I am not a kid. I realize that love is not what is depicted in the movies. I have no illusions. I fully expect that one day he will regard me as a fling. The one on the space station. Doctor What’s-Her-Name.
But at least the here and now, the lovemaking, should be better. Instead, I feel as though he would rather be playing with a teenager.
Would it have been this way with Dan?
O’Donnell realized that there was something wrong with Lorraine. Her hair was no longer twisted into a neat French braid. Instead, it was bound by a net that seemed poised to fly off her head with the force of her loosened chestnut tresses. Her lips, usually pressed together in an expression he called grim, were noticeably turned down into a frown. She refused to meet his eyes.
His daily meetings with Lorraine had diminished from a half hour to barely ten minutes. Their tenor had shaded from openly adversarial to politely civil, if not genuinely friendly. They would chat until Lorraine apparently satisfied herself that the whites of his eyes weren’t bloodshot, his pupils weren’t dilated, his speech wasn’t slurred, and his limbs were not twitching uncontrollably. So he was surprised when she immediately ordered him to roll up his sleeve.
O’Donnell watched silently as Lorraine readied a syringe. Her breath sounded thick, as if she were congested. Still refusing to meet his eyes, she tied a rubber tube around his biceps and told him to pump his hand until his already prominent veins threatened to burst out of his skin. As with the last blood test, O’Donnell concentrated on the small Monet print fastened to the wall. He felt the coolness of the alcohol as she swabbed his inner elbow. He expected the thin prick of the needle. Instead, he felt as if his arm were being gouged by claws.
“Easy, Doc!”
Lorraine’s hands trembled. The needle scraped across his skin, leaving a darkened line of blood behind. O’Donnell grabbed the syringe with his free hand and lifted the needle out of his arm. Lorraine wrenched the syringe away and, with the same motion, stuffed it into a waste receptacle.
“You okay, Doc?”
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t look at him and furiously prepared a second syringe.
O’Donnell thought he heard her sniffle. He pulled the tube from his right arm and tightened it around his left. This time he watched her. As she moved to stick him, he gently placed his hand on hers and guided the needle into his vein.
“Do you want to tell me what this is all about?” he said when she finished drawing his blood.
“It was time for a test.”
“I’m talking about the butcher job on my right arm.”
She was labeling the syringe. O’Donnell placed his hand on her chin and turned her head so that she faced him. Her brown eyes were wet.
“You want to talk to me for a change?” he said.
She hesitated, but only for a moment.
“Have you ever thought you loved someone and tried to make that person notice you?”
“All the time,” said O’Donnell.
“Did they?”
“Sometimes, sometimes not. I never gave it much effort. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to that.”
“Well, did it ever happen that after you gave up on the one person and started seeing someone else, you realized that the first person had noticed you all along. Only now, because you are with the second person, and because you may have done things that are not in the best interests of the first person, you realize that you can never go back.”
O’Donnell knew the first person was Dan and the second person was Jaeckle, but he refrained from embarrassing her.
“I’ve been taught to think in absolutes,” he said. “Black and white, yes and no. One drink or one snort and I’ll be hell-bent for death and destruction. But when it comes to affairs of the heart, even I know that there are no absolutes. One day’s great idea is another day’s dumb mistake.”
He grinned at her. “Some people say we react to the chemicals in our brains. Some believe in true love. Whatever, the situation can be as unpredictable as hell. You make decisions based on constantly changing conditions. It’s worse than trying to predict the weather. But when you find yourself in a condition like the one you’re in, there’s only one reliable barometer.” He patted her stomach. “How does this feel?”
“Like I have a fist in it,” said Lorraine.
“You don’t like the decision you made.”
“I know that,” said Lorraine. “What can I do about it?”
“Right now, nothing,” he said. “You can’t force these decisions. It’s like trying to seed clouds. You can’t seed them if they don’t exist. You have to wait for the right time.”
“When is that?”
“Hard to say,” said O’Donnell. “But I do know one thing. The time always comes. They always come back.”
Lance’s innards trembled as he performed his daily inspection in the logistics module. The entire station seemed to be seething with a sexuality he had never noticed. The slender pipes looping across the ceiling were entwined arms and legs; their bright sheen was not from polished aluminum but from a fine glaze of sweat. The rounded bottoms of two oxygen cylinders lashed together were perfectly shaped breasts. Another pair were firm buttocks. The whole station was reeking with sex. It was everyplace, even in the very air. He tried to get his mind off last night with Carla Sue, tried to concentrate on his duties. But he could think of nothing else. His erection pressed against his flight pants.
A loud clanging interrupted his turmoil. Aaron Weiss hovered in the entry hatch, his ever-present hat and Minicam bound to him.
“May I come in?”
“I guess.”
Weiss tumbled quickly into the module.
“Commander’s orders,” he said. “I need permission and the escort of a crew member to enter this module.”
Lance shook his head as if perplexed by the rules.
“He must have a reason,” said Weiss. “Nothing on this station exists without good reason.”
“I suppose so,” said Lance, warily.
“What the hell is a logistics module, anyway?” asked Weiss.
Patiently Lance explained about the materials stored in the module and described the computer-controlled system for utilizing them.
Weiss suddenly asked, “What is your opinion of the scientific research being conducted on this station?”
“Uh—It’s important, I guess,” said Lance.
“I get the feeling that the crew is not intimately involved with it.”
Lance almost said that he personally was more intimately involved with the Mars Project. His thoughts surged between a giddy pride about last night and a gnawing fear that he had done something terribly wrong. But he couldn’t tell Aaron Weiss about that. Weiss wouldn’t understand.
“No, we’re not,” he replied. “Our main job is to keep the station flying. That’s why we’re here. That’s what inspecting this here log mod every day is all about.”
“Log…?” Weiss looked puzzled momentarily. “Oh, you mean logistics module.”
Lance nodded. Moving around Weiss, he made a big show of testing the seals of a waste receptacle.
“It’s an interesting project,” said Weiss, adjusting himself so that he always faced the constantly moving crewman. “The creation of a superbug that will rid the world of toxic wastes.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Lance said, though he didn’t pay the idea much mind. He furtively passed a finger under his nose. Traces of Carla Sue’s tangy smell were still there, even after he had scrubbed his hands several times. Could the reporter smell it?
“Looks to me,” said Weiss, “that man for hundreds of years has played the devil in our Garden of Eden down below…”