'And the hatred for her,' Mole said, 'became hatred for yourself. Because you couldn't stand being afraid of one small woman. But a very powerful person – notice I said "person" not "woman."'
'Those low blows,' Eric said. 'Like her erasing my tape—'
'The low blow,' the Mole interrupted, 'was not her erasing the tape. It was her refusing to tell you which one she had erased. And her making it so clear that she enjoyed the situation. If she had been sorry – but a woman, a person, like that; they never become sorry. Never.' He was silent for a time. 'And you can't leave her.'
'We're fused,' Eric said. The damage is done.' The mutually inflicted pain delivered at night without the possibility of anyone intervening, overhearing and coming to help. Help, Eric thought. We both need help. Because this will go on, get worse, corrode us further and further until at last, mercifully—
But that might take decades.
So Eric could understand Gino Molinari's yearning for death. He, like the Mole, could envision it as a release – the only dependable release that existed ... or appeared to exist, given the ignorance, habit patterns, and foolishness of the participants. Given the timeless human equation.
In fact he felt a considerable bond with Molinari.
'One of us,' the Mole said, with perception, 'suffering unbearably on the private level, hidden from the public, small and unimportant. The other suffering in the grand Roman public manner, like a speared and dying god. Strange. Completely opposite. The microcosm and the macro.'
Eric nodded.
'Anyhow,' the Mole said, releasing Eric's hand and slapping him on the shoulder, I'm making you feel bad. Sorry, Dr Sweetscent; let's drop the topic.' To his bodyguard he said, 'Open the door now. We're done.'
'Wait,' Eric said. But then he did not know how to go on, to say it.
The Mole did it for him. 'How would you like to be attached to my staff?' Molinari said abruptly, breaking the silence. 'It can be arranged; technically you'd be drafted into military service.' He added, 'You may take it for granted you'd be my personal physician.'
Trying to sound casual, Eric said, 'I'm interested.'
'You wouldn't be running into her all the time. This might be a beginning. A start toward prying the two of you apart.'
'True.' He nodded. Very true. And very attractive, when thought of that way. But the irony – this consisted of precisely that which Kathy had goaded him toward all these years. 'I'd have to talk it over with my wife,' he began, and then flushed. 'Virgil, anyhow,' he muttered. 'In any case. He'd have to approve.'
Regarding him with brooding severity, the Mole said in a slow, dark voice. There is one drawback. You would not see so much of Kathy; true. But by being with me you'd see a great deal of our—' He grimaced. The ally. How do you suppose you'd enjoy yourself surrounded by 'Starmen? You might find yourself having a few spasms of the gut late at night yourself ... and perhaps worse – other – psychosomatic disorders, some you may not anticipate, despite your profession.'
Eric said, 'It's bad enough for me late at night as it is. This way I might have some company.'
'Me?' Molinari said. 'I wouldn't be company, Sweetscent, for you or anybody else. I'm a creature that's flayed alive at night. I retire at ten o'clock and then I'm back up, usually by eleven; I—' He broke off, meditatively. 'No, night is not a good time for me; not at all.'
It could clearly be seen in the man's face.
FIVE
On the night of his return from Wash-35 Eric Sweetscent encountered his wife at their conapt across the border in San Diego. Kathy had arrived before him. The meeting, of course, was inevitable.
'Back from little red Mars,' she observed as she shut the living room door after him. 'Two days doing what? Shooting your agate into the ring and beating all the other boys and girls? Or exposing sun pictures of Tom Mix?' Kathy sat in the center of the couch, a drink in one hand, her hair swept back and tied, giving her the look of a teen-ager; she wore a plain black dress and her legs were long and smooth, strikingly tapered at the ankles. Her feet were bare and each toenail bore a shiny decal depicting – he bent to see – a scene in color of the Norman Conquest. The smallest nail on each foot glittered with a picture too obscene for him to contemplate; he went to hang his coat in the closet.
'We pulled out of the war,' he said.
'Did we? You and Phyllis Ackerman? Or you and somebody else?'
'Everybody was there. Not just Phyllis.' He wondered what he could fix for dinner; his stomach was empty and in a state of complaint. As yet, however, there were no pains. Perhaps that came later.
'Any special reason why I wasn't asked along?' Her voice snapped like a lethal whip, making his flesh cringe; the natural biochemical animal in him dreaded the exchange which was in store for him – and also for her. Obviously she, like himself, was compelled to press head on; she was as much caught up and helpless as he.
'No special reason.' He wandered into the kitchen, feeling a little dulled, as if Kathy's opening had flattened his senses. Many such encounters had taught him to shield himself on the somatic level, if at all possible. Only old husbands, tired, experienced husbands, knew to do this. The newcomers... they're forced on by diencephalic responses, he reflected. And it's harder on them.
'I want an answer,' Kathy said, appearing at the door. 'As to why I was deliberately excluded.'
God, how physically appealing his wife was; she wore nothing, of course, under the black dress and each curved line of her confronted him with its savory familiarity. But where was the smooth, yielding, familiar mentality to go with this tactile form? The furies had seen to it that the curse – the curse in the house of Sweetscent, as he occasionally thought of it — had arrived full force; he faced a creature which on a physiological level was sexual perfection itself and on the mental level—
Someday the hardness, the inflexibility, would pervade her; the anatomical bounty would calcify. And then what? Already her voice contained it, different now from what he remembered of a few years back, even a few months. Poor Kathy, he thought. Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart – it was already deep in her heart, surely – then there will be no more woman. And you won't survive that. No matter what I or any man chooses to do.
'You were excluded,' he said carefully, 'because you're a pest.'
Her eyes flew open wide; for an instant they filled with alarm and simple wonder. She did not understand. Fleetingly, she had been brought back to the level of the merely human; the goading ancestral pressure in her had abated.
'Like you are now,' he said. 'So leave me alone; I want to fix myself some dinner.'
'Get Phyllis Ackerman to fix it for you,' Kathy said. The super-personal authority, the derision conjured up from the malformed crypto-wisdom of the ages, had returned. Almost psionically, with a woman's talent, she had intuited his slight romantic brush with Phyllis on the trip to Mars. And on Mars itself, during their overnight stay—
Calmly, he assumed that her heightened faculties could not genuinely ferret out that. Ignoring her, he began, in a methodical manner, to heat a frozen chicken dinner in the infrared oven, his back to his wife.
'Guess what I did,' Kathy said. 'While you were gone.'
'You took on a lover.'
'I tried a new hallucinogenic drug. I got it from Chris Plout; we had a jink session at his place and none other than the world-famous Marm Hastings was there. He made a pass at me while we were under the influence of the drug and it was – well, it was a pure vision.'
'Did he,' Eric said, setting a place for himself at the table.