"But--"
He went on swiftly. "Like several million other people I've been
wondering how you can tell a gardenia from a hellflower. Honestly, I
expected that you would take one look at the thing and then coldly
inform me that you knew the difference. Then I was going to ask you to
prove it. I was even going to be indignant over your thinking that I
would do such a thing. Upset, fraught with unrequited love and all that
bosh. I was prepared to maintain that I had bought the corsage in good
faith and that some joker like Cahill had played a gag on me, just for
kicks. Sooner or later you'd have told me how one could determine the
difference." He laughed bitterly and it was not hard when he thought of
Norma Hannon.
"Then," he went on, "you accepted it and put it in your hair, and I
know damned well that you can tell them apart. That made me think, and
I remembered that there are cases of women being immune. So I found
myself sheepishly afraid to explain, and let it go at that. Carolyn, I
just couldn't explain last night. But I do want to be honest with you."
He waited, hoping he had done a good job.
Carolyn put a soft hand against his face and then looked down. He
reached for her chin and lifted it. She blinked a few times, and then
smiled faintly. "Of course I knew what it was," she said. "And I know
that I am immune, so I took it and wore it. I wanted to see how you
would react. I wanted to find out why you did it. If you had done
it for the usual reason, I was going to lead you on until you were
incapable of control and then I was going to laugh at you and send you
packing." She looked up at him shyly. "I didn't want to think it was
for the usual reason."
She leaned toward him, but he took her by the shoulders and turned her
to face the telescope. At this, Carolyn put her head back against her
shoulder and rubbed her cheek against his.
"None of that," he said with a sharp laugh. "Hell, woman, you do fine
without a hellflower."
She turned in his arms and melted against him. He held her close
for awhile and then pushed her away from him. "We're running by the
rules, remember?" he said softly. "No fair, Carolyn. Think of my poor,
broken-down blood pressure, woman. Let's get back to astronomy. I may
live longer that way."
Astronomy is a fascinating hobby. Besides, this study required quite
a bit of close proximity, with his arms loosely around her so that he
could handle the setting-wheels on the telescope or Carolyn leaning
back against him as he looked over her shoulder to set the piece on
another object in the sky.
At midnight Farradyne showed her to her stateroom, and it was only
after he was in his own room that he remembered that she had carefully
ducked the explanation of how he could tell a love lotus from a
gardenia. He wondered at that. Maybe she thought he had not noticed the
careful steering away from the subject--and maybe a man who was going
into the business for what it was worth would not have noticed the
evasion.
Then there was the question of his own moral sense. So far as he had
appraised himself he had damned little such sense and most of this was
a matter of personal taste rather than observance of a set of rules.
More strange was the moral sense of the Niles family. It seemed to be
high except for their completely amoral disregard for what happened to
the hapless victims of their racket.
He went to sleep murmuring a line from a poem many hundreds of years
old that he had read as a youngster.
"... their honor rooted in dishonor...."
Take-off was scheduled for six o'clock and Farradyne barely made it.
Fortunately there was only an Albemarle Seventy-One coming in on a
landing beam and he could take his Lancaster up with his eyes closed.
The Tower signed him out with a few remarks about sleepy people who
just got up and a yawn over the near-at-hand bedtime. Then the contact
was closed and Farradyne was a-space on the next leg of his journey.
Free from the control board, Farradyne had two choices. In his role
of lover he could rap on her door because he wanted to be near her,
or he could let her sleep because he did not want to disturb her.
He listened at her door on his way to the galley but he could hear
nothing; apparently she did not snore. He went on down and built
himself a plate of ham and eggs and a large pot of coffee, and thankful
for the quiet and the solitude and the freedom, he ate his breakfast
and then loafed in the salon, trying to plan his future course.
Carolyn made her appearance at ten o'clock and reproached him. He gave
her the stock answer, against which there could be no rebuttal, and
offered her breakfast. He was solicitous and gentle. He felt that with
four hours of nerve-soothing quiet behind him, he could play it with a
bit more relaxation.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"About a half-million miles out from Terra, I can figure it out for you
if you want it precisely."
She smiled at him. "It's important. How close is that 'about' a
half-million miles?"
Farradyne leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes as he went
through the familiar formula, tossing out the figures beyond three
significants. It took him half a minute of plain mental arithmetic
to come up with the answer, "Four hours at one gravity makes it six
hundred sixty thousand miles. There's some error there, caused by the
fact that our apparent gravity just at take-off was not much more
than one-point-three, and the pull of the earth was replaced by true
accelerations as the Terran gravity diminished. But those figures
should be close enough."
"I didn't think you could guess that close."
"That was no guess, it was a practiced estimate. I can come closer than
that with some thought. After all, a shoe salesman should be able to
call off the sizes of the shoes he sees on the street, and you know the
Classical Chinese Carpenter?"
"No."
"The Chinese Carpenter is an oriental who comes in and takes a careful
look where the plaster fell out of the ceiling, and then goes away and
cuts a hunk of plasterboard that exactly fits the holes without any
cutting or even shaving."
Carolyn laughed politely.
"But this is neither here nor there. There are two things to consider:
one is breakfast and the other is that we are on our way, but your
pilot does not know where he's going."
"Can you strike a line between Terra and Polaris at a distance of three
hundred million miles?"
"Duck soup," replied Farradyne. "But how fast?"
"Zero with respect to Terra at three hundred million."
"Let's go up and start computing," he suggested. "I'll construct you
some grub after we get the first approximation and we get the ship on
the preliminary correction course."
He led her up to the course computer in the control room where she
added the time of rendezvous to the rest of the figures. He plucked at
the keyboard steadily for a minute, then sat back while the calculator
machine went through the program of arithmetical operations for which
it was designed. He took the punched paper strip from the machine and
fed it into the autopilot, and then said, "Now we'll go below and eat."
"You haven't been waiting for me?"
He nodded, hoping that he looked a bit lovesick.
"You shouldn't have."
They went below and she eyed the dirty dishes with womanly amusement.
"You are a sweet sort of liar, Charles," she said, turning and coming
into his arms.
He returned her kiss, thinking, these are the "dames" that try men's
souls.
14
Carolyn's eyes were fastened on the telescope, her attention was rapt.
There was a tiny signal pip at the extreme range on the long-range
radar that controlled the telescope, but the object was still too far
away. The range was closing slowly, but they would meet somewhere out
there, three hundred million miles above Terra to the astronomical
North.
Farradyne knew his instruments and his attention was therefore free to
think of other matters. Carolyn was busy at the "scope," so Farradyne
carefully and quietly slipped a long fluorescent lamp from its
terminals and stood it carefully on one end beside him. He balanced
it carefully and took a couple of silent steps toward Carolyn before
the tube lost its balance and fell to the floor with an ear-shattering
explosion.
It even shocked Farradyne, who knew it was coming.
Carolyn reacted like a person stabbed with a red-hot spear. Every
muscle in her body tensed as her nervous system twitched and she stood
there for a full ten seconds as stiff as a figure of concrete while the
shock gripped her. Then adrenalin poured into her veins and she started
to bundle up muscularly at the same time that she realized that there
really was no danger. Farradyne could see the relaxation of her body
taking place almost inch by inch.
The tension crept out of her silently until her breasts began to fall
in a shuddering exhalation. Then she sighed, and her tuneful voice was
a wordless trill of relief.
Farradyne's attention snapped into full awareness and he felt a thrill
of exultation run through him. Carolyn Niles' voice was a quavering
trill in _three lilting tones_.
Then the spell was gone and she relaxed against a brace holding one
hand under her left breast and breathing heavily. "What on earth--?"
"Lamp fell out of its moorings," said Farradyne. "My fault. That's
one of the pre-flight check-ups that I didn't have time to make this
morning. Stay where you are and I'll clean up this mess."
"Do you mind if I sit down? I haven't been that startled in years. I
thought the ship had exploded."
"Park yourself in the pilot's seat," he said. "But be careful. Broken
fluorescent tubing is doubly dangerous. The gook they put on the inside
is as poisonous as hell and the glass is as sharp as a razor."
She nodded and picked her way through the glass. She looked up at him
and said, "You don't seem to have been startled at all."
"I had a few millionths of a second to get my nerves in readiness," he
said. "I saw it come down. You took a beating."
"I guess I did," she admitted weakly.
Farradyne laughed; it was a forced laugh but he hoped it was
convincing. "Someone told me once that when a person is excited he
always reverts to his native tongue." Her eyes widened and her mouth
started to open, but Farradyne went on as though he hadn't been
watching avidly for some sign. "But I didn't think your native tongue
was Upper Irish Banshee."
Her eyes half-closed and her mouth snapped back from slack wonder to
toned self-control. "What did I say?" she asked with a half-humorous
smile, which Farradyne knew to be false.
"It sounded like, 'I am slain to pieces' but I don't know Upper Irish
Banshee very well."
"You're making fun of me," she complained pettishly.
"No I'm not. Not really. Anyone can be scared right out of his skin
when something like that happens unexpectedly."
"All right," she said, and the humor was gone from her voice. "So you
are not making fun of me. You've been playing a very serious game with
me, haven't you?"