A Woman's Place Part 4

She had a three-quarter vision of each man and the table between them.

They were dealing a greasy pack of cards! Were they going to gamble for her? Relief and shame intermingled in her reaction. She would have preferred they settle it with more elemental.... It would have made it less.... Yet, this way neither would be killed. Sons and daughters from both....

"How are we going to tell her now?" Sam asked, as he picked up his cards. His voice came distinctly through the wall crack.

"We should have told her about our wives and families right at the start," Harper answered morosely. "I don't know why we didn't. Except that, well, none of us have talked about things back home. She didn't, and so we didn't either."

"But I never dreamed Miss Kitty would start getting ideas," Sam said in a heartsick voice. "I just never dreamed she...."

"We're going to have to tell her," Harper said resolutely. "We'll just have to tell her that, well, there's still hope and as long as there's hope...."

Blindly, in an anguish of shame such as she had never known, Miss Kitty crept away from the bunkhouse, and stumbled back to the cabin. Now she was shivering so violently she could hardly walk. The exposure to the night air, the nervous tension, overwrought emotions....

She could not remember getting back into the cabin, crawling into bed.

She knew only that a little later she was in bed, still shaking violently with a chill, burning with fever.

She was awakened in the morning with the sound of the axe chopping on wood. She dragged herself out of bed, forlorn, sick, filled with shame.

Her head spun so wildly that she sank to her knees and lay it on the bed. Then her pride and her will forced her to her feet, and she drove herself to dress, to go into the big room, dig out glowing coals from beneath ashes, put them in the little cook stove, pile fine slivers of resin-rich kindling on top of them, blow on them.

Between painful breaths, she heard herself sobbing. Her teeth started chattering again, and there was a ringing in her ears. She heard the blows of the axe falling on the wood, and each blow transferred itself to the base of her skull. The ringing in her ears grew louder and louder.

She heard one of the men shout. It sounded like Sam. Had he hurt himself with the axe, gashed his leg or something? She'd always been afraid of that axe! She'd told them and told them to be careful!

She pulled herself up from her knees there at the stove where she had been blowing on the coals. She must get out there, help him! That terrible buzzing in her head, that ringing in her ears. No matter, she must get out there to help him.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

She threw open the door and saw Sam running toward the lifeship. Had he lost his mind? The bandages were here. She had them here! She saw Lt.

Harper come to the door of the bunkhouse. He was still pulling on his pants. He started running toward the lifeship, too, cinching his belt as he ran.

Then she realized that at least part of the ringing in her ears came from the lifeship. At first it had no meaning for her, then she remembered them talking about fixing up some kind of alarm, so that if they got a signal through....

She started running toward the lifeship. She stumbled, fell, got up, felt as light as a feather, as heavy as mercury. She crawled up the steps of the lifeship, she clutched at the door. She heard Sam speaking very slowly, carefully.

"Do you read me? _Is this Earth?_"

She saw his face. She knew the answer.

And that was the last she knew.

Consciousness came back in little dribbles like a montage--half reality and half nightmare of the insomniac. Lt. Harper's voice shouting at her with a roar like a waterfall, "My G.o.d, Miss Kitty, are you sick?"

Blackness. More shouting, Sam calling the lieutenant, something about a red flare in the sky. A lucid moment, when Sam was explaining to her that Earth had been given the warp coordinates, and had sent a red flare to see if they could get through. Then another gap. A heavy trampling of feet, a great many feet. Some kind of memory of a woman in white, sticking a thermometer in her mouth. The p.r.i.c.k of a needle in her arm.

The sense of being carried. A memory of knowing she was in a ship. A flash that was more felt than seen.

Nightmares! All nightmares! She would wake up in a moment. She would get up, dress, go out and start a fire to heat water on the cookstove. She had planned to have coffee, a special treat from their almost exhausted store. She would have coffee. The men would come in sheepish, evading her glance.

Very well, she would simply tell them that she had misunderstood, save them the embarra.s.sment of telling her. She would not be the woman scorned.

She moved her hands to throw back her blankets, and froze. Her fingers had not touched blankets, they had touched cool, slick sheets! Her eyes popped open.

It had not been a nightmare, a wish fulfillment of escape. She was in a hospital room. A nurse was standing beside her bed, looking down at her.

A comfortably motherly-looking sort of woman was speaking to her.

"Well, now, Miss Kittredge, that's much better!" the woman said. "So you will go gather wild rice in the swamp and get your bloodstream full of bugs!" But it was a professional kind of chiding, the same way she had talked to her kindergarten children when they'd got themselves into trouble.

"Still," the nurse chatted, "it's made our pathologists mighty happy.

They've been having themselves a ball a.n.a.lyzing the bugs you three managed to pick up. You got something close to malaria. The two men, healthy oxen, didn't get anything at all. We had to let 'em out of quarantine in three days."

Miss Kitty just looked at her in a sort of unthinking la.s.situde. She was still trying to make the reality seem real. The nurse helped a little.

She turned to her cart and produced a white enamel, flat container. She slid it under the top sheet.

"Upsy-daisy now, Miss Kittredge," she said firmly. "It's time you started cooperating a little."

Yes, that brought her back to reality. But she still didn't say anything.

"Although we might as well not have let 'em out of quarantine," the nurse grumbled. "They've just been living out there in the waiting room for a solid week, b.u.t.tonholing everybody from doctors down to orderlies asking about you."

She gave a soft wolf whistle.

"Whew, imagine having not just one guy but two of 'em, absolutely crazy about you. Just begging to see you, hold your hand a little. Two beautiful men like that! You ready to see them soon?"

Miss Kitty felt a rush of shame again. In the cabin she would have been forced to face them, but not now.

"No," she said firmly. "I _never_ want to see them again."

"Well, now, let me tell you something, Miss Kittredge," the nurse said, and this time there was a note of seriousness. "One of the symptoms of this sickness you picked up is that it makes you talk. Gal, you have talked a blue streak for the last week. We know everything, everything that happened, everything you thought about. The doctor understood how you might feel about things. So he told the lieutenant and Mr. Eade that you had got bitten about the time you were up in the rice swamp, and that you hadn't been responsible for anything you'd said for the last three days back there on New Earth."

Miss Kitty felt a flood of relief.

"Did they believe the doctor?" she asked hesitantly.

"Sure they believed him," the nurse answered. "Sure they did. But you wanna know something? I've talked to those two men. And I've just got myself an idea that it wouldn't have made a particle of difference in the way they feel about you even if they didn't believe it. You're tops with those two guys, lady. Absolutely tip-top tops. The way you pitched in there, carried your share of things...."

She slipped the pan out from under the sheets, and put it into a compartment of the cart.

"You wanna know something else? I don't think you were out of your head at all when you propositioned those two guys. I think you were showing some good female sense, maybe for the first time in your life. And I think they know you were.

"You think it over, Miss Kittredge. If I know you--and I ought to after listening to you rave day after day--you've got what it takes. You want my advice? You go right on being a normal female. Don't you be silly enough to get back into that warped, twisted, frustrated kind of a man-hater you always thought you were.

"I gotta go now. You think it over. But not too long. Those two guys are going to be mighty, mighty hurt if they find out you're conscious and won't see them."

She went out the door, pushing her cart in front of her.