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.For her also, he was afraid.* * *Chapter NINE* * *IT WAS, in the Nom, the twentieth day.It was possible finally for human nerves to adjust to Kesrith’s longer day.Duncan rose and wandered to the private bath—that luxury at least their onworld accommodations had afforded him, though he must content himself with the recycled ration of water available within the Nom’s apparatus.The Nom depended entirely on life-support systems like those of a ship: regul did not find surface existence comfortable, although it was tolerable.Neither was it, he suspected, comfortable for humans.Filtered air, recycled water, and that originally reclaimed from a sea so laden with alkali that nothing would live in it.The world’s little animal life was confined to the uplands, and from what information he had obtained from the translated regul advisories on that score, there was little born of Kesrith that was harmless.The interior of the Nom held gardens that somewhat humidified their air and provided pleasantness, but the alien harshness of the foliage and the accompanying scent of regul made the gardens less pleasant than they might have been.He was, he reckoned, growing used to regul.He was learning to tolerate a number of things he had once thought impossible to accept, and that in twenty days of close contact.It was close contact.There were no restricted hours, no confinement to quarters, but the regulations forbade them to leave the Nom at any time.Stavros, of course, would not do so as long as regul remained on Kesrith—a reasonably brief time to wait: ten days until the first human ships should come in and replace the regul.Duncan reckoned, at least, that their sanity might hold that long.He had a mental image of their first encounter with those humans incoming: that the landing party would find them both changed, bizarre and altered by their stay on Kesrith.He was not the man that had begun the voyage; SurTac Sten Duncan on Haven had been capable of far more impulsive behavior than Sten Duncan, aide to the new governor of Kesrith.He had acquired patience, the ability to reckon slowly; and he had acquired something of regul manners, ponderous and unwieldy as their conventions were.They began to come as naturally as yes, sir and no, sir: Favor, my lord; and, Be gracious, elder.They had promised him retirement after five years; but five years in this sullen environment would make him unfit for human company: five years from now he might find clean air a novelty and Haven daylight strange to the eyes—might find human manners banal and odd after the stark, survival-oriented settlement that men would have to make of Kesrith.He was in the process of adapting: any world, any climate, any operation in hostile terrain that wanted human hands directly at work onworld was a SurTac’s natural job, and he was learning the feel of Kesrith.Stavros was doing the same thing in his intellectual way, absorbing every oddity within his reach—like the regul, never seeming to need notes, simply looking and listening, on his rare excursions from his room to the gardens.This morning he had an appointment in Hulagh’s offices.It was an important Occasion.Something rumbled outside, different from the accustomed thunder of departing ships.Duncan switched the view to let light through the Norn’s black windows.They had a view of the whole horizon from the sea at the right to the hills at the left, save that they could not see the mri edun and could not see the port, the two things in which they had the greatest interest: it was of course no accident that they were arranged as they were.Nothing in that desolation had changed in twenty days; but now above the hills there was a change.A storm was moving in, the clouds grey, red-tinged, shadowing the sea in one quarter.Lightning flashed with impossible rapidity.The weather, said the prepared statements of the bai’s staff, is unpredictable by season, and occasionally violent.The rain is mildly caustic, especially in showers following duststorms.It will be desirable to bathe if one is caught in the rain.Above all it is necessary to seek suitable cover at the earliest indication of a storm.The winds can achieve considerable violence.If fronts converge on the seaward and hillward sides, cyclonic action is frequent [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]