“Another rule, I know. But does that mean you can’t sit next to us at meals? I’ve been watching you very carefully. You deliberately stay as far from us as you can.”
A hundred thoughts raced through Jamie’s mind. He muttered, “Lead us not into temptation.”
“Are you in love with Joanna?”
“No! Of course not.”
“Of course not,” Ilona mimicked, smiling at him. “The rules forbid us to fall in love, don’t they.”
“Not just the rules,” Jamie replied.
“You don’t want to get involved emotionally, is that it?”
He nodded, thinking of Edith back in Houston, wondering suddenly where she was, who she was with now.
Ilona wrapped her arms around Jamie’s neck. “When is the last time you made love?”
“What? I don’t think…”
“I’ll wager you haven’t made love since the last time you went home to California, have you?”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“Certainly not since we arrived at the assembly station. Not since then.”
Jamie’s mind was telling him to disengage from her and get away but his arms were clasping Ilona close to him, holding her tightly against his body. Their lips were almost touching.
“I want to make love with you, Jamie. Right here and now. I want to make love with my strong silent friend here among the stars. I want your strength, your warmth.”
She kissed him fiercely, then whispered, “The rules say nothing against fucking, Jamie. Fuck me, red man, fuck me.”
Slowly, languidly, almost like a man hypnotized, Jamie pulled open the front of Ilona’s coveralls; the Velcro seam split with the same noise as ripping fabric. As if in a dream he watched himself slide the garment over her shoulders and down her long arms. She wore nothing at all beneath the coveralls. The skin of her bare shoulders and slight breasts looked milky white in the starlight. All the long months of denial exploded in a sudden frenzy as Jamie pulled Ilona to the hard metal flooring, impervious to the cold, uncaring about Mars or Gaia or anything else except this eager tigress. The stars wheeled impassively about them.
2
The next morning at breakfast Jamie felt terribly embarrassed. He could not face Joanna at all, and found that it was difficult for him even to look into Ilona’s face. She smiled at him, though, from across the narrow wardroom table as he sat down with his tray between Tony Reed and Tadeusz Sliwa, the golden-haired Polish backup biochemist.
Jamie hurried through his breakfast and headed quickly up toward the communications console, where he intended to contact the growing library at Houston and bury himself in reading more details about the odd, oxygen-rich chemistry of the soil of Mars.
“You seem to be in a hurry.”
It was Tony Reed, striding up the narrow passageway behind him.
“I’ve got some reading to do,” Jamie said.
“Afraid I have to conduct some official business with you, my friend.”
Jamie stopped and turned around to face Reed. “Official business?”
“As the ship’s resident physician, yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please come with me to my office,” said Reed, smiling crookedly.
The ship’s infirmary was situated just behind the exercise room. It was a cubicle no larger than any of the individual quarters for the personnel, cramped and crowded even with only two people in it.
Reed slid the accordion-fold door shut and carefully latched it in place. Jamie could hear the groaning squeal of the weight machine from the other side of the partition and the puffing grunts of whoever was working out with it.
“We missed you yesterday afternoon,” Tony said, a sly grin on his face.
“I needed some privacy,” he said.
“So did Ilona, apparently.”
Reed squeezed past Jamie and sat on the edge of the built-in desk, folding his arms across his chest. He nodded toward the stool resting beside the locked medicine cabinet.
Jamie remained standing. He wondered who might be in the exercise room next door and how much he could hear through the thin partition wall.
Reed was practically leering. “You seemed to disappear right after she did. And then you both returned to us at about the same time.”
“Hoffman’s had a nervous breakdown,” Jamie said. “I was pretty upset by the news.”