so shambling a manner before the tall and brooding good looks of the Earthman. And Eugenia had never looked at him again after she had seen Crile - never seriously looked at him.
Genarr's eyes scanned the message from Janus Pitt - dry, condensed, as his messages always were, and with that indefinable feel of authority behind it, as though the possibility of disagreement were not merely unheard of - but actually unthought of.
And he now noted that Pitt spoke more forcefully of the young daughter than of the mother. There was especially Pitt's statement that the daughter had expressed a deep interest in Erythro, and if she wished to explore its surface, she was to be allowed to.
Now why was that?
26
And there she was. Fourteen years older than at the time of the Leaving. Twenty years older than she was in her pre-Crile youth, the day they had gone into Farming Area C and climbed the levels into low gravity, and she had laughed when he tried a slow somersault and had turned too far and had come down on his belly. (Actually, he could easily have hurt himself, for though the sensation of weight decreased, mass and inertia did not, and damage could follow. Fortunately, he had not suffered that humiliation.)
Eugenia looked older, too, but she had not thickened very much, and her hair - shorter now, and straight - was more matter-of-fact somehow, but was still a lively dark brown.
And when she advanced toward him, smiling, he could feel his traitor heart speed a bit. She held out both hands and