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talk as though the problem meant something to you. Could you tell me why?"
"I'd be glad to try," he said slowly. "The standard answer would be that while
you're out in space you have lots of time to think-but people use thinking
time differently. I suppose I've been looking for some frame of reference that
could be mine ever since I was four, when my father and mother split up. She
was a Christian Scientist and he was a Dianeticist, so they had a lot to fight
about. There was a court battle over custody that lasted for nearly five
years. -
"I joined the army when I was seventeen, and- it didn't take me very long to
find out that the army -is no substitute for a family, let alone a church.
Then I volunteered for space service school. That was no church either. The
army got jurisdiction over space travel when the whole field was just a baby,
because it had- a long tradition of grafting off land-grants, and it didn't
want the navy or the air force to grab off the gravy from any such grants that
might be made on the planets. That's one of - the army's historic
prerogatives; the idea is that anything that's found on an army site-diamonds,
uranium, anything of value- is found money, to be lived off during peacetime
when the Congress gets stingy with appropriations. I spent more time helping
the army space-travel department fight unification with the space arms of the
other services than I did doing real work in space. That was what I was
ordçred to do-but it didn't help me to think of space as the ultimate
cathedral.
"Somewhere along in there, I got married and we had
one son;-he was born the same day I entered space school. Two years later, the
marriage was annulled. That sounds funny, I know, but the circumstances
were-unusual.
"When Pfitzner approached me and -asked me to pick up soil samples for them, I
suppose I saw another church with which I could identify myself-something
humanitarian, long-range, impersonal. And when I found this afternoon that the
new church wasn't going to welcome the convert with glad cries-well, the
result is that I'm now weeping on your shoulder." He smiled. "That's hardly
flattering, I know. But you've already helped me to talk myself into a spot
where the only next step is to apolo-gize, which I hereby do. I hope you'll
accept it."
"I think I will," she said, and then, tentatively, she smiled back. The result
made him tingle as though the air-pressure had dropped suddenly by five pounds
per square inch. Anne Abbott was one of those exceedingly rare plain girls
whose smiles completely transform them, as abruptly as the bursting of a
star-shell. When she wore her normal, rather sullen expression, no one would
ever notice her-but a man who had seen her smile might well be willing to kill
himself working to make her smile again, as often as possible. A wOman who was
beautiful all the time, Paige thought, probably never could know the devotion
Anne Abbott would be given when - she found that man.
"Thank you," Paige said, rather inadequately. "Let's order, and then I'd like
to hear you -talk. I dumped The Story of My Life into your lap rather early in
the game, I'm afraid."
"You order,'~ she said. "You talked about flounder this afternoon, so you must
know the menu here-and you handed me out of the Caddy so nicely that I'd like
to preserve the illusion." -
"Illusion?"
"Don't make me explain," she said, coloring faintly~ "But. . . . Well, the
illusion of there being one or two cavaliers in the world still. Since you
haven't been a surplus woman on a planet full of lazy males, you wouldn't
understand the value of a small courtesy or two. Most men I meet want to be
shown my mole before they'll bother tO learn my last name."
Paige's surprised shout of laughter made heads turn all over the restaurant.
He throttled it hurriedly, afraid that it would embarrass the girl, but she
was smiling again, mak
ing him feel instead as though - he had just had three whiskies in quick
succession. -
"That's a quick tranformation for me," he said, "This afternoon I was a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]