bunk.
“Just think,” she whispered, “within twenty-four hours this little place will be swept away in a torrent of fire . . . or maybe sooner.” She muffled his laughter with her mouth.
They struggled to find room. “Just one thing,” she said, hesitating. “There are some places you have to be careful.”
“I’ll be careful of everyplace.”
“I’m serious. Here, and here . . .” She showed him the results of her surgery. “They’re sensitive.”
“Hm. Are you going to explain all this to me, or do I have to take it on faith?”
“I’ll explain everything. Later.”
Much later Blake sat on the end of the bunk, dangling a leg over the edge and watching her in the light from the single torch, turned down to less than a candle’s glow. Even completely exposed, there was nothing visible in this ec-centric light to reveal that her long-limbed, small-breasted body was other than simply human.
To her infrared-sensitive vision, Blake presented a much brighter image, for he glowed with heat wherever the blood coursed through his veins. She amused herself, watching the heat slowly redistribute itself.
“Sleepy?” she asked. “No. You?”
She shook her head. “You wanted me to explain. It’s a very long story. Some parts you’ve already heard, but not in the same order.”
“Tell me a long story. Any order you want.”
On the far side of the ice cave, Bill Hawkins lay alone on his bunk and stared with open eyes into pitch darkness. With the imminent arrival of Inspector Troy, and thus of the launch of the Ventris , Forster had finally brought poor Hawkins out of the glare of the spotlight and into hiding with the rest of the expedition. He was grateful. He was a shade less miserable once he’d gotten away from the Interplanetary, which now held nothing but bitter associations.
He repeatedly replayed his few hours with Marianne in his mind, noting that the same events looked a bit different each time he analyzed them. Each time, his behavior looked worse.
It began the very morning after their first night, when they met at a dim sum place in the square and she arrived with a smile that lit up her green eyes—straight from the travel agency. She announced to him that she’d canceled the rest of her Grand Tour. He’d turned her smile to anger with his disapproval; what, after all, did she intend to do with herself without him? She’d answered that she would find something to do until he came back from Amalthea. So he’d given her a lecture on broadening her knowledge of the worlds, etc., and she’d thrown in his face his own remarks about how two weeks wasn’t enough to get to know Ganymede . . . He’d had the sense to retreat, but not until she’d accused him of sounding like her mother , for God’s sake. . . .
It got worse. Hawkins was the sort who got himself twisted into moral knots over whether to speak up every time somebody said something that was well known but untrue—for example, that Venus had once been a comet, or that ancient alien astronauts had bulldozed runways in the Peruvian desert—and some imp of the perverse wouldn’t let him keep his mouth shut whenever she made a petty mis-take, even ones far less egregious than these. She took this treatment longer, perhaps, than she should have, for she was acutely aware of the scattered nature of her education.
But eventually she had to stand and fight, for her own selfrespect. And it was Hawkins’s bad luck that she chose to make her stand upon the theories of Sir Randolph Mays. Something about Mays sent her into raptures—so many piles of facts, perhaps, his truly extraordinary erudition, as if somehow he had read five times as much as any other man alive—and that same something sent Hawkins into paroxysms of offended rationalism—perhaps because Mays’s facts, taken individually, were unassailable: it was just the cock-amamie way he stacked them up. . . .
The more she defended Mays, the more
“Just think,” she whispered, “within twenty-four hours this little place will be swept away in a torrent of fire . . . or maybe sooner.” She muffled his laughter with her mouth.
They struggled to find room. “Just one thing,” she said, hesitating. “There are some places you have to be careful.”
“I’ll be careful of everyplace.”
“I’m serious. Here, and here . . .” She showed him the results of her surgery. “They’re sensitive.”
“Hm. Are you going to explain all this to me, or do I have to take it on faith?”
“I’ll explain everything. Later.”
Much later Blake sat on the end of the bunk, dangling a leg over the edge and watching her in the light from the single torch, turned down to less than a candle’s glow. Even completely exposed, there was nothing visible in this ec-centric light to reveal that her long-limbed, small-breasted body was other than simply human.
To her infrared-sensitive vision, Blake presented a much brighter image, for he glowed with heat wherever the blood coursed through his veins. She amused herself, watching the heat slowly redistribute itself.
“Sleepy?” she asked. “No. You?”
She shook her head. “You wanted me to explain. It’s a very long story. Some parts you’ve already heard, but not in the same order.”
“Tell me a long story. Any order you want.”
On the far side of the ice cave, Bill Hawkins lay alone on his bunk and stared with open eyes into pitch darkness. With the imminent arrival of Inspector Troy, and thus of the launch of the Ventris , Forster had finally brought poor Hawkins out of the glare of the spotlight and into hiding with the rest of the expedition. He was grateful. He was a shade less miserable once he’d gotten away from the Interplanetary, which now held nothing but bitter associations.
He repeatedly replayed his few hours with Marianne in his mind, noting that the same events looked a bit different each time he analyzed them. Each time, his behavior looked worse.
It began the very morning after their first night, when they met at a dim sum place in the square and she arrived with a smile that lit up her green eyes—straight from the travel agency. She announced to him that she’d canceled the rest of her Grand Tour. He’d turned her smile to anger with his disapproval; what, after all, did she intend to do with herself without him? She’d answered that she would find something to do until he came back from Amalthea. So he’d given her a lecture on broadening her knowledge of the worlds, etc., and she’d thrown in his face his own remarks about how two weeks wasn’t enough to get to know Ganymede . . . He’d had the sense to retreat, but not until she’d accused him of sounding like her mother , for God’s sake. . . .
It got worse. Hawkins was the sort who got himself twisted into moral knots over whether to speak up every time somebody said something that was well known but untrue—for example, that Venus had once been a comet, or that ancient alien astronauts had bulldozed runways in the Peruvian desert—and some imp of the perverse wouldn’t let him keep his mouth shut whenever she made a petty mis-take, even ones far less egregious than these. She took this treatment longer, perhaps, than she should have, for she was acutely aware of the scattered nature of her education.
But eventually she had to stand and fight, for her own selfrespect. And it was Hawkins’s bad luck that she chose to make her stand upon the theories of Sir Randolph Mays. Something about Mays sent her into raptures—so many piles of facts, perhaps, his truly extraordinary erudition, as if somehow he had read five times as much as any other man alive—and that same something sent Hawkins into paroxysms of offended rationalism—perhaps because Mays’s facts, taken individually, were unassailable: it was just the cock-amamie way he stacked them up. . . .
The more she defended Mays, the more
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