Fantastic Stories Presents the Fantastic Universe Super Pack. Roger Dee

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СКАЧАТЬ I croaked.

      “The first time.” He smiled suddenly, and it was like the sun coming up in the morning, and then his arms went all the way around me. I don’t know whether he moved over on the seat, or I did, or both of us. “Oh, baby, baby,” he whispered in my ear, and then there was the second time.

      The second time was like the first, and also like dancing, and some ways like the bathtub. This time none of me melted away; it was all there, and all close to him, and all warm, and all tingling with sensations. I was more completely alive right then than I had ever been before in my life.

      After we stopped kissing each other, we stayed very still, holding on to each other, for a while, and then he moved away just a little, enough, to breathe better.

      I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I didn’t even want to be separated from him by the two or three inches between us on the seat. But he was sitting next to me now, staring straight ahead, not saying anything, and I just didn’t know what came next. On television, the kiss was always the end of the scene.

      He started the car again.

      I said, “I have to . . . my car . . . I . . . .”

      “We’ll come back,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll come back. Let’s just drive a little...?” he pulled out past my car, and turned and looked at me for a minute. “You don’t want to go now, do you? Right away?”

      I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me any more, so I took a breath and said out loud, “No.”

      We came off a twisty street onto the highway. “So that’s how it hits you,” he said. He wasn’t exactly talking to me; more like thinking out loud. “Twenty-seven years a cool cat, and now it has to be a crazy little midget that gets to you.” He had to stop then, for a red light—the same light I’d stopped at the first time on the way in. That seemed a long long time before.

      Larry turned around and took my hand. He looked hard at my face, “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

      “What?” I said. “What do you mean?” I hadn’t even tried to make sense out of what he was saying before; he wasn’t talking to me anyhow.

      “Kid,” he said, “maybe that was the first time for you, but in a different way it was the first time for me too.” His hand opened and closed around mine, and his mouth opened and closed too, but nothing came out. The light was green; he noticed, and started moving, but it turned red again. This time he kept watching it.

      “I don’t suppose anybody ever told you about the birds and the bees and the butterflies,” he said.

      “Told me what about them?” He didn’t answer right away, so I thought about it. “All I can think of is they all have wings. They all fly.”

      “So do I. So does a fly. What I mean is . . . the hell with it!” He turned off the highway, and we went up a short hill and through a sort of gateway between two enormous rocks. “Have you ever been here?” he asked.

      “I don’t think so . . . .”

      “They call it The Garden of the Gods. I don’t know why. I like it here . . . it’s a good place to drive and think.”

      There was a lot of moonlight, and the Garden was all hills and drops and winding roads between low-growing brush, and everywhere, as if the creatures of some giant planet had dropped them, were those towering rocks, their shapes scooped out and chiseled and hollowed and twisted by wind, water and sand. Yes, it was lovely, and it was non-intrusive. Just what he said—a good place to drive and think.

      Once he came to the top of a hill, and stopped the car, and we looked out over the Garden, spreading out in every direction, with the moonlight shadowed in the sagebrush, and gleaming off the great rocks. Then we turned and looked at each other, and he reached out for me and kissed me again; after which he pulled away as if the touch of me hurt him, and grabbed hold of the wheel with a savage look on his face, and raced the motor, and raised a cloud of dust on the road behind us.

      I didn’t understand, and I felt hurt. I wanted to stop again. I wanted to be kissed again. I didn’t like sitting alone on my side of the seat, with that growl in his throat not quite coming out.

      I asked him to stop again. He shook his head, and made believe to smile.

      “I’ll buy you a book,” he said. “All about the birds and the bees and a little thing we have around here we call sex. I’ll buy it tomorrow, and you can read it—you do know how to read, don’t you?—and then we’ll take another ride, and we can park if you want to. Not tonight, baby.”

      “But I know . . . .” I started, and then had sense enough to stop. I knew about sex; but what I knew about it didn’t connect with kissing or parking the car, or sitting close . . . and it occurred to me that maybe it did, and maybe there was a lot Ididn’t know that wasn’t on Television, and wasn’t on the Ship’s reference tapes either. Morals and mores, and nuances of behavior. So I shut up, and let him take me back to the hotel again, to my own car.

      He leaned past me to open the door on my side, but he couldn’t quite make it, and I had my fourth kiss. Then he let go again, and almost pushed me out of the car; but when I started to close the door behind me, he called out, “Tomorrow night?”

      “I . . . all right,” I said. “Yes. Tomorrow night.”

      “Can I pick you up?”

      There was no reason not to this time. The first time I wouldn’t tell him where I lived, because I knew I’d have to change places, and I didn’t know where yet. I told him the name of the motel, and where it was.

      “Six o’clock,” he said.

      “All right.”

      “Good night.”

      “Good night.”

      *

      I don’t remember driving back to my room. I think I slept on the bed that night, without ever stopping to determine whether it was comfortable or not. And when I woke up in the morning, and looked out the window at a white-coated landscape, the miracle of snow (which I had never seen before; not many planets have as much water vapor in their atmospheres as Earth does.) in summer weather seemed trivial in comparison to what had happened to me.

      Trivial, but beautiful. I was afraid it would be very cold, but it wasn’t.

      I had gathered, from the weather-talk in the place where I ate breakfast, that in this mountain-country (it was considered to be very high altitude there), snow at night and hot sun in the afternoon was not infrequent in the month of April, though it was unusual for May.

      It was beautiful to look at, and nice to walk on, but it began melting as soon as the sun was properly up, and then it looked awful. The red dirt there is pretty, and so is the snow, but when they began merging into each other in patches and muddy spots, it was downright ugly.

      Not that I cared. I ate oatmeal and drank milk and nibbled at a piece of toast, and tried to plan my activities for the day. To the library first, and take back the book they’d lent me. Book . . . all right then, get a book on sex. But that was foolish; I knew all about sex. At least I knew . . . well, СКАЧАТЬ