"chap-22" - читать интересную книгу автора (Biggle Lloyd Jr. - All The Colours Of Darkness)

22

A softly closing door awakened Darzek. He lay staring at the ceiling and listening to the reassuring street noises. Two women began a backyard argument somewhere nearby. The house was as restfully silent as it had been the night before.

He turned over lazily, made himself comfortable again, and then lay gazing incredulously at the clothing that had been draped over the room’s two chairs. His clothing. The suit was his, as were the socks and necktie, and it seemed only logical that the shirt, underwear, shoes, and handkerchief had likewise been lifted from his wardrobe. He wondered by what sleight of hand they had entered his apartment, and got the answer when he sat up and saw on the bureau the personal possessions he had abandoned on the Moon, including his keys. The alien garment strips had disappeared.

There was also a tray packed with sandwiches and cartons of coffee.

The coffee was hot; the sandwiches as various as the night before. He managed to eat three, with three cartons of coffee, and then he dressed himself slowly and spent some time contemplating the strangely pale, bewhiskered face that stared back at him from the bureau mirror. His burns had healed without scars, but it would be a long time before he could comb his hair properly.

"Might as well get a brush haircut and have done with it," he told himself resignedly. "But it’ll have to grow some before it’s even long enough for that!"

The beard he could do without, and would as soon as he got his hands on a razor. Otherwise, except for his hair, he had come out of his experience in surprisingiy good shape.

He knotted his tie, and went downstairs to join the aliens. He first searched for the collapsing door in the basement wall, and could not find it. Feeling slightly foolish, he backed off and called. A moment later the door rippled open, and Darzek stepped through.

"Good morning," he said. "Or good afternoon. Did I sleep until the next day or the day after that? I feel as if—"

He broke off confusedly. It was a male alien who stood before him, an alien of smaller stature, but it was not Xerxes, nor Ysaye, nor Zachary. Darzek stared blankly. "Who are you?" he demanded.

The alien did not reply. He led Darzek down the tunnel to the underground room, and with a sleight-of-hand gesture produced another doorway. Darzek stepped through, and it closed behind him.

In this room, a diminutive replica of the other, a female alien was seated on the floor. A desklike contrivance stood in front of her, and across its surface flickers of light darted in incomprehensible patterns. Beside her stood a solidly human chair that looked, in those glowing surroundings, like a crude relic of some long-forgotten primitive civilization. Over the chair a silver space suit was draped.

The moving lights faded, and the alien rose to greet him. "Mr. Darzek," she said. "Mr. Jan Darzek." It was not a question.

Darzek began a polite bow, and halted it to accept the hand she extended to him.

"I don’t believe we’ve met before," he said.

She was enormous, like Alice and Gwendolyn, but she appeared to be infinitely older. Her face was a mass of sagging wrinkles. The delicate blue tint had faded from her skin, but there were disfiguring blotches, like large bruises. The webbing of the fingers, which had been delicately transparent with the younger aliens, had a loathsome appearance of dark, decaying flesh.

As he looked at her she said with a smile—and the smile was in her voice— "I do not think you find us beautiful, Mr. Jan Darzek."

Darzek said slowly, "I find you strange. I think only a very rash man would attempt to evaluate the aesthetic attributes of something totally beyond his experience. No doubt your people could use our beauty queens in your chambers of horror, if you have such a thing."

She gazed at him steadily without answering. Her eyes, like Alice’s, were without color and faintly luminous. Then she turned, and removed the space suit from the chair. "Please sit here," she said. "I thought you would be more comfortable if you had one of your chairs to use. Our talk may be a long one."

Darzek seated himself. She laid the suit aside, and sat down on the floor facing him.

"You have an excellent command of English," Darzek said. "So do the others—Xerxes, Ysaye, and Zachary, that is—and they speak other languages like natives. Is it an innate ability?"

"Ability and training. We are chosen for that ability, and we are trained meticulously. Long ago, when Moon bases and matter transmitters were at most subjects of speculative thought among your people, I served my apprenticeship on this planet. Its rustic depravity and senseless wars made it an excellent training ground. Afterwards I returned and wrote its present classification."

"Then you’re the one who plastered the NO TRESPASSING signs around this Solar System."

"Listen." She leaned forward, and there was no mistaking her earnestness. "Your planet has long been used by us for training purposes. Its scientific development has accelerated in the past century, but that was only as we anticipated. The matter transmitter was several centuries in your future. Suddenly, through some freakish accident, its principles were discovered. It could not have happened at a worse time. Our Group here consisted of a newly arrived Group Leader on her first assignment, an apprentice technician, one apprentice observer, and two observers who are permanently assigned here because they have never demonstrated sufficient ability to attain rank. The Group should have requested a consultation, but it thought it could handle the situation. It thought it was handling it. It will receive a severe reprimand."

"In my estimation," Darzek said, "you should receive the reprimand."

"I? Why do you say that?"

"You underestimated the inhabitants of this planet, and sent an inadequate force to deal with them."

"So you defend the Group," she said. "You actually defend it. I did not think it possible, but they were right. You do consider them your friends. Such a thing has never happened before."

"Are you so incapable of friendship yourself that it surprises you to find it in others?"

She did not answer at once, but whether she was offended or only nonplused he could not decide. Then she spoke with oracular deliberation. "The Group will receive a reprimand. not because it failed to handle the situation here, but because it attempted to handle it. It should have taken into consideration the crudeness of your transmitting device, and done nothing."

"It works," Darzek said.

"Barely. It is of a wholly unique design, and it is self-limiting. It does not point to further discoveries, it prevents them. It is so clumsy in its operation that Alice—" Again the smile was in her voice. "I would very much like to know the sources for those names, but our time is limited. Alice was almost unable to use it. That fact should have been determined at the beginning."

"Ah! Those three steps to space travel. Then you think our transmitter is so crude that we’re stranded on the first step."

"Your transmitter is so crude that you cannot be said to have taken the first step."

"Then—you won’t smash Universal Trans?"

"What has happened makes it mandatory that we review your planet’s classification. That is why I am here. Specifically, I have come to obtain your recommendations on this subject."

Darzek stared. "You want my recommendations?"

"You have taken an oath, Jan Darzek. You may not have been aware of the full implications of that act. The oath made you one of us—and among us, all who have been associated with a problem have an equal right to state opinions and make recommendations. Yours will be considered quite as carefully as mine. You know the transmitter’s potential for space travel. It is true that your present transmitter does not have that potential, but if your scientists merely grasped the idea of such a potential, of the transmitter that works without a receiver and the transmitter that transmits itself, it is possible that they would concentrate on the problem and solve it. May I have your opinion on that, please."

"They’d solve it," Darzek conceded. "Sooner or later. I think too that you may be underestimating our scientists. The invention of the transmitter may not have been the accident you assume it was."

"Have you a recommendation?"

"Certainly. You admit yourself that there’s no danger in our present transmitter. It represents a tremendous human achievement, and I see no justification whatsoever in your depriving us of it merely because at some future time it might become dangerous to you. Leave it alone. Leave us alone. And if you insist upon hindering us, we are at least entitled to a just compensation, to an equal measure of help."

"Your recommendation has been noted and will be considered. Have you anything further to say?"

"Yes," Darzek said. "I think you’re wrong about the darkness—about our darkness. We have saints and sinners, moral people and immoral people, men with admirable ethics and men with no ethics at all, and every shade of difference in between. It seems to me that you’re attempting to measure us according to a scale of values where everything is either black or white—or good or evil. I don’t know myself if man is ready for amicable relations with alien peoples, but I’m positive that he isn’t hopeless. If man is really as depraved as you say he is, then your people are far worse. With your tremendous technology you could banish hunger and want from Earth. You could make the deserts and wastelands bloom, and strengthen the weak and contain the oppressive. Instead of building, you destroy. Instead of helping man to his natural destiny, you thwart him. A moral person who finds a fellow creature lying in the gutter doesn’t try to keep him there. He helps him out. My recommendation is that you take a long, careful look at your own color of darkness."

"It has been noted and will be considered. There remains one singular problem. What shall we do with the human, Jan Darzek?"

Darzek gestured indifferently. "That’s certainly a minor problem."

"We do not consider it so."

"I suppose you refer to erasing my memory. Some of the things that happened I might have looked back on with pleasure in my old age, but I’m sure that I shall have other memories that will serve the purpose. It would be nice to be able to remember the way the Earth looked from the Moon. I had other things on my mind at the time, and I only glanced at it, but it would be nice to remember. Most of all I hate to part with the memories of Ysaye, and Alice, and the others. They taught me something about myself that I’ll probably never learn again."

"Is there anything else?"

"Why ask? You couldn’t leave me part of a memory. I’d go nuts trying to fasten it onto something, or figure out where I got it."

"No decision has been reached with regard to the classification of your planet and your people, but it has been decided that Jan Darzek shall have his own free choice in the matter of his memory."

"You mean—you’ll let me keep it all?"

"If that is your choice. All, or any part of it."

‘Then I’d better not say anything else. Bring out your eraser—I don’t want a choice. If I were to choose I’d have to accept the responsibility for what followed, and there may be issues at stake that I couldn’t even comprehend."

"You are an awesome individual, Jan Darzek." She got to her feet and held the space suit in front of him. "Do you recognize it?"

"It’s a suit like those my people use on the Moon. It’s—" his eyes fell on the dangling air hose "—why, it’s the one I stole!"

"The one you stole, and used to memorable effect. Listen, Jan Darzek. There is a distant planet—more distant, perhaps, than I could make you understand in the time that I have. On that planet is a structure whose nature would be difficult to explain to you, though you would probably call it a museum. It is no mere repository of curiosities as are such museums of yours that I have seen. It, and its contents, are venerated beyond the values your language is able to express. This suit shall be displayed there, and not among the least significant of the treasures that building contains. As long as our civilization lasts—and that should be long indeed, for it is yet vigorous and expanding, and not even the gloomiest of our prognosticators professes to see an end to it—the peoples of the galaxy shall gaze upon this suit, and read of the epic of Jan Darzek, and marvel. In distant centuries perhaps even your own people will be among them. Does it please you to have attained so brilliant a measure of immortality? There are many of my people who would willingly endure much in order to achieve far less."

"I’d say that it’s a trifle exaggerated. I don’t ordinarily do epic things on an empty stomach."

"You sacrificed your own life to save the lives of five who could only be called your enemies."

"I didn’t sacrifice my life, I didn’t save their lives, and I don’t consider them my enemies. What happened was a team effort. I contributed. So did Ysaye. Alice did the most. Even those who did nothing helped by not interfering where all of their training told them they should interfere."

"They were watching," the alien said slowly. "They saw the difficulties you experienced in returning to them, when you could so easily have remained with your own people. Then you gave them your oxygen. If you had not done so Alice would have come too late. You deliberately sacrificed yourself in a cause that must have appeared hopeless at the time. It appeared hopeless to them."

"I’m a natural-born optimist."

"You are a feebly civilized inhabitant of a remote and utterly insignificant planet, with no more than a rudimentary moral sense, and—your act has created consternation in every headquarters all the way back to Supreme."

"You left out something," Darzek said dryly. "My darkness is also the wrong color."

"Do you state that as an opinion?"

"As an indictment of whoever is in charge of colors. Shall I see them again? Alice, and Ysaye, and the others?"

"They have already departed. They left a message for me to give to you.

"‘When the airless wind shall sing,

When the broken circle mends,

When the brightest day dawns without light,

And the brittle night comes softly without darkness, I shall yet remember.’

"It is from a poem celebrated on many worlds. Ysaye translated it for you, but I fear that it does not translate well."

"Please tell them that I understand, and return to them the same feeling."

"Certainly."

"Before we get on with the memory erasing, there is one thing I would like to know."

"I am at your service, Jan Darzek."

"What is the verdict?"

"The verdict?"

"About Universal Trans. And Earth. What are you going to do?’

"The verdict is not yet formulated. Even if it were, I should regretfully decline to tell you. You know something of our Code. Surely you can understand that."

"You won’t even tell me when my memory will be erased immediately afterwards?"

"Even if the Code permitted it, it would involve a needless complication and an impossible delay. The memory erasing is a prolonged and delicate operation, and we must first, with your assistance, devise substitute memories for the time of your absence. We must also have a technician prepare a wig for you. According to your photograph, the damage to your hair is somewhat conspicuous."

"Just a trifle."

"Our technicians are highly skilled in such matters."

"I know. I can’t see the harm in your telling me, though, if it’s erased right away."

"It would be a violation of my oath—and yours. Whatever the relationship between our peoples may be in the future, Jan Darzek, none of your people shall ever know about it. Certainly not during your lifetime—or mine. Are you ready now?"

Darzek got up resignedly.

Again he could not locate the door, and he had to wait until she opened it for him.

22

A softly closing door awakened Darzek. He lay staring at the ceiling and listening to the reassuring street noises. Two women began a backyard argument somewhere nearby. The house was as restfully silent as it had been the night before.

He turned over lazily, made himself comfortable again, and then lay gazing incredulously at the clothing that had been draped over the room’s two chairs. His clothing. The suit was his, as were the socks and necktie, and it seemed only logical that the shirt, underwear, shoes, and handkerchief had likewise been lifted from his wardrobe. He wondered by what sleight of hand they had entered his apartment, and got the answer when he sat up and saw on the bureau the personal possessions he had abandoned on the Moon, including his keys. The alien garment strips had disappeared.

There was also a tray packed with sandwiches and cartons of coffee.

The coffee was hot; the sandwiches as various as the night before. He managed to eat three, with three cartons of coffee, and then he dressed himself slowly and spent some time contemplating the strangely pale, bewhiskered face that stared back at him from the bureau mirror. His burns had healed without scars, but it would be a long time before he could comb his hair properly.

"Might as well get a brush haircut and have done with it," he told himself resignedly. "But it’ll have to grow some before it’s even long enough for that!"

The beard he could do without, and would as soon as he got his hands on a razor. Otherwise, except for his hair, he had come out of his experience in surprisingiy good shape.

He knotted his tie, and went downstairs to join the aliens. He first searched for the collapsing door in the basement wall, and could not find it. Feeling slightly foolish, he backed off and called. A moment later the door rippled open, and Darzek stepped through.

"Good morning," he said. "Or good afternoon. Did I sleep until the next day or the day after that? I feel as if—"

He broke off confusedly. It was a male alien who stood before him, an alien of smaller stature, but it was not Xerxes, nor Ysaye, nor Zachary. Darzek stared blankly. "Who are you?" he demanded.

The alien did not reply. He led Darzek down the tunnel to the underground room, and with a sleight-of-hand gesture produced another doorway. Darzek stepped through, and it closed behind him.

In this room, a diminutive replica of the other, a female alien was seated on the floor. A desklike contrivance stood in front of her, and across its surface flickers of light darted in incomprehensible patterns. Beside her stood a solidly human chair that looked, in those glowing surroundings, like a crude relic of some long-forgotten primitive civilization. Over the chair a silver space suit was draped.

The moving lights faded, and the alien rose to greet him. "Mr. Darzek," she said. "Mr. Jan Darzek." It was not a question.

Darzek began a polite bow, and halted it to accept the hand she extended to him.

"I don’t believe we’ve met before," he said.

She was enormous, like Alice and Gwendolyn, but she appeared to be infinitely older. Her face was a mass of sagging wrinkles. The delicate blue tint had faded from her skin, but there were disfiguring blotches, like large bruises. The webbing of the fingers, which had been delicately transparent with the younger aliens, had a loathsome appearance of dark, decaying flesh.

As he looked at her she said with a smile—and the smile was in her voice— "I do not think you find us beautiful, Mr. Jan Darzek."

Darzek said slowly, "I find you strange. I think only a very rash man would attempt to evaluate the aesthetic attributes of something totally beyond his experience. No doubt your people could use our beauty queens in your chambers of horror, if you have such a thing."

She gazed at him steadily without answering. Her eyes, like Alice’s, were without color and faintly luminous. Then she turned, and removed the space suit from the chair. "Please sit here," she said. "I thought you would be more comfortable if you had one of your chairs to use. Our talk may be a long one."

Darzek seated himself. She laid the suit aside, and sat down on the floor facing him.

"You have an excellent command of English," Darzek said. "So do the others—Xerxes, Ysaye, and Zachary, that is—and they speak other languages like natives. Is it an innate ability?"

"Ability and training. We are chosen for that ability, and we are trained meticulously. Long ago, when Moon bases and matter transmitters were at most subjects of speculative thought among your people, I served my apprenticeship on this planet. Its rustic depravity and senseless wars made it an excellent training ground. Afterwards I returned and wrote its present classification."

"Then you’re the one who plastered the NO TRESPASSING signs around this Solar System."

"Listen." She leaned forward, and there was no mistaking her earnestness. "Your planet has long been used by us for training purposes. Its scientific development has accelerated in the past century, but that was only as we anticipated. The matter transmitter was several centuries in your future. Suddenly, through some freakish accident, its principles were discovered. It could not have happened at a worse time. Our Group here consisted of a newly arrived Group Leader on her first assignment, an apprentice technician, one apprentice observer, and two observers who are permanently assigned here because they have never demonstrated sufficient ability to attain rank. The Group should have requested a consultation, but it thought it could handle the situation. It thought it was handling it. It will receive a severe reprimand."

"In my estimation," Darzek said, "you should receive the reprimand."

"I? Why do you say that?"

"You underestimated the inhabitants of this planet, and sent an inadequate force to deal with them."

"So you defend the Group," she said. "You actually defend it. I did not think it possible, but they were right. You do consider them your friends. Such a thing has never happened before."

"Are you so incapable of friendship yourself that it surprises you to find it in others?"

She did not answer at once, but whether she was offended or only nonplused he could not decide. Then she spoke with oracular deliberation. "The Group will receive a reprimand. not because it failed to handle the situation here, but because it attempted to handle it. It should have taken into consideration the crudeness of your transmitting device, and done nothing."

"It works," Darzek said.

"Barely. It is of a wholly unique design, and it is self-limiting. It does not point to further discoveries, it prevents them. It is so clumsy in its operation that Alice—" Again the smile was in her voice. "I would very much like to know the sources for those names, but our time is limited. Alice was almost unable to use it. That fact should have been determined at the beginning."

"Ah! Those three steps to space travel. Then you think our transmitter is so crude that we’re stranded on the first step."

"Your transmitter is so crude that you cannot be said to have taken the first step."

"Then—you won’t smash Universal Trans?"

"What has happened makes it mandatory that we review your planet’s classification. That is why I am here. Specifically, I have come to obtain your recommendations on this subject."

Darzek stared. "You want my recommendations?"

"You have taken an oath, Jan Darzek. You may not have been aware of the full implications of that act. The oath made you one of us—and among us, all who have been associated with a problem have an equal right to state opinions and make recommendations. Yours will be considered quite as carefully as mine. You know the transmitter’s potential for space travel. It is true that your present transmitter does not have that potential, but if your scientists merely grasped the idea of such a potential, of the transmitter that works without a receiver and the transmitter that transmits itself, it is possible that they would concentrate on the problem and solve it. May I have your opinion on that, please."

"They’d solve it," Darzek conceded. "Sooner or later. I think too that you may be underestimating our scientists. The invention of the transmitter may not have been the accident you assume it was."

"Have you a recommendation?"

"Certainly. You admit yourself that there’s no danger in our present transmitter. It represents a tremendous human achievement, and I see no justification whatsoever in your depriving us of it merely because at some future time it might become dangerous to you. Leave it alone. Leave us alone. And if you insist upon hindering us, we are at least entitled to a just compensation, to an equal measure of help."

"Your recommendation has been noted and will be considered. Have you anything further to say?"

"Yes," Darzek said. "I think you’re wrong about the darkness—about our darkness. We have saints and sinners, moral people and immoral people, men with admirable ethics and men with no ethics at all, and every shade of difference in between. It seems to me that you’re attempting to measure us according to a scale of values where everything is either black or white—or good or evil. I don’t know myself if man is ready for amicable relations with alien peoples, but I’m positive that he isn’t hopeless. If man is really as depraved as you say he is, then your people are far worse. With your tremendous technology you could banish hunger and want from Earth. You could make the deserts and wastelands bloom, and strengthen the weak and contain the oppressive. Instead of building, you destroy. Instead of helping man to his natural destiny, you thwart him. A moral person who finds a fellow creature lying in the gutter doesn’t try to keep him there. He helps him out. My recommendation is that you take a long, careful look at your own color of darkness."

"It has been noted and will be considered. There remains one singular problem. What shall we do with the human, Jan Darzek?"

Darzek gestured indifferently. "That’s certainly a minor problem."

"We do not consider it so."

"I suppose you refer to erasing my memory. Some of the things that happened I might have looked back on with pleasure in my old age, but I’m sure that I shall have other memories that will serve the purpose. It would be nice to be able to remember the way the Earth looked from the Moon. I had other things on my mind at the time, and I only glanced at it, but it would be nice to remember. Most of all I hate to part with the memories of Ysaye, and Alice, and the others. They taught me something about myself that I’ll probably never learn again."

"Is there anything else?"

"Why ask? You couldn’t leave me part of a memory. I’d go nuts trying to fasten it onto something, or figure out where I got it."

"No decision has been reached with regard to the classification of your planet and your people, but it has been decided that Jan Darzek shall have his own free choice in the matter of his memory."

"You mean—you’ll let me keep it all?"

"If that is your choice. All, or any part of it."

‘Then I’d better not say anything else. Bring out your eraser—I don’t want a choice. If I were to choose I’d have to accept the responsibility for what followed, and there may be issues at stake that I couldn’t even comprehend."

"You are an awesome individual, Jan Darzek." She got to her feet and held the space suit in front of him. "Do you recognize it?"

"It’s a suit like those my people use on the Moon. It’s—" his eyes fell on the dangling air hose "—why, it’s the one I stole!"

"The one you stole, and used to memorable effect. Listen, Jan Darzek. There is a distant planet—more distant, perhaps, than I could make you understand in the time that I have. On that planet is a structure whose nature would be difficult to explain to you, though you would probably call it a museum. It is no mere repository of curiosities as are such museums of yours that I have seen. It, and its contents, are venerated beyond the values your language is able to express. This suit shall be displayed there, and not among the least significant of the treasures that building contains. As long as our civilization lasts—and that should be long indeed, for it is yet vigorous and expanding, and not even the gloomiest of our prognosticators professes to see an end to it—the peoples of the galaxy shall gaze upon this suit, and read of the epic of Jan Darzek, and marvel. In distant centuries perhaps even your own people will be among them. Does it please you to have attained so brilliant a measure of immortality? There are many of my people who would willingly endure much in order to achieve far less."

"I’d say that it’s a trifle exaggerated. I don’t ordinarily do epic things on an empty stomach."

"You sacrificed your own life to save the lives of five who could only be called your enemies."

"I didn’t sacrifice my life, I didn’t save their lives, and I don’t consider them my enemies. What happened was a team effort. I contributed. So did Ysaye. Alice did the most. Even those who did nothing helped by not interfering where all of their training told them they should interfere."

"They were watching," the alien said slowly. "They saw the difficulties you experienced in returning to them, when you could so easily have remained with your own people. Then you gave them your oxygen. If you had not done so Alice would have come too late. You deliberately sacrificed yourself in a cause that must have appeared hopeless at the time. It appeared hopeless to them."

"I’m a natural-born optimist."

"You are a feebly civilized inhabitant of a remote and utterly insignificant planet, with no more than a rudimentary moral sense, and—your act has created consternation in every headquarters all the way back to Supreme."

"You left out something," Darzek said dryly. "My darkness is also the wrong color."

"Do you state that as an opinion?"

"As an indictment of whoever is in charge of colors. Shall I see them again? Alice, and Ysaye, and the others?"

"They have already departed. They left a message for me to give to you.

"‘When the airless wind shall sing,

When the broken circle mends,

When the brightest day dawns without light,

And the brittle night comes softly without darkness, I shall yet remember.’

"It is from a poem celebrated on many worlds. Ysaye translated it for you, but I fear that it does not translate well."

"Please tell them that I understand, and return to them the same feeling."

"Certainly."

"Before we get on with the memory erasing, there is one thing I would like to know."

"I am at your service, Jan Darzek."

"What is the verdict?"

"The verdict?"

"About Universal Trans. And Earth. What are you going to do?’

"The verdict is not yet formulated. Even if it were, I should regretfully decline to tell you. You know something of our Code. Surely you can understand that."

"You won’t even tell me when my memory will be erased immediately afterwards?"

"Even if the Code permitted it, it would involve a needless complication and an impossible delay. The memory erasing is a prolonged and delicate operation, and we must first, with your assistance, devise substitute memories for the time of your absence. We must also have a technician prepare a wig for you. According to your photograph, the damage to your hair is somewhat conspicuous."

"Just a trifle."

"Our technicians are highly skilled in such matters."

"I know. I can’t see the harm in your telling me, though, if it’s erased right away."

"It would be a violation of my oath—and yours. Whatever the relationship between our peoples may be in the future, Jan Darzek, none of your people shall ever know about it. Certainly not during your lifetime—or mine. Are you ready now?"

Darzek got up resignedly.

Again he could not locate the door, and he had to wait until she opened it for him.