The Pleasure Tube Read Free Page B

uniform. Her legs aren't only possible, though—long, finely muscled, sleek above her pearl-colored shoes; she has a dancer's legs.
    "Do you mind if I walk around the terminal?"
    She pushes herself loosely from the wall, then shakes her head. "No, you'd better not leave. I punched your whole program, your birth date seemed wrong, I thought we'd have to rewrite your ticket. You've been away for a really long time. You should just stay here."
    "I'm not a child," I tell her.
    "So I've noticed." She smiles. "But there's plenty you don't know." She comes toward me, bends down, and for an instant I think she is going to touch my knee. But what she does is pull up the inlaid top of the elegant, low wooden table I am sitting by. Inside—I laugh when I see it—is an entire computer console, miniaturized, with ivory keys. She punches a few buttons, guitar music fills the room, and the large glass wall becomes slightly darker. My chair reclines and the whole room seems to soften.
    "Just relax," she smiles. "It won't be all that long."
     
    I think about the blonde woman I met on the lower level of the terminal and recall a vague, fleeting familiarity about her. Will I see her again? What is it she wants to do? I assume anything goes on this ship, but I had better be discreet. The ticket agent was right; there are some things I don't know.
    I do know this, though: this waiting, this lack of motion, magnifies the anxiety which I came all this way to smother and forget. Outside, the daylight is failing and ship lights, lane lights, begin to twinkle and glow. The view from the window brings to mind the array from the Daedalus dome I so often stood watching; the blue-gray shade of the glass is so like the color of the dome when we were cruising that the sight through it is uncanny. And yet we do not move. I slump back into the chair, close my eyes—a lushly comfortable chair whose designer must have had an affection for the small of the back.
    In my half sleep I am again at the console of the Daedalus. In the stillness I am again at the lull, an incredible lull so motionless that I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. My mind shunts on, so trained by Taylor's questioning; I recall shutting down and hoping for drift to pick up energy from the front that visually howls on the starboard side of the dome. Nothing shows on the instruments in the lull. My hands sweat. Motionless, I feel queasy, my stomach confused by the sudden end to turbulence. The memory of Werhner's fork dripping sauce, an odor, the odor of curry—there is a shudder in the ship—I turn to grimace at Werhner. He has disappeared. Beyond his station the port hatch to SciCom hangs open like a tongue, through the opening, not the blue-green glow of SciCom computers or pale-blue-uniformed technicians working or the air lock beyond them, but deep space, blue-black space—there is a shock wave—in my body, through the ship. Hurtling at me is a spinning, growing ball of light, the howling sight of a raging sun....
     
    I awake perspiring, startled; instinctively I stroke the heel of my hand. Through the waiting-lounge window the landing lights of a shuttle sever the deep night, sweep toward me, turn away. I sigh and walk off my anxiety, wish we would board and move.
    The girl returns, the door hushes closed behind her.
    "Ten minutes," she says pleasantly, her voice with a different edge than it had when I first heard her speak. Her hands are at the back of her neck undoing a braid in her hair—she has redone her makeup, I think; her face looks fresher, more natural. As she shakes her hair loose it falls in long curls to her shoulders. "Free at last," she says.
    "Time to go home?"
    "Time to stop working, anyway." She joins me at the window overlooking the transport runways. "You should see home, I live next to a freeway." She, too, looks out over the tarmac and the winking, high-rise city far beyond it. On the tarmac the hulking fuselages of the shuttles wait in