“No. Nor my testicles either.”
“Glad to find someone who still knows the difference. All right, then we won’t spray that area, because the painkiller also tends to deaden some of the pleasure response for a while, and I hate to spoil a guy’s Friday night.” The doctor stuck out his hand. “I’m the house doc here, Lawrence—never, never Larry— Pinkbourne. If there’s trouble and I turn up, I’m on your team. I have a little side line with ConTech, too, which I imagine will help you to feel better.”
“If ConTech is so ubiquitous, where was it in Surabaya?”
“It’s everywhere in Surabaya—that’s the problem. The Dutch Reich is so hostile that nobody ever gets a spare minute to do any preplanning, and every one of Iphwin’s agents is always busy. Here, things are a great deal more relaxed—there’s a sort of a detente with the Emperor in Tokyo and an even better detente with the King here. Why the hell Iphwin insists on operating in any of the Reichs, let alone the Dutch Reich, is beyond me. You’re an expat, aren’t you, Peripart?”
“Crossbred Nineteener and Remnant,” I said, “originally out of Illinois and California. You must be too?”
“You have me beat,” he said, smiling. “Hawaiian exodus on both sides of the family, and nobody knows where they came from before then. I have a few distant cousins that were Nineteeners.”
We chatted for a few minutes, as all expats do, seeing if we had any distant shared relatives or mutual acquaintances. Anymore it’s almost a relief when you don’t—if we can find unassimilated Americans we don’t know, it means our numbers haven’t shrunk as far as we might reasonably have feared. We shook hands, and I went up to the room.
The lock had already been set to my thumb, and my bags were inside, along with Helen’s—hers were mostly unpacked, since she was one of those people who don’t feel comfortable in a hotel room until they’ve homesteaded it. The note from her on the bed said she’d gone out shopping, that Iphwin’s men had already briefed her on the situation, and that she’d be back in a little while.
I stripped naked and stretched out on top of the coverlet to take a nap. Dr. Pinkbourne’s painkillers were hitting me nicely by then, so that my whole body had kind of a pleasant warm glow. I was asleep a moment later, and it seemed as if the next instant I was waking up in the middle of a long passionate kiss from Helen. When the kiss broke I sat up and discovered that she was also naked; she must have undressed before climbing onto the bed beside me, I realized in a groggy sort of way. “Hello there,” I said.
Even if I hadn’t been quietly in love with her for the past five years, I’d have liked what I saw. Helen had thick chestnut hair, and when it was loose, as it was now, it hung to her waist in a soft natural wave. Her eyes were gray-green, her snub nose was sprayed with freckles, and her mouth was wide and full-lipped above a strong chin; not everyone’s idea of attractive, but it certainly got my attention. Her body, thanks to her swimming, running, rowing, and hiking, was strong and muscular, compact more than willowy, longer in the torso than in the legs, and she had pleasantly big round buttocks and smallish, very firm breasts. Just at the moment, she was climbing on top of me, so that the thick hair formed sort of a tent around my face; she pushed me back on the bed and pressed her breast against my face. I sucked the nipple gently; her breath caught and she pinned my hands back and wrapped me in her thighs. She said, “I’m in the mood and I took the injection for the weekend. Let’s, please, before we do anything else.”
It was quick and very pleasant, and I was grateful that Pinkbourne had thought to ask before spraying my crotch. As Helen and I lay there in the afterglow, I said, “Why, Professor Perdita, what do you suppose your Intro to American History students would think if they could see us now?”
“They’d think you were a pervert of the first order, Dr. Peripart,” she said, grinning. “Imagine doing an old bag like me.”
“If I start imagining that again,” I said, “we won’t get out of the hotel room all weekend. Since I’m now affluent and with a good job, would you like to order a ring, make it official, and spend the rest of the weekend celebrating?”
“Lyle, is that your way of asking me to marry you?”
I sat up next to her, hugged her, and said, “Yes.”
In the full-length mirror, I saw the happy couple; Helen looked great, and although I was going to be forever nondescript by comparison—thin straight salt-and-pepper hair cut short, turned-up nose and thick lips, skinny frame without an ounce of extra muscle or fat on it—I figured that any children we had might get lucky and look like her, and if not, well, nobody had ever screamed and pointed at the sight of me.
She sat for a long time, pretending to think it over, as I held her, and finally said, “You do notice that you are really assuming that I would accept?”
“Of course I am. It’s a basic sales technique. I want you to say yes, so I’m using the best sales tactics I know.”
“Well, all right, so if the astronomy racket stops paying, you can sell vacuum cleaners door to door, and thus keep yourself from becoming a burden on me. Still and all, would you mind asking me in a fairly traditional manner, just as if we were a couple of fairly traditional people?”
I let go of her, rolled off the bed, dropped to one knee, took her hand, gazed upward, and said, “For god’s sake marry me or I’ll kill myself.”
“Does that have to be an either-or?” she asked. “Well, since you put it that way, what the hell.”
“Does that mean yes?” I asked, still not getting up off the floor.
“I guess it does,” she said. “What the hell.”
“Those three little words that mean so much,” I said, standing up and giving her a long, hard kiss.
She kissed back and said, “And now about your kind offer of the ring. You may order me a diamond, but you are by no means to do anything as stupid as putting two months’ salary into it, since we need to start saving for a house. Plain band, wide rather than narrow, and if the diamond has some blue in it, that’s a plus. On the day of delivery I shall first run madly through the halls of the history and social science departments showing it off, then consent to a long candlelight dinner, and finally take you back to my place where I shall use you sexually to within an inch of your life.”
“Actually,” I said, “here in Saigon there are jewelers who can come up with exactly what you want in half an hour. If you’d like, we could get the ring taken care of, then go for a good long dinner—with plenty of oysters—and then see whether I am sufficiently recovered. The spirit is very, very willing but the flesh, at the moment, is not entertaining visitors.”
Helen sighed. “That’s amazing. In Enzy it’s a month or more to get a piece of jewelry. At least that’s what it’s like for all my girlfriends when they get engaged. All the paperwork for owning gold. How do we go about buying a gold ring here? Do we just go to a shop or something?”
“We can, if you’d like. But most of the shops have a catalog on-line, and you can handle the material through a virtual reality setup, so you can see exactly what you’re going to be getting. Either way would be fine with me.”