Her gaze was very soft and tender as she watched him knock unhappily about the room. “And that’s why you went into that awful microscope, Gygyo? To prove that you could be as good a man as Edgar is when he’s playing poker?”
“It’s not just the poker, Mary Ann. That’s hair-raising enough, I grant you. It’s so many things. Take this used car he has, that he drives you around in. Any man who’d drive one of those clumsy, unpredictable power-plants through the kind of traffic and the kind of accident statistics that your world boasts— And every day, as a matter of course: I knew the micro-hunt was a pathetic, artificial affair, but it was the only thing available to me that even came close!”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me, Gygyo.”
“Maybe I don’t,” he brooded. “But I had reached the point where I had to prove it to myself. Which is quite silly when you come to think of it, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And I proved something after all. That two people with entirely different standards for male and female, standards that have been postulated and recapitulated for them since infancy, don’t have a chance, no matter how attractive they find each other. I can’t live with my knowledge of your innate standards, and you—well, you certainly have found mine upsetting. We don’t mesh, we don’t resonate, we don’t go. As you said before, we shouldn’t be in the same world. That’s doubly true ever since—well, ever since we found out how strongly we tend to come together.”
Mary Ann nodded. “I know. The way you stopped making love to me, and—and said—that horrid word, the way you kind of shuddered when you wiped your lips—Gygyo, you looked at me as if I stank, as if I stank! It tore me absolutely and completely to bits. I knew right then I had to get out of your time and out of your universe forever: But with Winthrop acting the way he is—I don’t know what to do!”
“Tell me about it.” He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together as he sat beside her on a section of upraised floor.
By the time she had finished, his recovery was complete, the prodigious leveling effect of mutual emotional involvement was no longer operative. Dismayed, Mary Ann watched him becoming once more a highly urbane, extremely intelligent and slightly supercilious young man of the twenty-fifth century, and felt in her very bone marrow her own awkwardness increase, her garish, none-too-bright primitiveness come thickly to the surface.
“I can’t do a thing for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”
“Not even,” she asked desperately, “with the problems we have? Not even considering how terrible it’ll be if I stay here, if I don’t leave on time?”
“Not even considering all that. I doubt that I could make it dear to you, however much I tried, Mary Ann, but I can’t force Winthrop to go, I can’t in all conscience give you any advice on how to force him—and I can’t think of a thing that would make him change his mind. You see there’s a whole social fabric involved which is far more significant than our personal little agonies, however important they may to us. In my world, as Storku pointed out, one just doesn’t do such things. And that, my sweet, is that.”
Mary Ann sat back. She hadn’t needed the slightly mock-hauteur of Gygyo’s last words to tell her that he was completely in control of himself, that once more he looking upon her as an intriguing but—culturally speaking—extremely distant specimen.
She knew only too well what was happening: she’d been the other end of this kind of situation once or twice herself.
Just two months ago, a brilliantly smooth salesman, who handled the Nevada territory for her company, had taken her out on a date and almost swept her off her feet.
Just as she’d reached the point where the wine in her bran was filled with bubbles of starlight, she’d taken out a cigarette and dreamily, helplessly, asked him for a light. The salesman had clicked a lighter at her in an assured and lordly gesture, but the lighter had failed to work. He had cursed, clicked it futilely a few more times, then had begun picking at the mechanism madly with his fingernails. In the erect few moments as he continued to claw at the lighter, it had seemed to Mary Ann that the glossy surface of his personality developed an enormous fissure along its entire length and all the underlying desperation that was essentially him leaked out. He was no longer a glamorous, successful and warmly persuasive young man, but a pathetically driven creature who was overpoweringly uncertain, afraid that if one item in his carefully prepared presentation missed its place in the schedule, the sale would not take place.
And it didn’t. When he’d looked at her again, he saw the cool comprehension in her eyes; his lips sagged. And no matter how wittily he tried to recapture the situation, how cleverly he talked, how many oceans of sparkling urgency he washed over her, she was his master now. She had seen through his magic to the unhooded yellow light bulbs and the twisted, corroded wires which made it work. She remembered feeling somewhat sorry for him as she’d asked him to take her home—not sorry for someone with whom she’d almost fallen in love, but slight sorrow for a handicapped child (someone else’s handicapped child) who had tried to do something utterly beyond his powers.
Was that what Gygyo was feeling for her now? With brimming anger and despair, Mary Ann felt she had to reach him again, reach him very personally. She had to wipe that smile off his eyelids.
“Of course,” she said, selecting the first arrow that came to hand, “it won’t do you any good if Winthrop doesn’t go back with us.”
He looked at her questioningly. “Me?”
“Well, if Winthrop doesn’t go back, we’ll be stuck here. And if we’re stuck here, the people from your time who are visiting ours will be stuck in the twentieth century; You’re the temporal supervisor—you’re responsible, aren’t you? You might lose your job.”
“My dear little Mary Ann! I can’t lose my job. It’s mine till I don’t want it any more. Getting fired—what a concept! Next you’ll be telling me I’m liable to have my ears cropped!”
To her chagrin, he chuckled all over his shoulders. Well, at least she had put him in a good mood; no one could say that she hadn’t contributed to this hilarity. And My dear little Mary Ann. That stung!
“Don’t you even feel responsible? Don’t you feel anything?”
“Well, whatever I feel, it certainly isn’t responsible. The five people from this century who volunteered to make the trip back to yours were well-educated, extremely alert, highly responsible human beings. They knew they were running certain inevitable risks.”
She rose agitatedly. “But how were they to know that Winthrop was going to be stubborn? And how could we, Gygyo, how could we know that?”
“Even assuming that the possibility entered nobody’s mind,” he pointed out, tugging at her arm gently until she sat down beside him again, “one has to, in all reason, admit that transferring to a period five centuries distant from one’s own must be accompanied by certain dangers. Not being able to return is one of them. Then, one has to further admit that, this being so, one or more of the people making the transfer recognized this danger—at least unconsciously—and wished to subject themselves to its consequences. If this is at all the situation, interference would be a major crime, not only against Winthrop’s conscious desires, but against such people’s unconscious motivations as well—and both have almost equal weight in the ethics of our period. There! That’s about as simple as I can make it, Mary Ann. Do you understand, now?”