“Pancho Weinstein the lawyer?” asked Dan. Talking with O’Donnell was like piecing together a puzzle.
“You have a damn good memory,” said O’Donnell. “Stacey doesn’t want the money. What the hell could they get for my bike? Eight hundred? A grand? But Stacey knows that the bike is my salvation. That’s why she wants it.”
“How is a bike your salvation?”
O’Donnell looked at Dan as if he had lost his train of thought.
“You just said your bike is your salvation,” said Dan.
“I did? Oh, well obviously you haven’t ridden up the Pacific Coast. Highway on a bike.”
“Obviously not,” said Dan.
“Riding it on a bike compares with driving it in a car or tour bus like being in this station compares with a space walk.”
And that is your salvation, thought Dan as a few more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Nice recovery, O’Donnell, but not good enough.
Kurt Jaeckle pressed a strip of rubber seal along the edge of the blister’s door. The new hinges were so stiff he could set the door at any angle without it flapping like a wing. The Mars module was quiet except for tiny bits of debris occasionally pinging against the ventilator grids. He didn’t notice Lorraine Renoir until she was at his shoulder.
“The chief scientist of the Mars Project is reduced to menial repair work?” she said, with a slight smile.
Jaeckle let his eyes meander from her toes to her hair, taking every possible moment to think of a clever rejoinder. She was barefoot. Her flight pants had been altered into shorts that clung to her hips like a second skin. Her breasts rose beneath her blue Trikon T-shirt with each breath.
“This isn’t repair work,” he said. “I’m a parent healing my child.”
“Tres corny, Professor.”
“I thought it was romantic,” said Jaeckle, reaching for her.
Lorraine shrugged and slipped away from Jaeckle to peer into the open mouth of the blister. The clamshell was retracted and the blister was bright with Earthglow. She felt a sense of vertigo, as if she could dive through that doorway and not stop falling until she landed on the tiny cotton swabs three hundred miles below. She looked again at Jaeckle. His brown eyes were piercing, penetrating. Maybe it wasn’t vertigo.
She always had been too analytical. She had never believed in Santa Claus. She never even believed in Bonhomme, which was astounding for a child growing up in Quebec City. During one Winter Carnival, she refused to join a group of classmates in front of the Ice Palace for a photograph with the seven-foot snowman who served as the carnival’s traditional master of ceremonies. He’s a figment of our imagination, she had said in English to her teacher.
Ever since Jaeckle had asked her to assist him on television, she had tried to look beyond the media personality that cloaked him like Bonhomme’s costume. She knew of Jaeckle’s reputation with women. She knew he wanted more from her than the TV show. Very deliberately, she decided to stop trying to analyze Jaeckle’s motives. She was finished with analysis. It hadn’t worked in her relationships on Earth, and it hadn’t worked on the station with Dan. She was constantly waiting for moments when the music would rise, the lights would dim, and the unseen audience would hold its collective breath. Russell Cramer’s episode and her accidental alliance with Jaeckle stripped away her complacency. This wasn’t theater, this was life. Time to meet Kurt Jaeckle. Time to find out what he’s really like—what I’m really like.
Lorraine flipped herself into the blister. Jaeckle followed, pulling the door closed behind him. The soft colors of twilight played through the dome.
“A parent healing your child,” Lorraine murmured to him. “Perhaps that is romantic, after all.”
“Am I a father figure to you?” he whispered back.
Before she could reply, his hands moved up her legs. His fingers were roughened from the repair work, and the scratchiness added to her excitement. He pulled her pants below her knees and kissed the insides of her thighs.
“Are you a naughty little girl?” Jaeckle crooned softly. “Do you want to be naughty for Daddy?”