The nights stretched into weeks, the weeks melted into months. Brad dutifully carried on with his anthropology work, observing the ship’s various scientific departments and the people who composed them, slowly constructing an ever-growing diagram of the relationships among them.
His own relationship with Felicia grew deeper and stronger. Almost every evening they pored over the squeaks and chirps of the octopods, trying to match specific sounds with specific actions and with the areas of their brains that lighted up. Every night he thought himself the luckiest man in the universe to have her by his side.
One evening he turned from the display screen showing a school of octopods gliding through their ocean and asked her, “Whose turn is it to make dinner?”
Sitting beside him, Felicia replied with a grin, “If you have to ask, then it’s your turn.”
“Good,” Brad said, getting to his feet. “Let’s go to a restaurant.”
Gesturing to the wall screen, Felicia asked, “What about our slithery friends?”
“They can wait. They’ll still be here when we get back.”
She got up from the sofa. “Okay. You’re the boss.”
Brad knew better, but he didn’t say a word about it.
Later that night, in the darkened bedroom, he asked, “The night we met, out on the dance floor…”
“Yes?” Drowsily.
“Who put you up to dancing with me?”
“Put me…? No one. I saw you in the middle of the dancers, looking kind of lost, kind of forlorn…”
A line from Othello flashed through Brad’s mind:
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed;
“And I loved her that she did pity them.”
He said, “And you took pity on me.”
“I wouldn’t call it pity.”
“It was awfully kind of you.”
Snuggling closer to him, she replied, “It’s worked pretty well, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s worked out so well that we ought to get married.”
“Married?” Suddenly Felicia was wide awake.
“It’s an ancient custom that’s pretty near universal. Every human society has a marriage ritual, symbolizing a couple’s dedication to each other.”
She giggled. “Stop talking like an anthropologist.”
“Will you marry me, Fil?”
“We’re living together. Isn’t that enough?”
“No. I want to marry you. We can get Captain Desai to perform the ceremony.”
“And Professor Kosoff to give away the bride,” Felicia added.
* * *
It was a week later that Felicia asked, “Brad, what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
They were sitting on the sofa again, with one of the holographic videos of the octopods on the wall screen. The dinner dishes, with the crumbs and crusts of their meal, were scattered across the coffee table in front of them.
“You’ve been staring at the screen for almost an hour now,” she said. “What’s going on inside your head?”
He didn’t reply.
“Come on, Brad, I can’t read your mind and your thoughts aren’t written on your forehead. Something’s troubling you, I can see that much. What is it? Is it me? Something I’ve done?”
Startled, Brad blurted, “You? Of course not!”
“Then what?”
He pointed at the screen. “Them.”
“Them? What about them?”
Turning to face her, Brad said, “We’ve been working on their language for how long now? Three months? Four?”
“More like five.”
“I think we’ve squeezed as much information out of the data we have as we’re going to. There’s not much more we can do with it.”
With a careful nod, Felicia said, “We’ve got two dozen word phrases.”
“We think we have two dozen phrases.”
“You’re not sure.”
“Right,” he said. “But I know how we can test our conclusions.”
Felicia’s expression turned from questioning to alarmed. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking. Or are you?”
“We’ve got to make contact with them,” Brad said. “See if our transliterations of their sounds actually mean what we think they mean.”
“Contact is forbidden! You know that!”
Brad shook his head. “We’ve already made contact, Fil. When we dropped the probes into their ocean, that was contact. If they’re intelligent, they must realize that those probes came from somewhere.”
“They’ve ignored the probes.”
“After determining that they’re neither food nor a threat.”
“You want to speak to them?”
“I want to try.”
“Kosoff won’t permit it.”
“I know. I’ll have to do it without his permission.”
“He’ll crucify you.”
Brad smiled tightly at her. “Not if I make actual, meaningful contact with the octopods. Not if I present him with a fait accompli.”
Felicia’s eyes were wide with fear. “Especially if you present him with a fait accompli,” she said.