Chapter 7
HE BUSIED HIMSELF with the drinks and a tray of savories.
He raised his glass, “Here’s looking at you.”
She was worth looking at. Her severe blue and gold uniform suited her. It could almost have been painted on to her splendid body.
She said, “Here’s looking at you, Grimes.” She sipped. “I hope you have enough of this excellent gin to last out the voyage.”
He said, “I make it myself. Or, to be more exact, the auto-chef does.”
She said, “A versatile ship. As versatile as her master.”
“Versatile?” he asked.
“Aren’t you? Survey Service officer, yacht skipper, ship-owner, courier . . .”
He laughed. “I’ll try anything once.”
“Will you?” There was something odd in the way she said it.
Grimes finished his drink, said, “Now I’ll get on with the minor modifications that we shall require. I should have done it before lift-off, but the plaspartit sheets didn’t come down until this morning, with the rest of the stores.”
“Plaspartit sheets?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows.
“You know the stuff. Sticks to anything. Used for erecting temporary partitions.”
“What for?’” she asked.
“I just told you.”
“But what for?”
“To make a light, longitudinal bulkhead in this cabin. The folding bunk on the starboard side is mine. The one on the port side is yours . . .”
She faced him over the table, looking into his eyes. Her own seemed preternaturally large, hypnotic in their intensity. She said, “I rather thought that it would have to happen, sooner or later. You’re a man, not unattractive. I’m a woman, with all the right things in the right places. When you turned on that Time-Space-twister of yours I had a sort of preview—a very vivid one. So now I know that it’s going to happen. Why put it off?”
Why indeed? Grimes asked himself.
He had not seen her touch any fastenings, but her shirt was open. Her breasts were large, firm, the pink nipples prominent and a stippling of color against the pearly pallor of her skin. She stood up and, moving with slow, deliberate grace, almost as though she were doing it to music, took off the shirt then pushed trousers and undergarments down her long, straight legs. She practiced all-over depilation, Grimes noted with almost clinical interest—or, perhaps, the lack of body hair was the result of some minor local mutation.
He had always preferred his women with sun-darkened skins and with luxuriant rather than otherwise pubic growths, but . . . Why look a gift horse in the pussy? he asked himself.
She moved lithely around the table and—it was the only possible word for her action—pounced, enveloping him in warm, naked femininity. As gently as possible he broke away. She stared at him incredulously. She almost snarled, “You’re not . . .”
He said, “Don’t worry. I’m heterosexual. But there’s just something I have to do in the control cab first . . .”
He made his way forward. He switched on the internal recorder. He had remembered Paragraph 118(c) of the Space Shipping Act. It was extremely unlikely that it would ever be evoked, that there would be need to prove that there had been no rape, but a videotape of this occasion would be a pleasant souvenir of the voyage, a felicitous parting gift when the time came for farewells.
When he returned to the main cabin he saw that she had found out how to lower his folding bunk from the ship’s side and, stretched out on the pneumatic mattress, was waiting for him.
He shed his clothing and joined her.