She glared at him, outraged, and then her expression began to clear. "I have to say you've got some cute aspects, Tib Sonderman."
"Oh, yes, sometimes cute," he agreed, "but I am not making you an appeal from cuteness. This is only to comply with the technical requirements of this technical undertaking you have made, and now we can consider this situation on its merits."
"Oh, can we?"
"Yes. And as someone said to me, I believe in Arecibo, though perhaps in different words, if one is through with a marriage one should be through with it."
She looked at him for a moment, shaking her head ruefully. "You strange man, the water's boiling. You're going to make me ruin my teapot."
"I will be glad to turn it off for you, but that is not the point, as I see it. That point is that what I would really like now is not coffee but to make love to you. Please excuse my nervousness. It is because of that that, I know, I am talking too much."
She sighed. "Much too much," she agreed. "Why don't you go turn off the coffee?"
They were both eager; they were both clumsy, and forgiving of each other's clumsiness. Tib Sonderman was not inexperienced with women, but he had run up no Leporello lists; after Wendy left he counted on his fingers all the women he had ever made love to and discovered, to his chagrin, that all ten fingers were not needed.
Nevertheless he had learned a great deal in his sexual experiences. The most interesting discovery was that women were individuals. They were not all the same. They did not say the same things. They did not feel the same or taste the same, and the terrain of each woman's erogenous zones was different from every other; the road maps in the textbooks could not be trusted.
It was astonishing, and greatly pleasurable, and he was eager to learn more. So while he and this newest of his—could the word still be "conquests"? (And "Number seventeen!" crowed the calculator in the back of his mind) —while he and Rainy Keating, that was to say, were making love, Tib was storing data in his retrieval system. This seemed to please her. This other did not. There was never a time when Tib Sonderman's conscious mind was not observing, recording, and analyzing.
Nevertheless they spent themselves gloriously and rolled only inches apart when they were through, their fingers still interlocked. It was not surprising that it had gone so well. Both had been for some time deprived. And as soon as Tib had caught his breath, he propped himself on an elbow and said seriously, "I think it will get better as we go along, my dear Rainy. "
She said, "Oh, my God." She freed her hands and reached out to the night table for her glasses in order to inspect this person. "Tib, honey," she said, "look. I just as soon not have the instant analysis, all right?"
"It was all right, then?" he asked.
"It was at least all right," she agreed, peering at him with warmth and amusement. She stroked his cheek with her finger and touched his shoulder. Her eyes were big and unfocused behind the glasses. "What's that?" she asked.
He shrugged away from her touch and sat up. "Look at the window!" he said. "It's getting light!"
Rainy glanced uninterestedly at the gray, dismal morning. "We got a late start," she said, and sat up beside him. "Are you going to tell me what it is?"
Tib glanced down at the tattoo on his upper arm, just about where most people his age had a vaccination. "The guards at the concentration camp put it there," he said reluctantly. "Oh, Tib!"
He said slowly, "That is where I was born. In the camp. My father was a Yugoslav partisan, and the Nazis took my mother hostage to force him to surrender. He did not surrender. He was killed in battle. Of course, since my mother was pregnant with me at the time, I also became a hostage."
"Oh, Tib," she said again; there was nothing else she could think of to say.
But his face was relaxed. "It is not that terrible, you know. At least it was not for me. What did I understand of what went on? By the time I was a year old and able to understand, to begin to understand, the war was over. We were at home in Zagreb, with my mother's family. This has been troubling me, Rainy," he added, "that we know so little about each other."
She stretched and yawned, and reached for a robe. "There's time for that, Tib. I have to go to my parents' for Christmas, but when I come back you can take me out somewhere for a taco and you can tell me all about Bulgaria—"
"Yugoslavia!"
"—about Yugoslavia, and I'll tell you about Lehigh County, Pennsylvania."
"You have to drive to San Diego? And I have been keeping you awake all night!"
She grinned. "I should certainly think so, and, listen, don't start apologizing, you hear? You've got some strange ways, dear Tib. "
"Yes, so you have told me," he said stiffly. "Well, you do. And I do have to get dressed. And I suppose you have something you have to do—or had you planned to stay here all through Christmas?" "Not at all!"
"Aw, come on, Tib, that was a joke." He said seriously, "I know you joke with me a lot, and I am not always sure when it is at my expense." He hesitated, and then confessed, "I am not at ease with women. I do not know why, but every relationship I enter leaves me with guilt feelings at the end. As early as seventeen, in London, I must tell you—"
"No, you mustn't," she said fondly. "Go home, Tib. Dear Tib. But go home."
The supernova in Virgo had completed its contraction and explosion, and by now it was radiating one billion times as much energy as the sun. It was far the brightest object in our galaxy, in itself, but so far away that gas clouds and distance would keep its light ever from reaching the earth. Such events are not rare. On an astronomical scale, even supernovae near the earth are not specially rare; one occurs every one or two hundred million years, on average. They are dangerous. The cosmic rays from the supernova damage the earth's ozone layers. The ozone layers can no longer filter out the destructive ultraviolet from sunlight. All exposed organisms suffer extreme sunburn, cancer, often death. In the last six hundred million years there have been perhaps eight such nearby supernovas. There have also been about eight episodes in which all life on Earth was decimated.
Thursday, December 24th. 10:45 m.
In the suite of offices belonging to the Pedigrue Foundation, which was in the Pedigrue Tower, located in Pedigrue Center, Tommy Pedigrue had the third best private room. It was not a corner office. It did not have a wet bar, like his father's, or a complete taping and sound system, like his brother's. But it had two windows and a couch, and a door that locked even against his family. It was all right. When the time was ripe he would move to his brother's office, and no doubt his brother's seat in the Senate— whenever his brother made the move to those larger offices on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
He sat at ease behind his desk, and Myrna Licht looked in on him as he was dialing his telephone. "Tib Sonderman isn't answering, Tommy," she reported. "Do you want me to leave a message on his machine?"
"Oh, hell," he said in annoyance and frowned, considering. "Yeah. Tell him to call me—no, wait. Tell him he's booked to appear on the Sunland Saturday television show, and I want him down here two hours before the show for briefings—you know what to tell him," he added quickly, as the phone in his hand came alive. He waved to Myrna and addressed the phone. "Walt? Merry Christmas! This is Tommy Pedigrue, calling for Townsend and my father and all of us. Townie's stuck in Washington, otherwise he'd be calling you himself. . . . No, he won't be able to take part in the tree-lighting ceremony tonight. My father's going to do it for him. But we're hoping we'll all be together tomorrow for Christmas dinner. . . . Thank you, Walt. And the same to you and—" he ran his finger down the list of names—"to Mary Ellen and the boys." He hung up, checked off name number fifteen on his list and put another card into the automatic dialer. As he leaned back he could see the great dark tree at the enter of Pedigrue Plaza. Tonight it would be his father who would make the little speech and press the button that would light it up, but sooner or later. . . . "Hello? Rachel? Yes, this is Tommy Pedigrue," he said, "and we wanted to wish all of you the best of the season—"