Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/87

 control room contained a couch, a desk, a small microfilm library and a well-stocked liquor cabinet, but that was about all. Cross opened the cabinet and poured himself a generous brandy. He drank it fast, then he lay down on the couch and tried to sleep. He always slept out the A Priori phases of his runs if they were under eight hours, but he had a good idea that he was going to have a hard time sleeping this one out. He was right. The minute he closed his eyes he saw a white towel and a golden sunrise of shoulders; two breath-taking colonnades of tanned, glistening flesh— There was no sleeping after that.

He swore aloud. Surely she must realize that an ordinary pilot like himself couldn't afford her. Then why had she deliberately exhibited her deluxe charms? Why had she deliberately delayed him at her door with so obviously false an excuse as a discussion of the unstable phase of A Priori? He was certainly not naive enough to think that, just because she was a fallen lady of the stars, she would waive her fee. If fourteen years in space had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that any extraterrestrial act of love was a business transaction and nothing more.

Still—

He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can go to hell, he thought—

But she didn't. She went to New America, instead. He accosted her on a sunny avenue in Little Chicago and they turned, hand in hand, down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The season was spring, and the warm air had activated the thermostatically controlled Hi-Fi's hidden in the foliage, and the air was filled with the singing of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that wound up to a secluded cottage, and they walked through scented coolness to the door. He noticed, then, that all the while they'd been walking, she'd been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been raining, too, despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with raindrops, and raindrops twinkled on her long, tanned legs—

He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. "I'll be damned!" he said. There was a persistent bell-like sound in his ears, and presently he recognized it as the beeping of the communicator. He got up, then, and PASSAGE TO GOMORRAH