lack of her hurt more with each passing day. And with each passing day, he realized that there was a gathering fright inside himself over her absence. He didn’t know why.
He came back to home-cavern one day to find Losten waiting for him. Losten was standing there, grave and polite while Tritt was showing him the new baby and striving to keep the handful of mist from touching the Hard One.
Losten said, “It is indeed a beauty, Tritt. Derala is its name?”
“Derola,” corrected Tritt. “I don’t know when Odeen will be back. He wanders about a lot—”
“Here I am, Losten,” said Odeen, hastily. “Tritt, take the baby away; there’s a good fellow.”
Tritt did so, and Losten turned to Odeen with quite obvious relief, saying, “You must be very happy to have completed the triad.”
Odeen tried to answer with some polite inconsequence, but could maintain only a miserable silence. He had recently been developing a kind of comradeship, a vague sense of equality with the Hard Ones, that enabled them to talk together on a level. Somehow Dua’s madness had spoiled it. Odeen knew she was wrong and yet he approached Losten once more as stiffly as in the long-gone days when he thought of himself as a far inferior creature to them, as a—machine?
Losten said, “Have you seen Dua?” This was a real question, and not politeness. Odeen could tell easily.
“Only once, H—” (He almost said “Hard-sir” as though he were a child again, or a Parental.) “Only once, Losten. She won’t come home.”
“She must come home,” said Losten, softly.
“I don’t know how to arrange that.”
Losten regarded him somberly. “Do you know what she is doing?”
Odeen dared not look at the other. Had he discovered Dua’s wild theories? What would be done about that?
He made a negative sign without speaking.
Losten said, “She is a most unusual Emotional, Odeen. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” sighed Odeen.
“So are you in your way, and Tritt in his. I doubt that any Parental in the world would have had either the courage or the initiative to steal an energy-battery or the perverse ingenuity to put it to use as he did. The three of you make up the most unusual triad of which we have any record.”
“Thank you.”
“But there are uncomfortable aspects to the triad, too; things we didn’t count on. We wanted you to teach Dua in the mildest and best possible way in which to cajole her into performing her function voluntarily. We did not count on Tritt’s quixotic action at just that moment. Nor, to tell you the truth, did we count on her wild reaction to the fact that the world in the other Universe must be destroyed.”
“I ought to have been careful how I answered her questions,” said Odeen miserably.
“It wouldn’t have helped. She was finding out for herself. We didn’t count on that either. Odeen, I am sorry, but I must tell you this—Dua has become a deadly danger; she is trying to stop the Positron Pump.”
“But how can she? She can’t reach it, and even if she could, she lacks the knowledge to do anything about it.”
“Oh, but she can reach it.” Losten hesitated, then said, “She remains infused in the rock of the world where she is safe from us.”
It took awhile for Odeen to grasp the clear meaning of the words. He said, “No grown Emotional would—Dua would never—”
“She would. She does. Don’t waste time arguing the point.… She can penetrate anywhere in the caverns. Nothing is hidden from her. She has studied those communications we have received from the other Universe. We don’t know that of certain knowledge, but there is no other way of explaining what is happening.”
“Oh, oh, oh.” Odeen rocked back and forth, his surface opaque with shame and grief. “Does Estwald know of all this?”
Losten said, grimly, “Not yet; though he must know someday.”
“But what will she do with those communications?”
“She is using them to work out a method for sending some of her own in the other direction.”
“But she cannot know how to translate or transmit.”
“She is learning both. She knows more about those communications than Estwald himself. She is a frightening phenomenon, an Emotional who can reason and who is out of control.”
Odeen shivered. Out of control? How machine-like a reference!
He said, “It can’t be that bad.”
“It can. She has communicated already and I fear she is advising the other creatures to stop their half of the Positron Pump. If they do that before their Sun explodes, we