Second Contact Read Free Page A

sandwich. He was three or four inches taller than Sam—over six feet instead of under—and broader through the shoulders. By the way he ate, he should have been eleven feet tall and seven feet wide.
    His second bite was even bigger than the first. He was still chewing when the telephone rang. “That’s got to be Karen!” he said with his mouth full, and dashed away.
    Barbara and Sam shared looks of mingled amusement and alarm. “In my day, girls didn’t call boys like that,” Barbara said. “In my day, girls didn’t shave their heads, either. Go on, call me a fuddy-duddy.”
    “You’re my fuddy-duddy,” Sam said fondly. He slipped an arm around her waist and gave her a quick kiss.
    “I’d better be,” Barbara said. “I’m glad I am, too, because there are so many more distractions now. In my day, even if there had been body paint, girls wouldn’t have been so thorough about wearing it as boys are—and if they had been, they’d have been arrested for indecent exposure.”
    “Things aren’t the same as they used to be,” Sam allowed. His eyes twinkled. “I might call that a change for the better, though.”
    Barbara elbowed him in the ribs. “Of course you might. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, though. And”—she lowered her voice so Jonathan wouldn’t hear—“I’m glad Karen isn’t one of the ones who do.”
    “Well, so am I,” Sam said, although with a sigh that earned him another pointed elbow. “Jonathan and his pals are a lot more used to skin than I am. I’d stare like a fool if she came over dressed—or not dressed—that way.”
    “And then you’d tell me you were just reading what her rank was,” Barbara said. “You’d think I love you enough to believe a whopper like that. And you know what?” She poked him again. “You might even be right.”

    Felless had not expected to wake in weightlessness. For a moment, staring up at the fluorescent lights overhead, she wondered if something had gone wrong with the ship. Then, thinking more slowly than she should have because of the lingering effects of cold sleep, she realized how foolish that was. Had something gone wrong with the ship, she would never have awakened at all.
    Two people floated into view. One, by her body paint, was a physician. The other . . . Weak and scatterbrained as Felless was, she gave a startled hiss. “Exalted Fleetlord!” she exclaimed. She heard her own voice as if from far away.
    Fleetlord Reffet spoke not to her but to the physician: “She recognizes me, I see. Is she capable of real work?”
    “We would not have summoned you here, Exalted Fleetlord, were she incapable,” the physician replied. “We understand the value of your time.”
    “Good,” Reffet said. “That is a concept the males down on the surface of Tosev 3 seem to have a great deal of trouble grasping.” He swung one of his eye turrets to bear on Felless. “Senior Researcher, are you prepared to begin your duties at once?”
    “Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” Felless replied. Now the voice her hearing diaphragms caught seemed more like her own. Antidotes and restoratives were routing the drugs that had kept her just this side of death on the journey from Home to Tosev 3. Curiosity grew along with bodily well-being. “May I ask why I have been awakened prematurely?”
    “You may,” Reffet said, and then, in an aside to the physician, “You were right. Her wits are clear.” He gave his attention back to Felless. “You have been awakened because conditions on Tosev 3 are not as we anticipated they would be when we set out from Home.”
    That was almost as great a surprise as waking prematurely. “In what way, Exalted Fleetlord?” Felless tried to make her wits work harder. “Does this planet harbor some bacterium or virus for which we have had difficulty in finding a cure?” Such a thing hadn’t happened on either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, but remained a theoretical possibility.
    “No,” Reffet replied.