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Mavra would be his bosom buddy.
    â€˜Not much of a job,’ commented Johnny, as we headed for hot water and soap. He seemed quite down in the mouth about the dullness of it all. Apparently the harrowing trip through the Halcyon Drift hadn’t cured him of his thirst for deep space adventure. He had real courage all right, but no sense of proportion.
    â€˜It’ll be a cakewalk,’ I said unenthusiastically. ‘Relax and enjoy it. There’s plenty of time yet to go shooting monsters on alien worlds.’ That, I supposed, would be his idea of a good time. There’s no accounting for taste.
    At that time, I didn’t exactly visualise my taking an active part in the happenings on Rhapsody. I certainly didn’t see myself wandering around in the planet’s black depths, alone, shattered, frozen and pursued. I suppose it was Johnny’s sense of melodrama which involved me in the first place, but once I was loose, it was all my own work.
    And all my own fault.

CHAPTER THREE
    I should have been dead tired, but I couldn’t go to sleep. It wasn’t simply a matter of not daring to go to sleep, even if I was sitting on a highway. I purely and simply couldn’t sleep.
    After a while, I began to find the darkness oppressive. I once lived, for a while, on a world which was not unlike Rhapsody. The main difference was that it could be reached, even by p-shifters, because it was that much farther away from its primary. (Even so, it was never easy sliding the old Fire-Eater in and along an eclipsed groove.) But the culture could hardly have been more dissimilar. The air was always hot and loaded with odours. The background smell of sweat and the conversion machines was always masked by heavy perfume. Here, on Rhapsody, there was nothing like that. Not that the air smelled bad—this was a much bigger warren, and there were fewer people here—but where there were odours, in the towns and the mine workings, they were politely ignored, as if they did not exist. And it was a matter of politeness—the odours were never so perpetual that they could be blotted out of one’s consciousness.
    And on that other world, light was a treasure of immense value. The aesthetic existence of the culture was built around the qualities and uses of light. The people thrived on light—soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, sad light, angry light, jealous light, callous light. The rarity of light within the caverns enabled the people to find all kinds of beauty in the mere presence of it that other cultures, saturated by abundant solar radiation, could not hope to discover.
    Again, nothing of that sort here. The inhabitants of Rhapsody were apparently content with their darkness. If anything, they had come to abhor light in any quantity. Their capital had been illuminated only by dim lanterns, placed haphazardly rather than in the locations where they would be most useful.
    The Rhapsody people had eyes, and used them; there was no doubt about that. But they seemed to be ashamed of their eyesight, and they apparently rejoiced in the hardship of doing without it whenever it was convenient, and often when it was not.
    One could, perhaps, imagine that the warrens here might develop an alternative aesthetic life from that of the other world. One might imagine their coming to appreciate the qualities of darkness, rather than of light, finding beauty and inspiration in shadow and obscurity. But that had not happened either. These people seemed to have no art and no concept of beauty.
    Even their language had been modified only by loss. They had abandoned all the words describing the quality of light: effulgence, brilliance, sheen, iridescence, radiance, lambent, pellucid, lustrous, rutilant, luminiferous, incandescent, coruscate. Likewise, they found no use for terms describing bodies of light; not merely sun, but also nimbus, corona, aurora, spectrum, beam, halo, ignis fatuus and spangle.