“I’m not surprised,” Dewhurst said into his drink, but he was listening too.
“Well, we talked,” Wade continued. “You know how it is. I was young, and there was no doubt what I had in mind . . . but remember I’d been looking for romance. “And there was something odd about the girl. I mean, there couldn’t be much doubt what she wanted either, or she wouldn’t have come up to me that way . . . but she didn’t seem like a professional. She was quite young and quite beautiful, and, it seemed to me, quite innocent.”
“How young?” Da Silva asked with a hard underlayer to his voice.
Wade met the other man’s eyes. “Old enough,” he said. “Not twenty standard years, though. You’ll remember that I wasn’t much older than that myself.”
Da Silva dipped his head in curt approval.
Reed grimaced, interested despite himself. “What was she wearing?” he asked. He faced slightly away from the storyteller to keep from seeming too eager.
“Cast offs,” Wade said crisply. “The light was poor—”
“I thought you said the primary was full?” Dewhurst said in a verbal pounce.
Belgeddes raised an eyebrow. “I don’t recall you saying that, Dickie,” he said.
“No?” said Wade. “No, I don’t believe I did—”
He smiled at Dewhurst. “But it’s true nonetheless. I don’t suppose you’ve been on Ain, my friend? Reed—”
Wade clicked his gaze sideways, like a turret lathe moving from one setting to the next.
“—how would you describe the way Ain’s lighted under the primary?”
Reed shrugged and said apologetically to Dewhurst, “There’s quite a lot of light, actually, but Wade’s right—it’s blotchy, multicolored pastels from the gas bands in the primary’s atmosphere. It conceals as much as it hides, to tell the truth.”
“Quite,” Wade said primly. “So while it appeared to me that the girl was dressed in little better than wiping rags, I couldn’t be sure. And fashions differ, you know.”
Dewhurst snorted.
“I had a miniflood clipped to my sleeve,” Wade said. “But it didn’t seem the time to switch it on.”
“You have been out in the evening with young ladies, haven’t you, Dewhurst?” Belgeddes asked.
“Yes,” said Dewhurst, admitting defeat. “Yes, I can see that.”
“So we chatted—”
“Sitting on your air mattress, I suppose,” Reed said.
“Sitting on my air mattress,” Wade agreed with an appreciative nod. “She said she was local but from another island. A fisherman’s daughter, I assumed. Not professional, I was sure of that now, but not disinterested either. I put a hand on her shoulder, and she slid open the front closure of my shirt.”
Wade leaned back in his chair, savoring perhaps the memory and certainly the focused interest of the others in the lounge. Belgeddes smiled like a father watching his youngest perform in a church pageant.
“Well,” the storyteller continued, “I thought I knew where matters were proceeding. Now, of course, I think they were intended to proceed in a very different fashion. But her fingers touched the garnet locket that my mother had given me on her deathbed. I always carry it, you know. Mother said it would protect me from harm. Silly superstition, I suppose, but there you are.”
“And I suppose you’re wearing it now?” Da Silva asked, more precise than hostile in his tone. “The locket?”
“At this very moment?” Wade replied. He patted the breast of his tailored gray-and-black shirt “I believe it’s in my cabin. I can go get it, of course.”
“Shouldn’t say he was in much risk at the moment, would you?” Belgeddes said. He chuckled. “Unless you fellows are a syndicate of starship gamblers preying on poor innocents like Dickie and me?”
“Huh! Catch me playing cards with you two!” Dewhurst muttered.
“Well, she touched the locket and she pulled back like she’d been burned. ‘Why, that’s nothing!’ I said, pretty hasty as you can imagine. Not wanting anything to spoil the moment, so to speak. So I flipped the locket out, and I turned my light—I mentioned having a light, didn’t I?”
“A miniflood,” Belgeddes agreed approvingly.
“I switched on the light—aimed at the locket, mind, but there was scatter from it and through it, though the garnets. And when that red light flickered across the girl, as I thought she was, she simply melted.”