She patted the bun mournfully and said, “I guess you think this is pretty funny.”
Dandish considered the question. He was not impelled to laugh. Twenty years before, when Dandish was a teenager with the long permanented hair and the lacquered fingernails that were the fashion for kids that year, he had dreamed almost every night of just such a situation as this. To own a girl of his own—not to love her or to rape her or to marry her, but to possess her as a slave, with no one anywhere to stop him from whatever he chose to impose on her—had elaborated itself in a hundred variations nightly. He didn’t tell anyone about his dream, not directly, but in the school period devoted to practical psychology he had mentioned it as something he had read in a book and the instructor, staring right through him into his dreams, told him it was a repressed wish to play with dolls. “This fellow is role playing,” he said, “acting out a wish to be a woman. These clear-cut cases of repressed homosexuality can take many forms…and on and on, and although the dreams were as physically satisfying as ever, the young Dandish awoke from them both reproved and resentful.
But Silvie was neither a dream nor a doll. “I’m not a doll!” said Silvie, so sharply and partly that it was a shock. “Come on out and get it over with!”
She straightened up, holding to a free-fall grip, and although she looked angry and annoyed she still did not seem afraid. “Unless you are really crazy,” she said clearly, “which I doubt, although I have to admit it’s a possibility, you aren’t going to do anything I don’t want you to do, you know. Because you can’t get away with it, right? You can’t kill me, you could never explain it, and besides they don’t let murderers run ships in the first place, and so when we land all I have to do is yell cop and you’re running a subway shuttle for the next ninety years.” She giggled. “I know about that. My uncle got busted on income-tax evasion and now he’s a self-propelled dredge in the Amazon delta, and you should see the letters he writes. So come on out and let’s see what I’m willing to let you get away with.”
She grew impatient. “Kee-rist,” she said, shaking her head. “I sure get the great ones. And, oh, by the way, as long as I’m up, I have to go to the little girls’ room, and then I want breakfast.”
Dandish took some small satisfaction in that these requirements, at least, he had foreseen. He opened the door to the washroom and turned on the warmer oven where emergency rations were waiting. By the time Silvie came back biscuits, bacon and hot coffee were set out for her.
“I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?” she said. “Well, I’ll live. How about some clothes? And how about coming out so I can get a look at you?” She stretched and yawned and then began to eat. Apparently she had showered, as was generally desirable on awakening from freeze-sleep to get rid of the exfoliated skin, and she had wrapped her ruined hair in a small towel. Dandish had left the one small towel in the washroom, reluctantly, but it had not occurred to him that his victim would wrap it around her head. Silvie sat thoughtfully staring at the remains of her breakfast and then after a while said, like a lecturer:
“As I understand it, starship sailors are always some kind of a nut, because who else would go off for twenty years at a time, even for money, even for any kind of money? All right, you’re a nut. So if you wake me up and won’t come out, won’t talk to me, there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Now, I can see that even if you weren’t a little loopy to start with, this kind of life would tip you. Maybe you just want a little company? I can understand that. I might even cooperate and say no more about it.
“On the other hand, maybe you’re trying to get your nerve up for something rough. Don’t know if you can, because they naturally screened you down fine before they gave you the job. But supposing. What happens then?
“If you kill me, they catch you.
“If you don’t kill me, then I tell them when we land, and they catch you.
“I told you about my uncle. Right now his body is in the deepfreeze somewhere on the dark side of Mercury and they’ve got his brain keeping the navigation channels clear off Belem. Maybe you think that’s not so bad. Uncle Henry doesn’t like it a bit. He doesn’t have any company, bad as you that way, I guess, and he says his suction hoses are always sore. Of course he could always louse up on the job, but then they’d just put him some other place that wouldn’t be quite as nice— so what he does is grit his teeth, or I guess you should say his grinders, and get along the best he can. Ninety years! He’s only done six so far. I mean six when I left Earth, whatever that is now. You wouldn’t like that. So why not come out and talk?”
Five or ten minutes later, after making faces and buttering another roll and flinging it furiously at the wall, where the disposal units sluiced it away, she said, “Damn you, then give me a book to read, anyway.”
Dandish retreated from her and listened to the whisper of the ship for a few minutes, then activated the mechanisms of the revival crib. He had been a loser long enough to learn when to cut his losses. The girl sprang to her feet as the sides of the crib unfolded. Gentle tentacles reached out for her and deposited her in it, locking the webbing belt around her waist. “You damned fool!” she shouted, but Dandish did not answer. The anesthesia cone descended toward her struggling face, and she screamed, “Wait a minute! I never said I wouldn’t—”; but what she never said she wouldn’t, she couldn’t say, because the cone cut her off. In a moment she was asleep. A plastic sack stretched itself around her, molding to her face, her body, her legs, even to the strayed towel around her hair, and the revival crib rolled silently to the freezing room. Dandish did not watch further. He knew what would happen, and besides, the timer reminded him to make his check. Temperatures, normal; fuel consumption, normal; course, normal; freezer room showed one new capsule en route to storage, otherwise normal. Goodbye, Silvie, said Dandish to himself, you were a pretty bad mistake.
Conceivably later on, with another girl . . .
But it had taken nine years for Dandish to wake Silvie, and he did not think he could do it again. He thought of her Uncle Henry running a dredge along the South Atlantic littoral. It could have been him. He had leaped at the opportunity to spend his sentence piloting a starship instead.
He stared out at the 10,000,000 stars below with the optical receptors that were his eyes. He clawed helplessly at space with the radars that gave him touch. He wept a 5,000,000-mile stream of ions behind him from his jets. He thought of the tons of helpless flesh in his hold, the bodies in which he could have delighted, if his own body had not been with Uncle Henry’s on coldside Mercury, the fears on which he could have fed, if he had been able to inspire fear. He would have sobbed, if he had had a voice to sob with.