“It’s my real price … but it’s also an alternative. Call it my second choice. My first choice, which means the price I’d settle for, comes in two parts: (a) to be taken into your service as a responsible officer; and, (b) to be married to Captain Robin Weinbaum.”
Weinbaum sailed up out of his chair. He felt as though copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each of his ears.
“Of all the” he began. There his voice failed completely.
From behind him, where Wald was standing, came something like a large, Scandinavian-model guffaw being choked into insensibility.
Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little.
“You see,” she said, “I don’t point my best and most accurate knee at every man I meet.”
Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and carefully. “Walk, do not run, to nearest exit,” he said. “Women and childlike security officers first. Miss L]‘e, are you trying to sell me the notion that you went through this elaborate hanky-panky beard and allout of a burning passion for my dumpy and underpaid person?”
“Not entirely,” Dana L]‘e said. “I want to be in the bureau, too, as I said. Let me confront you, though. Captain, with a fact of life that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you at all.
Do you accept as a fact that I can read the future in detail, and that that, to be possible at all, means that the future is fixed?”
“Since Thor seems able to accept it, I suppose I can too provisionally.”
“There’s nothing provisional about it,” Dana said firmly.
“Now, when I first came upon thisuh, this gimmickquite a while back, one of the first things that I found out was that I was going to go through the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ masquerade, force myself onto the staff of the bureau, and marry you, Robin. At the time, I was both astonished and completely rebellious. I didn’t want to be on the bureau staff; I liked my free-lance life as a video commentator. I didn’t want to marry you, though I wouldn’t have been averse to living with you for a whilesay a month or so. And above all, the masquerade struck me as ridiculous.