Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/88

 went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message which the receiver had emitted:

Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clairvoyant? Had she known there was going to be a storm?

He hurried toward the control panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel again, the towel and the deliberate shower. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to work off her passage, but it didn't do any good, and his anger kept intensifying till it superseded his common sense, till it transformed him from a seasoned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control panel simply hadn't been designed to be operated by a frustrated schoolboy, and when his fingers sought to punch out the pattern that would snap the Pandora back into normal space, they punched, instead, a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.

The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons and, at the same time, it temporarily incapacitated the particular unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back against the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the automatic shock, his body going numb. He slid slowly to the deck, still conscious but unable to move his limbs.

The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer. Lying there, watching the room dissolve around him, he experienced a strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how much he really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just made had been the result of his anger, or whether his anger had merely been a trumped-up excuse for making the mistake; whether the entire action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the Lady Berenice's past

The tree was much taller than he had thought, and he wished now that he hadn't been in such a hurry to join the club. He had swum the 88