“You see?” said Tritt. “It was I who talked to him. That is why he brought her.”

“No,” said Odeen. “It was time. He would have brought her even if neither of us had talked to him.”

Tritt didn’t believe him. He was quite sure that it was entirely because of himself that Dua was with them.

Surely, there was never anyone like Dua in the world. Tritt had seen many Emotionals. They were all attractive. He would have accepted any one of them for proper melting. Once he saw Dua, he realized that none of the others would have suited. Only Dua. Only Dua.

And Dua knew exactly what to do. Exactly. No one had ever shown her how, she told them afterward. No one had ever talked to her about it. Even other Emotionals hadn’t, for she avoided them.

Yet when all three were together, each knew what to do.

Dua thinned. She thinned more than Tritt had ever seen a person thin. She thinned more than Tritt would ever have thought possible. She became a kind of colored smoke that filled the room and dazzled him. He moved without knowing he was moving. He immersed himself in the air that was Dua.

There was no sensation of penetration, none at all. Tritt felt no resistance, no friction. There was just a floating inward and a rapid palpitation. He felt himself beginning to thin in sympathy, and without the tremendous effort that had always accompanied it. With Dua filling him, he could thin without effort into a thick smoke of his own. Thinning became like flowing, one enormous smooth flow.

Dimly, he could see Odeen approaching from the other side, from Dua’s left. And he, too, was thinning.

Then, like all the shocks of contact in all the world, he reached Odeen. But it wasn’t a shock at all. Tritt felt without feeling, knew without knowing. He slid into Odeen and Odeen slid into him. He couldn’t tell whether he was surrounding Odeen or being surrounded by him or both or neither.

It was only—pleasure.

The senses dimmed with the intensity of that pleasure and at the point where he thought he could stand no more, the senses failed altogether.

Eventually, they separated and stared at each other. They had melted for days. Of course, melting always took time. The better it was the longer it took, though when it was over all that time seemed as though it had been an instant and they did not remember it. In later life, it rarely took longer than that first time.

Odeen said, “That was wonderful.”

Tritt only gazed at Dua, who had made it possible.

She was coalescing, swirling, moving tremulously. She seemed most affected of the three.

“We’ll do it again,” she said, hurriedly, “but later, later. Let me go now.”

She had run off. They did not stop her. They were too overcome to stop her. But that was always the way afterward. She was always gone after a melting. No matter how successful it was, she would go. There seemed something in her that needed to be alone.

It bothered Tritt. In point after point, she was different from other Emotionals. She shouldn’t be.

Odeen felt differently. He would say on many occasions, “Why don’t you leave her alone, Tritt? She’s not like the others and that means she’s better than the others. Melting wouldn’t be as good if she were like the others. Do you want the benefits without paying the price?”

Tritt did not understand that clearly. He knew only that she ought to do what ought to be done. He said, “I want her to do what is right.”

“I know, Tritt, I know. But leave her alone, anyway.”

Odeen often scolded Dua himself for her queer ways but was always unwilling to let Tritt do so. “You lack tact, Tritt,” he would say. Tritt didn’t know what tact was exactly.

And now— It had been so long since the first melting and still the baby-Emotional was not born. How much longer? It was already much too long. And Dua, if anything, stayed by herself more and more as time went on.

Tritt said. “She doesn’t eat enough.”

“When it’s time—” began Odeen.

“You always talk about it’s being time or it’s not being time. You never found it time to get Dua in the first place. Now you never find it time to have a baby-Emotional. Dua should—”

But Odeen turned away. He said, “She’s out there, Tritt. If you want to go out and get her, as though you were her Parental instead of her right-ling, do so. But I say, leave her alone.”

Tritt backed away. He had a great deal to say, but he didn’t know how to say it.

2a

Dua was aware of the left-right agitation concerning her in a dim and faraway manner and her rebelliousness grew.

If one or the other, or both, came to get her, it would end in a melting and she raged against the thought. It was all Tritt knew, except for the children; all Tritt wanted, except for the third and last child; and it was all involved with the children and the still missing child. And when Tritt wanted a melting, he got it.

Tritt dominated the triad when he grew stubborn. He would hold on to some simple idea and never let go and in the end Odeen and Dua would have to give in. Yet now she wouldn’t give in; she wouldn’t—

She didn’t feel disloyal at the thought, either. She never expected to feel for either Odeen or Tritt the sheer intensity of longing they felt for each other. She could melt alone; they could melt only through her mediation (so why didn’t that make her the more regarded). She felt intense pleasure at the three-way melting; of course she did, it would be stupid to deny it; but it was a pleasure akin to that which she felt when she passed through a rock wall, as she sometimes secretly did. To Tritt and Odeen, the pleasure was like nothing else they had ever experienced or could ever experience.

No, wait. Odeen had the pleasure of learning, of what he called intellectual development. Dua felt some of that at times, enough to know what it might mean; and though it was different from melting, it might serve as a substitute, at least to the point where Odeen could do without melting sometimes.

But not so, Tritt. For him there was only melting and the children. Only. And when his small mind bent entirely upon that, Odeen would give in, and then Dua would have to.

Once she had rebelled. “But what happens when we melt? It’s hours, days sometimes, before we come out of it. What happens all that time?”

Tritt had looked outraged at that. “It’s always that way. It’s got to be.”

“I don’t like anything that’s got to be. I want to know why.”

Odeen had looked embarrassed. He spent half his life being embarrassed. He said, “Now, Dua, it does have to be. On account of—children,” He seemed to pulse, as he said the word.

“Well, don’t pulse,” said Dua, sharply. “We’re grown now and we’ve melted I don’t know how many times and we all know it’s so we can have children. You might as well say so. Why does it take so long, that’s all?”

“Because it’s a complicated process,” said Odeen, still pulsing. “Because it takes energy. Dua, it takes a long time to get a child started and even when we take a long time, it doesn’t always get started. And it’s getting worse.... Not just with us,” he added hastily.

“Worse?” said Tritt anxiously, but Odeen would say no more.

They had a child eventually, a baby-Rational, a left-let, that flitted and thinned so that all three were in raptures and even Odeen would hold it and let it change shape in his hands for as long as Tritt would allow him to. For it was Tritt, of course, who had actually incubated it through the long pre-forming; Tritt who had separated from it when it assumed independent existence; and Tritt who cared for it at all times.

After that, Tritt was often not with them and Dua was oddly pleased. Tritt’s obsession annoyed her, but Odeen’s —oddly—pleased her. She became increasingly aware of his—importance. There was something to being a Rational that made it possible to answer questions, and somehow Dua had questions for him constantly. He was readier to answer when Tritt was not present.