‘Invasion of privacy? That covers it, of course, but I didn’t think it would bother you a bit.’ Lola paused, studying the other girl intently. ‘You’re quite a problem yourself. Callous -utterly savage humor – yet very sensitive in some ways -fastidious…’
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‘I’m not on the table for dissection!’ Belle snapped. ‘Study me all you please, but keep the notes in your notebook. I’d suggest you study Clee.’
‘Oh, I have been. He baffles me, too. I’m not very good yet, you—’
That’s the unders —’
‘Cut it!’ Garlock ordered sharply. ‘I said we had work to do. Jim, you’re hunting up the nearest observatory.’
‘How about transportation? No teleportation?’
‘Out. Rent a car or hire a plane, or both. Fill your wallet -better to have too much money than not enough. If you’re too far away tonight to make it feasible to come back here, send me a flash. Brownie, you’ll work this town first. Belle and I will have to work in the library for a while. We’ll all want to compare notes tonight…’
‘Yeah,’ James said into the pause, ‘I could tune in remote, but I don’t know where I’ll be, so it might not be so good.’
‘Check. You can ‘port, but be damn sure nobody sees or senses you doing it. That buttons it up, I guess.’
James and Lola left the ship; Garlock and Belle went into the library.
‘If I didn’t know you were impotent, Clee,’ Belle said, laughing, ‘I’d be scared to death to be alone with you in this spaceship. Lola hasn’t realized yet what she really hatched out – the screamingest screamer ever pulled on anybody!’
‘It isn’t that funny. You have got a hostile sense of humor.’
“Perhaps.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘But you were on the receiving end, which makes a big difference. She’s a peculiar sort of duck. Brainy, but impersonal – academic. She knows all the words and all their meanings; all the questions and all the answers, but she doesn’t apply any of them to herself. She’s always the observer, never the participant. Pure egghead … pure? Thafs it. She looks, acts, talks, and thinks like a virgin … Well, if that’s all, she isn’t any – or is she? Even though you’ve started calling her “Brownie”, you might not…’ She broke off and stared at him.
‘Go ahead. Probe.’
‘Why waste energy trying to crack a Prime’s shield? But just out of curiosity, are you two pairing, or not?”
Garlock smiled calmly. Don’t be inurbane. Let’s talk about
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I
Jim instead. I thought he’d be gibbering.’
‘No, I’m working under double wraps – full dampers. I don’t want him in love with me. You want to know why?’
‘I think I know why.’
‘Because having him mooning around underfoot would weaken the team and I want to get back to Tellus.’
‘I was wrong, then. I thought you were after bigger game.’
Belle’s face went stiff and still. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Plain enough, I would think. Wherever you are, you’ve got to be the Boss. You’ve never been in any kind of a party for fifteen minutes without taking it over. When you snap the whip everybody jumps – or else – and you swing a wicked knife. For your information I don’t jump, I’m familiar with knives, and you will never run this project or any part of it.’
Belle’s face set; her eyes hardened. ‘While we’re putting out information, take note that I’m just as good with actual knives as with figurative ones. If you’re still thinking of blistering my fanny, don’t try it You’ll find a rawhide haft sticking up out of one of those muscles you’re so proud of.’
‘Why don’t you talk sense, instead of just shooting off your mouth like that?’
‘Huh?’
‘I know you’re a Prime, too, but don’t let it go to your head. I’ve got more stuff than you have, so you can’t Gunther me. You weigh one thirty-five to my two seventeen. I’m harder, stronger, and faster than you are. You’re probably a bit more Umber – not too much – but I’ve forgotten more judo than you ever will know. So what’s the answer?’
Belle was breathing hard. ‘Then why don’t you do it right now?’
‘Several reasons. I couldn’t brag much about licking anybody I outweigh, by eighty-two pounds. I can’t figure out your logic – if any – but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t do either of us any good. Just the opposite.’
‘From your standpoint, would that be bad?’
‘What a Hell of a logic! You’ve got the finest brain of any woman living. You’re stronger than Jim is, by more than the Prime-to-Op ratio. You’ve got more initiative, more drive, more guts. You know as well as I do what your brain may
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mean before we get back. Why in all hell don’t you start using it?’
‘You are complimenting me?’
‘No. It’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘What difference does that make? Clee Garlock, I simply can’t understand you at all.’
‘That makes it mutual. I can’t understand a geometry in which the crookedest line between any two given points is the best line. Let’s get to work, shall we?’
‘Okay. One more bit of information first, though. Any such idea as taking the project away from you simply never entered my mind.’ She gave him a warm and friendly smile as she walked over to the file-cabinets.
For hours then, they worked, each scanning tape after tape. At midday they ate a light lunch. Shortly thereafter, Garlock put away his reader and all his loose tapes. ‘Are you getting anywhere, Belle? I’m not.’
‘Yes, but of course planets are probably pretty much the same everywhere – Tellus-type ones, anyway. Is all the Xeno-logy as cockeyed as I’m afraid it must be?’
‘At least. The one basic assumption was that there are no human beings other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary assumption that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scattered out in all directions. So I’ll have to roll my own. I’ve got to see Atterlin, anyway. I’ll be back for supper. So long.’
‘Be good – Clee as though you could be anything else! Oh, simon-pure monogamy, how wonderful you are!’ She snickered gleefully as Garlock strode out.
At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more enthusiastically then before; taking both his hands and pressing them against her firm, almost-bare breasts. She tried to hold back as Garlock led her along the corridor.
‘I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin,’ he thought carefully. ‘I would have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that specialty, could grasp | it only by referring back to somewhat similar situations which
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may have existed in the remote past – so remote a past that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half mythical, even to them.’
He went on to give in detail the sexual customs, obligations, and limitations of Lola’s purely imaginary civilization.
“Then it isn’t that you don’t want to, but you can’t?’ the lady asked, incredulously.
‘Mentally, I have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible,’ he assured her.
‘What a shame!’ Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man’s super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally failed – if she couldn’t have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a shame to waste such a man as that on any one woman!
‘I see … I see – wonderful!’ Atterlin’s thought was not at all incredulous, but vastly awed. ‘It is of course logical that as the power of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps …?’
‘That also is impossible. We four in the Pleiades are lost in space. This is the first planet we have visited on our first trial of a new method – new to us, at least – of interstellar travel. We missed our objective, probably by many millions of parsecs, and it is quite possible that we four will never be able to find our way back. We are trying now, by charting the galaxies throughout billions of cubic parsecs of space, to find merely the direction in which our own galaxy lies.’
‘What a concept! What stupendous minds! But such immense distances, sir … what can you possibly be using for a space-drive?’
‘None, as you understand the term. We travel by instantaneous translation, by means of something we call “Gunther”. I am not at all sure that I can explain it to you satisfactorily, but I will try to do so, if you wish.’