Is That What People Do? Read Free Page A

taught the five hundred and six shades of Love Proper, from the first faint possibility to the ultimate feeling, which is so powerful that only five men and one woman have experienced it, and the strongest of them survived less than an hour.
    Under the tutelage of a bank of small, interrelated calculators, he studied the intensification of love.
    He learned all of the thousand different sensations of which the human body is capable, and how to augment them, and how to intensify them until they become unbearable, and how to make the unbearable bearable, and finally pleasurable, at which point the organism is not far from death.
    After that, he was taught some things which have never been put into words and, with luck, never will.
    “And that,” Varris said one day, “is everything.”
    “Everything?”
    “Yes, Toms. The heart has no secrets from you. Nor, for that matter, has the soul, or mind, or the viscera. You have mastered the Language of Love. Now return to your young lady.”
    “I will!” cried Toms. “At last she will know!”
    “Drop me a postcard,” Varris said. “Let me know how you’re getting on.”
    “I’ll do that,” Toms promised. Fervently he shook his teacher’s hand and departed for Earth.
    At the end of the long trip, Jefferson Toms hurried to Doris’ home. Perspiration beaded his forehead and his hands were shaking. He was able to classify the feeling as Stage Two Anticipatory Tremors, with mild masochistic overtones. But that didn’t help—this was his first field work and he was nervous. Had he mastered everything?
    He rang the bell.
    She opened the door and Toms saw that she was more beautiful than he had remembered, her eyes smoky-gray and misted with tears, her hair the color of a rocket exhaust, her figure slight but sweetly curved. He felt again the lump in his throat and sudden memories of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.
    “I’m back,” he croaked.
    “Oh, Jeff,” she said, very softly. “Oh, Jeff.”
    Toms simply stared, unable to say a word.
    “It’s been so long, Jeff, and I kept wondering if it was all worth it. Now I know.”
    “You—know?”
    “Yes, my darling! I waited for you! I’d wait a hundred years, or a thousand! I love you, Jeff!”
    She was in his arms.
    “Now tell me, Jeff,” she said. “Tell me!”
    And Toms looked at her, and felt, and sensed, searched his classifications, selected his modifiers, checked and double-checked. And after much searching, and careful selection, and absolute certainty, and allowing for his present state of mind, and not forgetting to take into account climatic conditions, phases of the Moon, wind speed and direction, Sun spots, and other phenomena which have their due effect upon love, he said:
    “My dear, I am rather fond of you.”
    “Jeff! Surely you can say more than that! The Language of Love—”
    “The Language is damnably precise,” Toms said wretchedly. “I’m sorry, but the phrase, ‘I am rather fond of you’ expresses precisely what I feel.”
    “Oh, Jeff!”
    “Yes,” he mumbled.
    “Oh damn you, Jeff!”
    There was, of course, a painful scene and a very painful separation. Toms took to traveling.
    He held jobs here and there, working as a riveter at Saturn-Lockheed, a wiper on the Helg-Vinosce Trader, a farmer for a while on a kibbutz on Israel IV. He bummed around the Inner Dalmian System for several years, living mostly on handouts. Then, at Novilocessile, he met a pleasant brown-haired girl, courted her and, in due course, married her and set up housekeeping.
    Their friends say that the Tomses are tolerably happy, although their home makes most people uncomfortable. It is a pleasant enough place, but the rushing red river nearby makes people edgy. And who can get used to vermilion trees, and orange-and-blue grass, and moaning flowers, and three wrinkled moons playing tag in the alien sky?
    Toms likes it, though, and Mrs. Toms is, if nothing else, a flexible young lady.
    Toms wrote a