Apart from the crew, the GIRL was alone on the ship that returned to Beta.
And it turned out that she was more alone on the four-day trip than she expected.
Her crewman lover, who once had boasted of his sexual prowess, got tired of her unremitting demands, suddenly turned on her and said deliberately: “You must be the ugliest woman I ever saw.”
Not quick with words she had to speak, she had no response.
“You’re white and pasty and flabby,” he said cruelly. “You live in the dark. You …”
Having decided to crucify her, he did so with an invention and fluency far beyond her, though he was only an ignorant crewman. She swelled in rage, but did not move. All of the Six, except perhaps the SOLDIER, had learned long ago to fight, when they had to fight, with something other than a frail, vulnerable body. When the crewman left her, she still hadn’t moved.
She was special, didn’t the fool realise that? Of course he knew. Everybody knew. Yet in his male arrogance he thought he could speak to her like that and get away with it. The things he had said burned.
She had forgotten that the operation, the one she had led, the first led by a single member of the Six, had been brilliantly successful. She thought, venomously, only of the crewman. Her powers, though vague and not always controllable, were considerable. There must be something she could do. The virulence of her desire made her inventive …
The crewman, from then on, always had a presence over his shoulder. He was always seeing something out of the corner of his eye, and when he spun round, there was nothing there.
After a while the GIRL got the inspiration — for her it was no less — of adding a constant laugh to the constant presence. It was not difficult. After an hour or two of concentration, she had established such a situation that the crewman himself did nearly all the work.
He tried to get to her, uselessly, because she had not merely locked herself in the captain’s cabin but had the bulkhead in the corridor outside sealed, after providing herself with provisions to last the trip.
So he failed to get near her, and the silent laughter moved into his head.
The rest of the crew soon knew what was going on. They, however, unlike the once-arrogant crewman, knew the score. They stayed out of it.
The crewman lasted only forty-eight hours. At first he bore up quite well, thinking the ordeal could last only until the ship got back to Beta. But in one of the rare, unpredictable moments when the GIRL’S gift became genuine telepathy, she learned of this and laughed louder still and more derisively.
It would not stop. It would be as easy for her to keep it up on Beta as in the ship. It would never stop.
So the crewman entered an airlock and opened the outer door.
It was the only way to stop the laughing.