“Oh, relax, Rob. He’s not such a bad guy,” she said, lighting another cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it. “Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean thing—anyway, you’ve got as much to offer him as I do.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked honestly surprised. “I thought you knew he swings both ways.”
“He’s never given me any indication—” But I stopped, remembering how close he liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I was with him inside my bodyspace.
“Maybe you’re not his type,” she grinned. Only it wasn’t a kindly grin. A couple of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with interest, and then politely looked away.
“Let’s get out of here, Klara.”
So we went to the Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it wasn’t all that much fun. We wound up in her place and fell into bed, although the drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we finished. And the time was slipping by.
There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.
Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of those people. I knew Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself. Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making her edgy.
In some ways Klara was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She didn’t win a lottery to pay her fare. She earned it and saved it, painfully, over a period of years. She was a fully qualified airbody driver with a guide’s license and an engineering degree. She had lived like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and Major Medical. She knew more than I did about the growing of food on hydrocarbon substrates, in spite of all my years in Wyoming. (She had invested in a food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never put a dollar into anything she didn’t fully understand.) When we were out together, she was the senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov wanted as a shipmate—if he wanted anybody—not me. She had been my teacher!
And yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever I had been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the other two-week romances that had all ended badly in all the years after Sylvia. It was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini. Sagittarians were prophets. Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis were just terribly mixed up and indecisive. “It’s no wonder,” she told me gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than a couple of sips of coffee), “that you can’t make your mind up to go out again. It isn’t just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin nature wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will allow to win?”
I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, “Honey, go screw yourself.” And she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.
The Corporation made its expected announcement, and there was an immense flurry of conferring and planning and exchanging guesses and interpretations among all of us. It was an exciting time. Out of the master computer’s files the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low danger factors and high profit expectancies. They were subscribed, equipped, and launched within a week.
And I wasn’t on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to discuss why.
Surprisingly, Dane Metchnikov didn’t go out on any of them. He knew something, or said he did. Or didn’t say he didn’t when I asked him, just looked at me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn’t answer. Even Shicky almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the Finnish boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were four Saudis who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn’t go out, either, because she was waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some sort of continuity. You could eat in the Corporation commissary now without waiting in line, and there were empty rooms all up and down my tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, “Rob, I think I’m going to go to a shrink.”
I jumped. It was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.
I withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her—tactical: “I’m glad; it’s about time”; hypocritical: “I’m glad, and please tell me how I can help”; strategic: “I’m glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I could afford it.” I refrained from the only truthful response, which would have been: “I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for bending your head.” I didn’t say anything at all, and after a moment she went on:
“I need help, Rob. I’m confused.”
That touched me, and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay limp in mine, not squeezing back and not pulling away. She said: “My psychology professor used to say that was the first step—no, the second step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well, I’ve known that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do you want to keep the problem, or do you want to do something about it? I’ve decided to do something about it.”
“Where will you go?” I asked, carefully noncommittal.
“I don’t know. The groups don’t seem to do much. There’s a shrink machine available on the Corporation master computer. That would be the cheapest way.”
“Cheap is cheap,” I said. “I spent two years with the shrink machines when I was younger, after I—I was kind of messed up.”
“And since then you’ve been operating for twenty years,” she said reasonably. “I’d settle for that. For now, anyway.”
I patted her hand. “Any step you take is a good step,” I said kindly. “I’ve had the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if you could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all do it, I guess, but I’d rather have you angry at me on my own than because I’m acting as a surrogate for your father or something.”
She rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heecheemetal glow I could see surprise on her face. “What are you talking about?”
“Why, your problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to admit to yourself that you needed help.”
“Well, Rob,” she said, “it did, only you don’t seem to know what the problem is. Getting along with you isn’t the problem. You may be the problem. I just don’t know. What I’m worried about is stalling. Being unable to make decisions. Putting it off so long before I went out again—and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with.”
“I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!”
“You do have a mixed-up personality, Rob, you know you do. And I seem to lean on that. I don’t want to live that way.”
We were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways for things to go. We could get into a but-you-said-you-loved-me, but-I-can’t-stand-this scene, probably ending with either more sex or a wide-open split; or we could do something to take our minds off it. Klara’s thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction as mine, because she slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. “Let’s go up to the casino,” she said brightly. “I feel lucky tonight.”
There werent any ships in, and no tourists. There weren’t all that many prospectors, either, with so many shiploads going out in the past few weeks. Half the tables at the cisino were closed down, with the green cloth hoods over them. Klara found a seat at the blackjack table, signed for a stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to her without playing. “I told you this was my lucky night,” she said when, after ten minutes, she was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the house.