“Come on, Lucas,” she said impatiently. “It’s cold out here.”
He got out of the car and went with her into the small lobby. The elevator door was open and they walked into the aluminium box hand in hand. They kissed during the ride up and her mouth was as soft as he had thought it would be, and her thighs — closed around one of his — were as responsive as he had hoped they would be. Hutchman’s legs felt slightly shaky as he followed Andrea into her apartment which was pleasantly but sparsely furnished. It smelt faintly of apples. Just inside the door she dropped her coat on he floor and they kissed again. Her body was fuller than Vicky’s and her breasts, when he cupped them in his hands, felt heavier than Vicky’s. The automatic and unwanted comparison produced a painful churning sensation behind his eyes. He put Vicky out of his mind and drank from Andrea’s mouth.
“Do you want me, Lucas?” Her breath was warm on the roof of his mouth. “Do you really want me?”
“I really want you.”
“All right then. You wait here.” She walked into a bedroom and he waited without moving till she reappeared. She was wearing nothing but a black peep-hole brassiere, her nipples angled upward through the apertures on extruded blobs of milky flesh. Breathing noisily, Hutchman removed his own clothes, closed with Andrea, and bore her down onto a flame-coloured rug. Now, he thought, right now, my darling Vicky.
An indeterminate time went by before he made the shocking discovery that he could feel… precisely nothing. It was as if the whole region of his genitals was flooded with a deadening drug, destroying all sensation. Baffled and afraid, he waged a battle between his body and Andrea’s, surging and grasping and crushing…
“Give it up, Lucas.” Andrea’s voice reached him across interstellar distances. “It isn’t your fault.”
“But I don’t understand,” he said numbly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Sexual hypesthesia,” she replied, not unkindly. “Kraft-Ebbing devotes a whole chapter to it.”
He shook his head. “But I’m always all right with…”
“With your wife?”
“Oh, Christ!” Hutchman pressed his hands to his temples as the pain in his head became intolerable. What have you done to me, Vicky?
Andrea stood up, walked to the door where her suede coat was lying, and put it on. “I’ve had a very pleasant evening, Lucas, but I have an awful lot to do tomorrow and I must get to bed. Do you mind?”
“Of course not,” he mumbled with senseless formality. As he struggled into his clothes he tried to think of something intelligent and unconcerned to say, and finally came out with, “I hope you have good flying weather tomorrow.”
Her face betrayed no emotion. “I hope so too.”
“Good night, Lucas.” She closed the door quietly. The elevator was still at the landing and he rode down in it, staring at his reflection in the scratched aluminium.
Incredibly, after all that had happened, it was only a little after midnight when he got home, and Vicky was still up. The comfortable old skirt and cardigan she was wearing suggested to him that she had not been out and that no stranger had been in the house during his absence. She was watching the late movie on television and as usual the colour control was turned down too far, producing a faded picture. He adjusted the colour and sat down tiredly without speaking.
“Where have you been this evening, Lucas?”
“Out drinking.”
He waited for her to contradict him, directly or by inference, but she said, “You shouldn’t drink a lot. It doesn’t agree with you.”
“It agrees with me better than some things.”
She turned to face him, and spoke hesitantly. “I get the impression that… all this has really hurt you, Lucas, and it surprises me. Did you not understand what you were letting yourself in for?”
Hutchman stared at his wife. He had always loved her most when she wore the sort of friendly, familiar clothes she had on now. Her face was grave and beautiful in the subdued orange light, imbued with the power to make him whole again. He thought of his first batch of envelopes, sorted and separated now, speeding on the first stages of the journeys from which no power of his could bring them back.
“Go to hell, you,” he said thickly and walked out of the room.
Early next morning Hutchman drove east almost as far as Maidstone and dispatched another sheaf of envelopes. The weather was sunny and relatively warm. He got back to the house to find Vicky and David having a late breakfast. The boy was eating cereal and trying to do arithmetic problems at the same time.
“Dad,” he shouted accusingly. “Why do sums have to have hundreds, tens, and units? Why couldn’t it all be units? That way there’d be no carrying to do.”
“It wouldn’t work very well, son. But why are you doing homework on a Sunday morning?”
David shrugged. “The teacher hates me.”
“That’s not true, David,” Vicky put in.
“Then why does she give me more sums than the other boys?”
“To help you.” Vicky glanced up at Hutchman appealingly. He took David’s book and pencil, jotted down the answers to the remaining problems, and handed it back to the boy.
“Thanks, Dad.” David looked at him in wonderment, then darted out of the kitchen whooping with glee.
“Why did you do that?” Vicky lifted the coffeepot, poured an extra cup, and pushed it across the table to Hutchman. “You’ve always said that sort of thing didn’t help him.”
“We seemed to be immortal in those days.”
“Meaning?’
“Perhaps there isn’t enough time to do everything slowly and properly.”
Vicky pressed her hand to her throat. “I’ve been watching you, Lucas. You don’t act like a man who’s been…” She sighed. “What would you say if I told you I hadn’t been unfaithful in the clinical sense of the word?”
“I’d say what you’ve said to me several hundred times in the past — that doing it in the mind is just as bad.”
“But what if it was nauseating to my mind, and I only — “
“What are you trying to do to me?” he demanded harshly, pressing the knuckles of one hand to his lips in case they should tremble. After all that’s happened, he wondered in panic, am I going to fall? Can the lady dissolve her homunculus in acid and recreate him at will?
“Lucas, have you been unfaithful to me?” Her face was that of a priestess.
“No.”
“Then what has all this been about?”
Hutchman, standing with the coffee cup in his hands, felt his knees begin to orbit in minute circles which threatened to become larger and bring him down. A fearsome shift took place in his mind. Why do I need the machine? The spread of the information is all that matters. World-wide knowledge of how to build the antibomb machine would, by itself, make the possession of any nuclear device too risky. Even if the machine were destroyed my envelopes could still go out as a didactic hoax. Better still, I could open all the remaining envelopes and remove the letter — and just send the information. And without the hardware I could be safe. They need never find me…
He became aware that the telephone was ringing. Vicky halfrose from the table, but he waved her back, hurried impatiently into the hall, and lifted the instrument, cutting it short in the middle of a peal.