LIVING QUARTERS
Pancho had to sprint up the escalators to get back to the quarters she shared with Amanda before Mandy did. Twice she nearly stumbled and fell; it wasn’t easy to run up moving stairs when you can’t see your own feet.
It was late enough that the corridors were not crowded. Pancho easily dodged around the few people still up and about, leaving a couple of them bewildered as she brushed past them; they felt certain that someone had just rushed by, yet there was no one in sight. She got to their quarters well ahead of Amanda, powered down the stealth suit as soon as she slid the door shut behind her, stripped to her skivvies, and stuffed the suit under her bed. Elly was snoozing comfortably in her plastic cage, actually a box that still smelled faintly of the strawberries it had carried from China to Selene. Pancho had packed it with several centimeters of gritty regolith dirt, stuck in an artificial cactus, and kept a saucer of water in it for Elly’s comfort.
She was kneeling beside the plastic box, pouring fresh water into the saucer when Amanda came in.
Pancho looked up at her roommate. Mandy’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“How’d your date go?” she asked, innocently. Looking troubled, Amanda said, “Oh, Pancho, I think he wants to marry me.”
Pancho got to her feet. “He’s not the marrying kind.”
“He’s been married. Twice.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Amanda sat on her bed. “He… he’s different from any other man I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah. He’s got more money.”
“No, it isn’t that,” Amanda replied. “He’s…” She searched for a word.
“Horny?” Pancho suggested.
Amanda frowned at her. “He’s powerful. There’s something in his eyes… he almost frightens me.”
Thinking about Humphries’s home videos, Pancho nodded.
“I can’t see him again. I simply can’t.”
She sounded to Pancho as if she were trying to convince herself.
“He’s so accustomed to getting whatever he wants,” Amanda said, more to herself than Pancho. “He doesn’t like being turned away, rejected.”
“Nobody does, Mandy.”
“But he…” Again her words faltered. “Pancho, with other men I could smile and flirt and let it go at that. But Martin won’t be satisfied with that. He wants what he wants, and if he doesn’t get it he can be… I just don’t know what he’d do, but he frightens me.”
“You think he wants to marry you?”
“He said he loves me.”
“Aw hell, Mandy, guys have said that to me, too. All they want is to get into your pants.”
“I think he really believes that he loves me.”
“That’s a strange way to put it.”
“Pancho, I can’t see him again. There’s no telling what he might do. I’ve got to stay away from him.”
Pancho thought that Amanda looked scared. And she’s got plenty to be scared of, she told herself.
First thing the following morning, Pancho phoned Dan Randolph and asked to meet with him. One of Randolph’s assistants, the big beefy-faced guy with the sweet tenor voice, said he’d call her back. In five minutes, he did. Randolph would see her in his office at ten-fifteen.
Astro Corporation’s offices were just down the corridor from the living quarters that the company rented. In most corporations, executive country was conspicuously more luxurious than the regular troops’ territory. Not so at Astro. There was no discernible difference along the length of the corridor. As she walked along the row of doors, looking for Randolph’s name, Pancho decided that she wouldn’t tell him about the stealth suit. She’d returned it first thing that morning to Walton’s locker. Ike knew nothing of her borrowing the suit; if there was any bad fallout, he couldn’t be blamed for anything.
Randolph looked tense when Pancho was ushered into his office by the big Aussie she’d talked to on the phone.
“Hi, boss,” she said brightly.
It was a small office, considering it belonged to the head of a major corporation. There was a desk in one corner, but Randolph was standing by the sofa and cushioned chairs arranged around a coffee table on the opposite side of the room. Pancho saw that the walls were decorated with photos of Astro rockets launching from Earth on tongues of fire and billowing smoke. Nothing personal. No pictures of Randolph himself or anyone else. Pancho grinned inwardly when she saw that Randolph’s desk was cluttered with papers, despite the computer built into it. The paperless office was still a myth, she realized.