“I’m sorry, Lieutenant O’Mara,” she said, “but Kledenth is quite right. After spending six weeks with a shipload of Kelgians, their habit of straight talking begins to rub off, so I’m beginning to say exactly what I feel. But it is wrong in thinking that I’m sexually frustrated. It’s same-species conversation and a pool partner I need, not sex. At the risk of sounding repetitious, what do you say?”
O’Mara looked at her but he couldn’t say anything. Suddenly she looked mortified.
“I know it isn’t usual with space service officers? she said, “but have you got a wife already, or a serious woman-friend somewhere?”
He could easily have lied his way out of trouble, but in Kelgian fashion she was being completely, and to Kelgians one always told the truth.
“No? he said.
“Then I don’t understand why you won’t…” Joan began, then stopped.
For a long moment she stared at him while her face slowly deepened in color. In the light of the preceding conversation, O’Mara would not have been surprised at anything she said or did, but he had never expected to see her blush.
“Looking closely at you? she continued, doing just that as her eyes moved from his chest and arms that filled the large uniform to the still young but lived-in face that stared out of his shaving mirror every morning, “I find this very difficult to believe, and I don’t want to give offense, but have I made a serious mistake? Do you not find my company attractive because I’m, well, the wrong gender?”
“No? said O’Mara seriously, “the wrong species.”
She stared at him openmouthed and aghast.
Kledenth said, “Are you getting therapy for it?”
Slowly she began to laugh, loudly and long. O’Mara stared at her without changing his expression until the laughter subsided into a broad smile.
“You sounded so, so serious when you said that? she said, “and you look so dour and unapproachable that I never suspected that you could have a sense of humor. But don’t ever make a joke like that in the pooi or you’ll be the one responsible for drowning me.”
In the event, neither of them drowned, although the enthusiasm she displayed while making sure he stayed afloat made the process feel like a bout of mixed wrestling. And while they were sitting on loungers at the edge of the pool before or after a swimming lesson it was worse, or better, because she could see that he was attracted to her. She kept telling him to relax, to be less serious about everything and to remember that he was, after all, on leave. It was obvious that he was becoming a challenge to her. But he wasn’t playing hard to get, just feeling too embarrassed and uncertain about himself to play at all. He kept trying to find e,~cuses to return to his cabin to avoid being alone at the pool with ler for too long.
He was, after all, only human.
In the dining room, on the recreation deck, and in the big observation lounge, where there would be nothing to look at but each other until Kreskhallar emerged from hyperspace, the soft assault continued although attimes it became less frontal. In the lounge there was nothing to do but talk, usually about and often with the other passengers, and drink various other-world concoctions that were intended to lower his resistance and/or remove his inhibitions, which they didn’t. She said very little about herself other than that she had recently graduated top of her year-she didn’t mention her specialty-and that to celebrate her parents had paid for this five-world, star-traveling convention that would enable her to visit worlds she was never likely to see otherwise while indulging her hobby among people of like mind.
O’Mara told her even less about himself, because the uniform, which he had taken to wearing on every social occasion like a suit of green armor, told her what he did in real life.
But there was one evening, when the ship was ten hours out of Traltha’s planetary capital, Naorthant, and the stars and myriad moons of the Tralthan system had been shining into the darkened observation lounge, when he had returned alone to his cabin with his resistance very low indeed.
Angrily he wondered why he was acting like some stupid knight errant from the legends that the passengers discussed endlessly among themselves. What was he trying to prove? She was an intelligent and very desirable young women, so much so that he couldn’t understand why she had any time for a coarse, ugly person like himself at all. And there was no way that it could become a permanent commitment, because it would end when Kreskhallar returned her to Earth in four weeks’ time. Nobody in Sector General would ever know about it, whatever “it” turned out to be, and if they did find out, neither Craythorne nor anyone e>~ would care. He was on leave, after all, and he had been told by his chief to relax and enjoy himself.
He wasn’t being unfaithful, he told himself again and again as he tossed sleepless in his bunk while in the darkness of the cabin pictures formed of Joan wearing even less than she had worn in the pool. It was utterly stupid, probably even insane, to feel that he was being unfaithful to someone who didn’t even know he was alive.
CHAPTER 19
H is idea of casual dress would have been a clean set of Monitor green coveralls with the insignia removed, but Joan would have none of that. Instead she insisted that he dress like a tourist for the sightseeing trips of Traltha’s famed beauty spots and, inwardly kicking and screaming, he was dragged into the Earth-human section of the spaceport’s shopping mall, where she became a sartorial tyrant regarding his wardrobe. He had never been the kind of person who merged into the background, O’Mara thought ruefully, but the result was so loud and garish that he was sure people would be able to hear as well as see him coming.
Traltha was a heavy planet pulling two-plus Earth Gs which meant that, except when sleeping or resting flat, they were required to wear gravity-nullifier harnesses at all times. O’Mara could have stood upright and moved about without one, but the others did not have his experience on space construction sites and could have fallen over and broken something and he would, after all, merely have been showing off.
The first time Joan appeared wearing hers she remarked that the antigravity harness could easily have doubled as a medieval Earth chastity belt.
On the atmosphere flights to justly famous Dunelton Gorge and the beautiful Bay of Trammith, and during the two-day stopovers for sightseeing, they traveled, talked, seriously and otherwise, and had all their meals together, but O’Mara had the feeling that a little distance was beginning to grow between them. By then he had learned how to swim well enough to try doing it from the gently sloping golden beach that fringed the bay, accompanied, naturally, by his shapely lifeguard. But their tour guide forbade all swimming, pointing out that Trammith was a nature preserve sparsely populated by a rare and protected species of sea predators who didn’t care what or who they ate, so there was no close physical contact with her either in or out of the water.
Had she simply given up on him, he wondered, because he had refused to take the many chances she had given him and was backing off while she still had some pride left? Or, now that he no longer wore uniform and was beginning to show more interest in her, was she trying to encourage him further by playing hard to get?
Only a nasty, devious-minded psychologist, he told himself, would have a thought like that.
He couldn’t believe that someone with his unfriendly personality could get into a situation like this. As soon as they returned to Naorthant spaceport he could simply detach himself from it by going to the Monitor office and boarding the next available ship going somewhere, anywhere, else. But that would be a stupid as well as a cowardly thing to do because, he was beginning to realize, he had been having a very enjoyable if recently a frustrating time on Kreskhallar. So whatever way the situation developed, he told himself firmly, it wouldn’t be all bad.