O’Mara didn’t reply.
“Alternatively,” she went on, “there’s the exercise machinery if you want to get hot and sweaty, unless you prefer playing table games like chess or scremman. Or there’s the observation gallery, where you can guzzle umpteen varieties of different other-planetary booze until you begin to see things crawling about in hyperspace outside. Which reminds me, do you know what Chorrantir, our only Tralthan passenger, said about alcoholics on its home world? It said that eventually they begin seeing pink Earth-humans.”
“Oh, God,” he said, and smiled in spite of himself.
“Come on, Lieutenant O’Mara,” Joan persisted. “That uniform looks good on you, but everybody on the ship knows by now that we have a Monitor on board, so you should relax and take it off. What do you say?”
“This conversation,” said Kledenth suddenly, “is much more interesting than the endless talking from my friends down the table about other-world legends and the heroic, or sometimes utterly reprehensible, figures who populate them. To some of these people it has become a religion rather than a hobby. Well, what do you say, O’Mara?”
“Nothing,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m still thinking about it”
“But there’s nothing to think about,” Kledenth went on, its fur rippling in small, uneven waves. “I know that you Earth-humans don’t have our ability to outwardly express inner feelings without ambiguity but, even to me, in this situation the bare words are more than adequate. The female concerned is young and probably physically attractive to you – although as a Kelgian I consider it to be an unsightly life-form whose wobbly chest lumps give it a ridiculous, top-heavy look – and plainly feeling bored and possibly sexually frustrated because she was the only member of her species among the passengers. Now a same-species male has come among us and the situation has changed for the better. Again I cannot speak with authority, O’Mara, but presumably you, too, are beautiful or have other male attributes which she finds attractive….”
O’Mara felt his face growing warm. He tried to halt the other with an upraised hand, but either it didn’t know the significance of the gesture or was simply ignoring it.
“… To me it is clear,” Keldenth went on, “that this invitation to widen your experience by learning to swim will, I understand, require you to divest yourselves of all or most of those ridiculous body coverings, and place you in a situation of close physical intimacy which is also, if my understanding of Earth-human sexual practices is correct, the usual prelude to mating. I can foresee you having an interesting and enjoyable voyage. So what do you say, O’Mara?”
He looked away from Kledenth’s narrow, cone-shaped head with its tiny, bright eyes and the rippling neck fur and toward Joan, trying to find the right words to apologize for the embarrassment that the other must have been causing her. But she was staring intently at him, half-smiling and plainly not at all embarrassed but enjoying his obvious discomfit.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant O’Mara,” she said, “but Kledenth is quite right. After spending six weeks with a shipload of Kelgians, then habit of straight talking begins to rub off, so I’m beginning to say exactly what I feel. But it is wrong in thinking that I’m sexually frustrated. It’s same-species conversation and a pool partner I need, not sex. At the risk of sounding repetitious, what do you say?”
O’Mara looked at her but he couldn’t say anything. Suddenly she looked mortified.
“I know it isn’t usual with space service officers,” she said, “but have you got a wife already, or a serious woman-friend somewhere?”
He could easily have lied his way out of trouble, but in Kelgian fashion she was being completely honest and forthright, and to Kelgians one always told the truth.
“No,” he said.
“Then 1 don’t understand why you won’t…” Joan began, then stopped.
For a long moment she stared at him while her face slowly deepened in color. In the light of the preceding conversation, O’Mara would not have been surprised at anything she said or did, but he had never expected to see her blush.
“Looking closely at you,” she continued, doing just that as her eyes moved from his chest and arms that filled the large uniform to the still young but lived-in face that stared out of his shaving mirror every morning, “I find this very difficult to believe, and I don’t want to give offense, but have I made a serious mistake? Do you not find my company attractive because I’m, well, the wrong gender?” “No,” said O’Mara seriously, “the wrong species.” She stared at him openmouthed and aghast. Kledenth said, “Are you getting therapy for it?” Slowly she began to laugh, loudly and long. O’Mara stared at her without changing his expression until the laughter subsided into a broad smile.