Shadow of the giant

too. He just enjoyed tormenting us
with the thought that he had endangered the entire world."
    "So what do you need him for?" demanded Petra.
    "We need him to work on the cure for Bean and the
babies."
    "Oh, right," said Bean. "You're going to turn
him loose in a lab."
    "No," said Rackham. "We're going to put him
in space, on an asteroid-based research station, closely supervised. He's been
tried and is under sentence of death for terrorism, kidnapping, and murder—the
murders of your brothers, Bean."
    "There's no death sentence," said Bean.
    "There is in military court in space," said
Rackham. "He knows he's alive as long as he's making progress on finding a
legitimate cure for you and the babies. Eventually, our team of co-researchers
will know everything he knows. When we don't need him anymore..."
    "I don't want him killed," said Bean.
    "No," said Petra. "I want him killed
slowly."
    "He might be evil," said Bean, "but I
wouldn't exist if not for him."
    "There was a day," said Rackham, "when that
would be the biggest crime you charged him with."
    "I've had a good life," said Bean. "Strange
and hard sometimes. But I've had a lot of happiness." He squeezed Petra's
knee. "I don't want you to kill him."
    "You saved your own life—from him," said Petra.
"You owe him nothing."
    "It doesn't matter," said Rackham. "We have
no intention of killing him. When he's no longer useful, he goes into a colony
ship. He's not a violent man. He's very smart. He could be useful in
understanding alien biota. It would be a waste of a resource to kill him. And
there's no colony that will have equipment he could adapt to create anything
... biologically destructive."
    "You've thought of everything," said Petra.
    "Again," said Bean, "you could have told us
this over the telephone."
    "I didn't want to," said Rackham.
    "The I.F. doesn't send a team like this or a man like
you on an errand like this just because you didn't want to use the phone."
    "We want to send you now," said Rackham.
    "In case you haven't been listening to yourself,"
said Petra, "there's a war on."
    Bean and Rackham ignored her. They just looked at each other
for a long time.
    And then Petra saw that Bean's eyes were welling up with
tears. That didn't happen very often.
    "What's happening, Bean?"
    Bean shook his head. To Rackham he said, "Do you have
them?"
    Rackham took an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and
handed it to Bean. He opened the envelope, removed a thin sheaf of papers, and
handed them to Petra.
    "It's our divorce decree," said Bean.
    Petra understood at once. He wasn't taking her with him. He
was leaving her behind with the normal children. He was going to take the three
children with the syndrome out into space with him. He wanted her to be free to
remarry.
    "You are my husband," she said. She tore the
papers in half.
    "Those are copies," said Bean. "The divorce
has legal force whether you like it or not, whether you sign them or not.
You're no longer a married woman."
    "Why? Because you think I'm going to remarry?"
    Bean ignored her. "But all the children have been
certified as legitimately ours. They aren't bastards, they aren't orphans, they
aren't adopted. They're the children of divorced parents, and you have custody
of five of them, and I have custody of three. If the ninth one is ever found,
then you'll have custody."
    "That ninth one is the only reason I'm listening to
this," said Petra. "Because if you stay you'll die, and if we both
go, then there might be a child who..."
    But she was too angry to finish. Because when Bean planned
this, he couldn't have known there'd be one child missing. He'd already done
this and kept it secret from her for ... for...
    "How long have you been planning this?" asked
Petra. Tears were streaming down her face, but she kept her voice steady enough
to speak.
    "Since we found Ramon and we knew there were normal
children," said Bean.
    "It's more complicated than that," said Rackham.
"Petra, I know how hard this is for you—"
    "No you don't."
    "Yes I damn well do," said Rackham. "I left a
family behind when I went out into space on the same kind of relativistic
turnaround voyage that Bean's embarking on. I divorced my wife before I went. I
have her letters to me. All the anger and bitterness. And then the
reconciliation. And then a long letter near the end of her life. Telling me
about how she and her second husband were happy. And the children turned out
well. And she still loved me. I wanted to kill myself.