  Next morning, Garlock was the last one, by a fraction of a minute, into the Main. "Good morning, all," he said, with a slight smile. "Huh? How come?" James demanded, as all four started toward the dining nook. Garlock's smile widened. "Lola. She brought me a pot of coffee and wouldn't let me out until I drank it." "Brought?" "Yeah. They haven't read their room-tapes yet, so they don't know that room-service is practically unlimited." "Why didn't I think of that coffee business a couple of years ago?" "Well, why didn't I think of it myself, ten years ago?" Belle's eyes had been going from one, man to the other. "Just what are you two talking about? If it's anybody's business except your own?" "He is an early-morning grouch," James explained, as they sat down at the table. "Not fit to associate with man or beast—not even his own dog, if he had one—when he first gets up. How come you were smart enough to get the answer so quick, Brownie?" "Oh, the pattern isn't too rare." She shrugged daintily, sweeping the compliment aside. "Especially among men on big jobs who work under tremendous pressure." "Then how about Jim?" Belle asked. "Clee's the Big Brain, not me," James said. "You're a lot Bigger Brain than any of the men Lola's talking about," Belle insisted. "That's true," Lola agreed, "but Jim probably is—must be—an icebox raider. Eats in the middle of the night. Clee probably doesn't. It's a good bet that he doesn't nibble between meals at all. Check, Clee?" "Check. But what has an empty stomach got to do with the case?" "Everything. Nobody knows how. Lots of theories—enzymes, blood sugar, endocrine balance, what have you—but no proof. It isn't always true. However, six or seven hours of empty stomach, in a man who takes his job to bed with him, is very apt to uglify his pre-breakfast disposition." Breakfast over and out in the Main: "But when a man's disposition is ugly all the time, how can you tell the difference?" Belle asked, innocently. "I'll let that pass," Garlock's smile disappeared, "because we've got work to do. Have any of you thought of any improvement on Lola's monogamous society?" No one had. In fact— "There may be a loop-hole in it," Lola said, thoughtfully. "Did any of you happen to notice whether they know anything about artificial insemination?" "D'you think I'd stand for that?" Belle blazed, before Garlock could begin to search his mind. "I'd scratch anybody's eyes out—if you'd thought of that idea as a woman instead of as a near-Ph.D. in anthropology you'd've thrown it into the converter before it even hatched!" "Invasion of privacy? That covers it, of course, but I didn't think it would bother you a bit." Lola paused, studying the other girl intently. "You're quite a problem yourself. Callous—utterly savage humor—yet very sensitive in some ways—fastidious...." "I'm not on the table for dissection!" Belle snapped. "Study me all you please, but keep the notes in your notebook. I'd suggest you study Clee." "Oh, I have been. He baffles me, too. I'm not very good yet, you...." "That's the unders...." "Cut it!" Garlock ordered, sharply. "I said we had work to do. Jim, you're hunting up the nearest observatory." "How about transportation? No teleportation?" "Out. Rent a car or hire a plane, or both. Fill your wallet—better have too much money than not enough. If you're too far away tonight to make it feasible to come back here, send me a flash. Brownie, you'll work this town first. Belle and I will have to work in the library for a while. We'll all want to compare notes tonight...." "Yeah," James said into the pause, "I could tune in remote, but I don't know where I'll be, so it might not be so good." "Check. You can 'port, but be damn sure nobody sees or senses you doing it. That buttons it up, I guess." James and Lola left the ship; Garlock and Belle went into the library. "If I didn't know you were impotent, Clee," Belle shivered affectedly and began to laugh, "I'd be scared to death to be alone with you in this great big spaceship. Lola hasn't realized yet what she really hatched out—the screamingest screamer ever pulled on anybody!" "It isn't that funny. You have got a savage sense of humor." "Perhaps." She shrugged her shoulders. "But you were on the receiving end, which makes a big difference. She's a peculiar sort of duck. Brainy, but impersonal—academic. She knows all the words and all their meanings, all the questions and all the answers, but she doesn't apply any of them to herself. She's always the observer, never the participant. Pure egg-head ... pure? That's it. She looks, acts, talks, and thinks like a virgin.... Well, if that's all, she isn't any—or is she? Even though you've started calling her 'Brownie,' like my now-tamed tomcat, you might not...." She stared at him. "Go ahead. Probe." "Why waste energy trying to crack a Prime's shield? But just out of curiosity, are you two pairing, or not?" "Tut-tut; don't be inurbane. Let's talk about Jim instead. I thought he'd be gibbering." "No, I'm working under double wraps—full dampers. I don't want him in love with me. You want to know why?" "I think I know why." "Because having him mooning around underfoot would weaken the team and I want to get back to Tellus." "I was wrong, then. I thought you were out after bigger game." Belle's face went stiff and still. "What do you mean by that?" "Plain enough, I would think. Wherever you are, you've got to be the Boss. You've never been in any kind of a party for fifteen minutes without taking it over. When you snap the whip everybody jumps—or else—and you swing a wicked knife. For your information I don't jump, I am familiar with knives, and you will never run this project or any part of it." Belle's face set; her eyes hardened. "While we're putting out information, take note that I'm just as good with actual knives as with figurative ones. If you're still thinking of blistering my fanny, don't try it. You'll find a rawhide haft sticking up out of one of those muscles you're so proud of—clear enough Mr. Garlock." "Why don't you talk sense, instead of such yak-yak?" "Huh?" "I know you're a Prime, too, but don't let it go to your head. I've got more stuff than you have, so you can't Gunther me. You weigh one thirty-five to my two seventeen. I'm harder, stronger, and faster than you are. You're probably a bit limberer—not too much—but I've forgotten more judo than you ever will know. So what's the answer?" Belle was breathing hard. "Then why don't you do it right now?" "Several reasons. I couldn't brag much about licking anybody I outweigh by eighty-two pounds. I can't figure out your logic—if any—but I'm pretty sure now it wouldn't do either of us any good. Just the opposite." "From your standpoint, would that be bad?" "What a hell of a logic! You have got the finest brain of any woman living. You're stronger than Jim is by a lot more than the Prime-to-Operator ratio—you've got more initiative, more drive, more guts. You know as well as I do what your brain may mean before we get back. Why in all hell don't you start using it?" "You are complimenting me?" "No. It's the truth, isn't it?" "What difference does that make? Clee Garlock, I simply can't understand you at all." "That makes it mutual. I can't understand a geometry in which the crookedest line between any two given points is the best line. Let's get to work, shall we?" "Uh-huh, let's. One more bit of information, though, first. Any such idea as taking the Project away from you simply never entered my mind!" She gave him a warm and friendly smile as she walked over to the file-cabinets. For hours, then, they worked; each scanning tape after tape. At mid-day they ate a light lunch. Shortly thereafter, Garlock put away his reader and all his loose tapes. "Are you getting anywhere, Belle? I'm not making any progress." "Yes, but of course planets are probably pretty much the same everywhere—Tellus-type ones, I mean, of course. Is all the Xenology as cockeyed as I'm afraid it must be?" "Check. The one basic assumption was that there are no human beings other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary assumption that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scatter out in all directions. So I'll have to roll my own. I've got to see Atterlin, anyway. I'll be back for supper. So long." At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more enthusiastically than before; taking both his hands and pressing them against her firm, almost-bare breasts. She tried to hold back as Garlock led her along the corridor. "I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin," he thought carefully. "I would have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that specialty, could grasp it only by referring back to somewhat similar situations which may have existed in the remote past—so remote a past that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half mythical, even to them." He went on to give in detail the sexual customs, obligations, and limitations of Lola's purely imaginary civilization. "Then it isn't that you don't want to, but you can't?" the lady asked, incredulously. "Mentally, I can have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible," he assured her. "What a shame!" Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man's super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally failed—if she couldn't have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a shame to waste such a man as that on any one woman! It was really too bad. "I see ... I see—wonderful!" Atterlin's thought was not at all incredulous, but vastly awed. "It is of course logical that as the power of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps...?" "That also is impossible. We four in the Pleiades are lost in space. This is the first planet we have visited on our first trial of a new method—new to us, at least—of interstellar travel. We missed our objective, probably by many millions of parsecs, and it is quite possible that we four will never be able to find our way back. We are trying now, by charting the galaxies throughout billions of cubic parsecs of space, to find merely the direction in which our own galaxy lies." "What a concept! What stupendous minds! But such immense distances, sir ... what can you possibly be using for a space-drive?" "None, as you understand the term. We travel by instantaneous translation, by means of something we call 'Gunther'.... I am not at all sure that I can explain it to you satisfactorily, but I will try to do so, if you wish." "Please do so, sir, by all means." Garlock opened the highest Gunther cells of his mind. There was nothing as elementary as telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, or the like; it was the pure, raw Gunther of the Gunther Drive, which even he himself made no pretense of understanding fully. He opened those cells and pushed that knowledge at the two Hodellian minds. The result was just as instantaneous and just as catastrophic as Garlock had expected. Both blocks went up almost instantly. "Oh, no!" Atterlin exclaimed, his face turning white. The girl shrieked once, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed on the floor. "Oh, I'm so sorry ... excuse my ignorance, please!" Garlock implored, as he picked the girl up, carried her across the room to a sofa, and assured himself that she had not been really hurt. She recovered quickly. "I'm very sorry, Grand Lady Neldine and Governor Atterlin, but I didn't know ... that is, I didn't realize...." "You are trying to break it gently." Atterlin was both shocked and despondent. "This being the first planet you have visited, you simply did not realize how feeble our minds really are." "Oh, not at all, really, sir and lady." Garlock began deftly to repair the morale he had shattered. "Merely younger. With your system of genetics, so much more logical and efficient than our strict monogamy, your race will undoubtedly make more progress in a few centuries than we made in many millennia. And in a few centuries more you will pass us—will master this only partially-known Gunther Drive. "Esthetically, Lady Neldine, I would like very much to father you a child." He allowed his coldly unmoved gaze to survey her charms. "I am sorry indeed that it cannot be. I trust that you, Governor Atterlin, will be kind enough to spread word of our physical shortcomings, and so spare us further embarrassment?" "Not shortcomings, sir, and, I truly hope, no embarrassment," Atterlin protested. "We are immensely glad to have seen you, since your very existence gives us so much hope for the future. I will spread word, and every Hodellian will do whatever he can to help you in your quest." "Thank you, sir and lady," and Garlock took his leave. "What an act, my male-looking but impotent darling!" came Belle's clear, incisive thought, bubbling with unrestrained merriment. "For our Doctor Garlock, the Prime Exponent and First Disciple of Truth, what an act! Esthetically, he'd like to father her a child, it says here in fine print—Boy, if she only knew! One tiny grain of truth and she'd chase you from here to Andromeda! Clee, I swear this thing is going to kill me yet!" "Anything that would do that I'm very much in favor of!" Garlock growled the thought and snapped up his shield. This one was, quite definitely, Belle's round. Garlock took the Hodellian equivalent of a bus to the center of the city, then set out aimlessly to walk. The buildings and their arrangement, he noted—not much to his surprise now—were not too different from those of the cities of Earth. With his guard down to about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" of this hitherto unknown civilization. The ether was practically saturated with thought. Apparently this was the afternoon rush hour, as the sidewalks were crowded with people and the streets were full of cars. It did not seem as though anyone, whether in the buildings, on the sidewalks, or in the cars, was doing any blocking at all. If there were any such things as secrets on Hodell, they were scarce. Each person, man, woman, or child, went about his own business, radiating full blast. No one paid any attention to the thoughts of anyone else except in the case of couples or groups, the units of which were engaged in conversation. It reminded Garlock of a big Tellurian party when the punch-bowls were running low—everybody talking at the top of his voice and nobody listening. This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city—and it did not take long—no one paid any more attention to him than they did to each other. Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing make-up. He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians—he'd have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport—the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why? He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn't make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a mass-detector ... no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians—balanced across a sort of bridge—that was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in.... While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air. At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, bumping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his assailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk. In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextricably intertwined, struck the pavement as one. The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons. The guardian's bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch. For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight—to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention—and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology. "I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock," she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, "for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked." "But what are they?" Garlock blurted. "I don't know." The woman turned her head and glanced, in complete disinterest, at the two furiously-battling creatures. Garlock knew now that this was the first time, except for that instantly-dismissed thrill of surprise at being the actual target of an attack, that she had thought of either of them. "Orange-yellow? It could be a ... a fumapty, perhaps, but I've no idea, really. You see, such things are none of our business." She thought at him, a half-shrug, half-grimace of mild distaste—not at the personal contact with the man nor at the savage duel; but at even thinking of either the guardian or the yellow monster—and walked away into the crowd. Garlock's attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing's neck had been stretched to twice its natural length and the guardian had eaten almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, a couple of smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. The orange beak still clashed open and shut, however, and the body still thrashed violently. Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim's body, just below its breast-bone. Thrusting two arms into the opening, he yanked out two organs—one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart—and ate them both; if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him. He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened. Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the Pleiades. Belle and Lola were in the Main. "I saw the damndest thing, Clee!" Lola exclaimed. "I've been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!" Lola's experience had been very similar to Garlock's own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers.... "Did you find out the name of the thing?" Garlock asked. "No. I asked half-a-dozen people, but nobody would even listen to me except one half-grown boy, and the best he could do was that it might be something he had heard another boy say somebody had told him might be a 'lemart.' And as to those lower-case Arpalones, the best I could dig out of anybody was just 'guardians.' Did you do any better?" "No, I didn't do as well," and he told the girls about his own experience. "But I didn't find any detectors or receptors, Clee," Lola frowned. "Where were they?" "'Way up—up here," he showed her. "I'll make a full tape tonight on everything I found out about the guardians and the Arpalones—besides my regular report, I mean—since they're yours, and you can make me one about your friend the green bat...." "Hey, I like that!" Belle broke in. "That could be taken amiss, you know, by such a sensitive soul as I!" "Check." Garlock chuckled. "I'll have to file that one, in case I want to use it sometime. How're you coming, Belle?" "Nice!" Belle's voracious mind had been so busy absorbing new knowledge that she had temporarily forgotten about her fight with her captain. "I'm just about done here. I'll be ready tomorrow, I think, to visit their library and tape up some planetological and planetographical—notice how insouciantly I toss off those two-credit words?—data on this here planet Hodell." "Good going. You've been listening to this stuff Lola and I were chewing on—does any of it make sense to you?" "It does not. I never heard anything to compare with it." "Excuse me for changing the subject," Lola put in, plaintively, "but when, if ever, do we eat? Do we have to wait until that confounded James boy gets back from wherever it was he went?" "If you're hungry, we'll eat now." "Hungry? Look!" Lola turned herself sidewise, placed one hand in the small of her back, and pressed hard with the other her flat, taut belly. "See? Only a couple of inches from belt-buckle to backbone—dangerously close to the point of utter collapse." "You poor, abused little thing!" Garlock laughed and all three crossed the room to the dining alcove. While they were still ordering, James appeared beside them. "Find out anything?" Garlock asked. "Yes and no. Yes, in that they have an excellent observatory, with a hundred-eighty-inch reflector, on a mountain only seventy-five miles from here. No, in that I didn't find any duplication of nebulary configurations with the stuff I had with me. However, it was relatively coarse. Tomorrow I'll take a lot of fine stuff along. It'll take some time—a full day, at least." "I expected that. Good going, Jim!" All four ate heartily, and, after eating, they taped up the day's reports. Then, tired from their first real day's work in weeks, all went to their rooms. A few minutes later, Garlock tapped lightly at Lola's door. "Come in." She stiffened involuntarily, then relaxed and smiled. "Oh, yes, Clee: of course. You're...." "No, I'm not. I've been doing a lot of thinking about you since last night, and I may have come up with an answer or two. Also, Belle knows we aren't pairing, and if we don't hide behind a screen at least once in a while, she'll know we aren't going to." "Screen?" "Screen. Didn't you know these four private rooms are solid? Haven't you read your house-tape yet?" "No. But do you think Belle would actually peek?" "Do you think she wouldn't?" "Well, I don't like her very much, but I wouldn't think she would do anything like that, Clee. It isn't urbane." "She isn't urbane, either, whenever she thinks it might be advantageous not to be." "What a terrible thing to say!" "Take it from me, if Belle Bellamy doesn't know everything that goes on it isn't from lack of trying. You wouldn't know about room service, either, then—better scan that tape before you go to sleep tonight—what'll you have in the line of a drink to while away enough time so she will know we've been playing games?" "Ginger ale, please." "I'll have ginger beer. You do it like so." He slid a panel aside, his fingers played briefly on a typewriter-like keyboard. Drinks and ice appeared. "Anything you want—details of the tape." He lighted two cigarettes, handed her one, stirred his drink. "Now, fair lady—or should I say beauteous dark lady?—we will follow the precept of that immortal Chinese philosopher, Chin On." "You are a Prime Operator, aren't you?" She laughed, but sobered quickly. "I'm worried. You said I flaunted virginity like a banner, and now Belle.... What am I doing wrong?" "There's a lot wrong. Not so much what you're doing as what you aren't doing. You're too aloof—detached—egg-headish. You know the score, words and music, but you don't sing. All you do is listen. Belle thinks you're not only a physical virgin, but a psychic-blocked prude. I know better. You're so full of conflict between what you want to do—what you know is right—and what those three-cell-brained nincompoops made you think you ought to do that you have got no more degrees of freedom than a piston-rod. You haven't been yourself for a minute since you came aboard. Check?" "You have been thinking, haven't you? You may be right; except that it's been longer than that ... ever since the first preliminaries, I think. But what can I do about it, Clee?" "Contact. Three-quarters full, say; enough for me to give you what I think is the truth." "But you said you never went screens down with a woman?" "There's a first time for everything. Come in." She did so, held contact for almost a minute, then pulled herself loose. "Ug-gh-gh." She shivered. "I'm glad I haven't got a mind like that." "And the same from me to you. Of course the real truth may lie somewhere in between. I may be as far off the beam on one side as you are on the other." "I hope so. But it cleared things up no end—it untied a million knots. Even that other thing—brotherly love? It's a very nice concept—you see, I never had any brothers." "That's probably one thing that was the matter with you. Nothing warmer than that, certainly, and never will be." "And I suppose you got the thought—it must have jumped up and smacked you—" Lola's hot blush was visible even through her heavy tan, "how many times I've felt like running my fingers up and down your ribs and grabbing a handful of those terrific muscles of yours, just to see if they're as hard as they look?" "I'm glad you brought that up; I don't know whether I would have dared to or not. You've got to stop acting like a Third instead of an Operator; and you've got to stop acting as though you had never been within ten feet of me. Now's as good a time as any." He took off his shirt and struck a strong-man's pose. "Come ahead." "By golly, I'm going to!" Then, a moment later, "Why, they're even harder! How do you, a scientist, psionicist, and scholar, keep in such hard shape as that?" "An hour a day in the gym, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Many are better—but a hell of a lot are worse." "I'll say." She finished her ginger ale, sat down in her chair, leaned back and put her legs up on the bed. "That was a relief of tension if there ever was one. I haven't felt so good since they picked me as home-town candidate—and that was a mighty small town and eight months ago. Bring on your dragons, Clee, and I'll slay 'em far and wide. But I can't actually be like she is...." "Thank God for that. Deliver me from two such pretzel-benders aboard one ship." "... but I could have been a pretty good actress, I think." "Correction, please. 'Outstanding' is the word." "Thank you, kind sir. And women—men, too, of course—do bring up certain memories, to ... to...." "To roll 'em around on their tongues and give their taste-buds a treat." "Exactly. So where I don't have any appropriate actual memories to bring up, I'll make like an actress. Check?" "Good girl! Now you're rolling—we're in like Flynn. Well, we've been in screen long enough, I guess. Fare thee well, little sister Brownie, until we meet again." He tossed the remains of their refreshments, trays and all, into the chute, picked up his shirt, and started out. "Put it on, Clee!" she whispered, intensely. "Why?" He grinned cheerfully. "It'd look still better if I peeled down to the altogether." "You're incorrigible," she said, but her answering grin was wide and perfectly natural. "You know, if I had had a brother something like you it would have saved me a lot of wear and tear. I'll see you in the morning before breakfast." And she did. They strolled together to breakfast; not holding hands, but with hip almost touching hip. Relaxed, friendly, on very cordial and satisfactory terms. Lola punched breakfast orders for them both. Belle drove a probe, which bounced—Lola's screen was tight, although her brown eyes were innocent and bland. But during the meal, in response to a double-edged, wickedly-barbed remark of Belle's, a memory flashed into being above Lola's shield. It was the veriest flash, instantly suppressed. Her eyes held clear and steady; if she blushed at all it did not show. Belle caught it, of course, and winked triumphantly at Garlock. She knew, now, what she had wanted to know. And, Prime Operator though he was, it was all he could do to make no sign; for that fleetingly-revealed memory was a perfect job. He would not have—could not have—questioned it himself, except for one highly startling fact. It was of an event that had not happened and never would! And after breakfast, at some distance from the others, "That is my girl, Brownie! You're firing on all forty barrels. You're an Operator, all right; and it takes a damn good one to lie like that with her mind!" "Thanks to you, Clee. And thanks a million, really. I'm me again—I think." Then, since Belle was looking, she took him by both ears, pulled his head down, and kissed him lightly on the lips. The spontaneity and tenderness were perfect at that moment. Clee's appreciation was obvious. "I know I said you'd have to kiss me next time," Lola said, very low, "but this act needs just this much of an extra touch. Anyway, such little, tiny, sisterly ones as this, and out in public, don't count." |
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