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ever better formed for my taste than she. I kissed her bare breasts, and she held my head to them. “It has to be,” she murmured again.
    I removed my suit, then undressed myself. Then I took her, and she was what she had always been for me, my ultimate delight. I kissed her, she clung to me, her face was wet with her tears or mine, and her tongue met mine as her legs lifted to wrap around mine. I bit her on her right ear as I pumped my essence into her, and she sighed and convulsed against me and relaxed at last. We lay embracing, the sweat of our exertion between us, and my delight in her body remained, though my sexual passion had passed. “It has been so long,” I murmured in her ear.
    “So long,” she agreed.
    There was a sound from the chair. “Shield coming on,” Coral announced.
    We clung to each other as the bubble passed from the free-fall of falling to the free-fall of null-gee.
    Technical experts say there is no distinction between them, but we more ordinary folk know that there is.
    We felt the change—and the enormous relief of knowing that if we had not imploded yet, we were not going to, for we would descend no farther.
    “I must leave you before the light returns,” Helse told me. She took my head in her hands and kissed me once more, deeply. “It has to be.”
    “It has to be,” I agreed. I knew what happened when I forced her to overstay her leave. She could become a corpse or a skeleton—or worse. Helse's terms had to be honored.
    Quickly I got up and dressed her and myself. I lifted her to the chair" Then, in an accident of timing that was fortunate indeed, the light returned.
    I blinked, and she blinked, adjusting. She was Shelia, my paralyzed secretary. Her hair was mussed and her clothing was in a certain disarray, but the rigors of the bubble-situation could account for that.
    She brought forth a handkerchief. “Sir, there is a smudge on your face,” she said.
    I brought my face down, and she wiped it carefully. She had done the same for me on other occasions, making sure I was presentable before a public appearance.
    But this was more than that. “Shelia,” I said. “I—”
    “You had a vision,” she said. “I understand.” She surely understood—but there are limits.
    “It was never my intent to—”
    “I know who Helse is,” she reminded me firmly.
    “But—”
    “She comes to you when you most need her, bringing what you need.”
    “That is true. However—”
    “Did you feel her legs move?”
    I stiffened in a kind of shock. Helse's legs had moved. They had enclosed my body at the essential moment.
    Shelia's legs had been paralyzed since her childhood. Never since I had known her had she moved them. I knew that electro and chemical therapy had maintained their structure, but the nerves simply were not there. This was no psychological thing; it was not physically possible for her to move them, even a trifle, unless she picked them up with her hands.
    Helse's arms had clasped my upper torso. Her legs had spread and lifted themselves. That could have been my fancy of the moment, of course; if I could summon her likeness from eternity, I could summon her motion.
    But how had Shelia known?
    I stared at her, bemused. Her eyes were bright with tears not of sorrow. “They moved,” I agreed. Then I kissed her.
    She returned the kiss, then, womanlike, chastised me. “You're smudged again—right after I got you clean.”
    With the same lipstick as before. Shelia's lipstick. But the body I had held had been Helse's.
    I gave up the effort to explain or apologize. Either nothing had happened between Shelia and me, or it was something so significant as to be beyond our understanding.
    But there was something else. I had separated from Megan. Never during the years of our marriage had I touched any member of my staff in any way other than proper or professional. I had touched another woman outside that number, but that had been a special situation and, I think, did not