In the darker moments over the past few years, Tom Falkner had liked to tell himself that he was living in hell. But now, in the few days since he had taken Glair into his house, he came to realize that that had been an exaggeration. He hadn’t really been in hell at all, only living on the outskirts. At last he had arrived in the true downtown section.
He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take it without cracking altogether.
He had taken a lot of punishment in his day — the washout of his astronaut career, his relegation to the AOS scrap heap, the breakup of his marriage — without cracking. Bending, yes. But remaining whole. This latest thing was too much, though. It hit him right along the line of irreconcilable conflicts that lay at the core of his being, and he was on the verge of splitting like the San Andreas Fault.
Glair said, “Go ahead and have a drink.”
“How do you know I want one?”
“It isn’t hard to tell. Poor Tom! I feel so sorry for you!”
“That makes two of us.”
“I know,” she said, letting a smile cross her face.
“You little devil! That isn’t fair, picking on my weakness. Can I help it if I’m a born self-pitier?”
“You could try a little harder. But go have your drink, anyway.”
“Do you want one?”
“You know I shouldn’t touch alcohol,” Glair said. She was sitting up in bed, the blankets bunched around her waist. The upper half of her body was engulfed in one of his pajama tops. He had insisted on that; she had no clothes of her own but for the rubber undergarment and the outer suit, both of which were hidden deep in his basement security chamber, and he found her casual outlook on nudity troublesome in his present frame of mind. Her breasts were extraordinarily well developed — implausibly so, in fact — and the sight of them filled him with such a fury of need that he had asked her to cover them. The temptation to climb into bed with her was overpowering enough as it was. And he had plenty of other problems about her presence here, right now, without getting involved in that.
He took a spray can of Japanese Scotch from his pocket drink-case and activated it. Right into the veins; that was the way. No bother about the vile taste, just mainline the alcohol to the bloodstream where it belonged, and start it on its way to the brain. Glair watched his impassively. Within moments, he imagined that he was more relaxed.
“Won’t you have to report to your office one of these days?” she asked him.
“I’m on sick leave. No one will bother me until Monday, now. That gives me a few more days to figure things out.”
“You’re still planning to turn me in?”
“I should. I can’t. I won’t.”
“My legs are getting better fast,” she said. “They’ll be healed in another two weeks, perhaps. Then I’ll get off your hands. I’ll clear out and my people will take me away and you can go back to work.”
“How are they going to find you, if that communicator in your suit is broken?”
“Don’t worry about that, Tom. They’ll find me or I’ll find them, and I’ll be off Earth in a hurry.”
“Heading where? Back to Dirna?”
“Probably not. Just to our relief base for a medical checkup and a rest.”
He frowned. “Where’s that?”
“I don’t want to tell you, Tom. I’ve told you a lot too much already.”
“Sure,” he said morosely. “And when I’ve pried all your galactic secrets out of you, I’m going to file a full report to the Air Force. You think I’m keeping you here for fun? I’m just pretending to be hiding you. Actually, AOS knows all about it, and this is our subtle way of—”
“Tom, why do you hate yourself so much?”
“Hate myself?”
“It shows in everything you say, in your movements, even. You’re so full of bitterness, of tension. Your sarcasm. The look on your face. What’s the matter?”
“I thought you knew. I was supposed to be an astronaut, and I flunked out, and they stuck me in a garbage assignment where 1 spent five days a week comforting crackpots and chasing around the country after mysterious blinking lights. Isn’t that a reason to be bitter?”
“Because you didn’t believe in your work, yes. But now you know that your AOS assignment wasn’t all wasted time. There really was something up there above the Earth. Isn’t that better? Don’t you feel now that there was a purpose to your work?”
“No,” he said sullenly. “What I was doing wasn’t worth a damn. And still isn’t.” He reached for a second spray can. “Glair, Glair, Glair, I didn’t want it to be real! I didn’t want to find any flying saucer girl in the desert! I—” He stopped, feeling absurd at what he had blurted. Glair said softly, “You preferred to have a worthless, empty job, because that way you could go on torturing yourself about your wasted career. Things became a lot worse for you when you found me, didn’t they? Suddenly you had to face up to the fact that your motive for self-torture was gone.”
“Quit it, Glair. Change the subject.”
“Look at me, Tom. Why do you hate yourself like this? Why do you want to go on hurting yourself?”
“Glair—”
“You’re still finding new ways to torment yourself, too. You told me that it was your duty to report me. You didn’t do it. The one man in all of AOS that actually found an extraterrestrial being, and instead of doing the naturally military thing you took her home and hid her in your house and opaqued the windows. Why? So you could feel good and guilty about the way you were violating your orders.”
His hand shook so vehemently that he could barely get the next spray can lined up with his vein.
“One more thing, Tom. Then I’ll let you alone. Why are you keeping your distance from me, if not for the same idea that you’ve got to keep hurting yourself? You want me, and we both know it. But you punish yourself by covering my body in this thing and telling yourself you’re being virtuous. There’s a word for your kind of personality in your language. Vorneen told me, once. A mato — mati—”
“Masochist,” Falkner said. His heart was hammering against the cage of his ribs.
“Masochist, yes. I don’t mean you whip yourself and wear tight boots. I mean you find ways to hurt your soul.”
“Who’s Vorneen?” Falkner asked. “One of my mates.”
“You mean, one of your shipmates?” That too. But I mean, a sexual mate. Vorneen and Mirtin and I, we were a crew together. A three-facet sexual group. Two males and me.”
“How could an arrangement like that possibly work? Aboard one ship, two males and—”
“It works. We aren’t human, Tom. And we don’t necessarily have the same emotions as human beings. We were very happy together. They may have been killed when the ship blew up, I don’t know. I was the first to jump. But you’re getting off the subject, Tom. The subject is you.”
“Forget me. I never realized you might have — have a sexual group. I never thought of it at all. You’re a married woman, then.”
“You could say that. Unless they’re dead. I have no way of communicating with them.”
“But you loved them both?”
Glair’s forehead furrowed. “ I loved them both, yes. And I could find room to love someone else, too. Come over here, Tom, and stop looking for ways to make yourself unhappy.”
He walked slowly toward her, thinking of two men and a woman aboard a flying saucer, and telling himself that they were not men, she was not a woman. He was surprised at the power of the jealousy that gripped him. He wondered what their alien lovemaking might be like. He felt dizzy.
Glair looked up, her eyes cool and inviting.
“Take this silly piece of cloth off me, Tom. Please.”
He drew the pajama top over her head, leaving her golden hair in disarray. Her breasts were high and firm and very white, and showed a total disregard for the forces of gravity. They were the sort of breasts one saw on calendar girls, but never on a real woman: mysteriously firm, mysteriously close-set, mysteriously out-thrust, a sixteen-year-old boy’s ideal image of what a woman’s breasts were like. She threw back the covers. He looked down at her and reminded himself that her entire body was a sham, a synthetic outer cloak for something terrifyingly strange. She could have the breasts of Aphrodite and the thighs of Diana, she could have every feminine perfection she desired, for she had had this body constructed to suit her own whims. Her flesh felt like flesh, and within it were nerves and bones and conduits for blood, but flesh, nerves, bones, and blood all were the pseudo-living products of a laboratory.
Within that glamorous unreal shape — who could say what horror nested there?
And yet, Falkner told himself, was any human woman lovely beneath her skin? That steaming mass of piled intestines, those tubes and globes and snaky loops, the grinning skull beneath the beautiful face? We all carry nightmare beneath our skins. It was folly to discriminate against Glair’s brand of nightmare.
His clothing fell away. She drew him down beside her.:
“Your legs—” he began.
“They’re doing fine. Forget about them and show me how an Earthman makes love.”
He touched her. “Can you — do you — ?”
“The anatomy’s all there,” Glair assured him. “Not the internal organs, but that shouldn’t matter. Hold me, Tom. Teach me. Love me.”
Easily, more easily than he had imagined it could happen, he embraced her, and felt her cool, slick skin against his sweating hide, and caressed her just as if she were real and this were real and none of it a dream. Desperately he seized her and found her ready, and with sudden savage relief he broke free of his self-imposed bonds and accepted the gift of love that she was offering.