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Medical, and he can't make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and
go out again. But then he'd be broke if he didn't score. So he just stays on, a cripple."
I put the glass down. I didn't want any more to drink. "So long, Ituno," I said. "I'm
going to bed."
I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn't know if I would ever
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mail. There wasn't much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump
lady of a certain age. But there's a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the
cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn't room for much else. The days were all the same: sex,
letter writing, sleeping . . . and worrying.
Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in
a way I could face, about why I did.
Sigfrid says, "You sound tired, Rob."
Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my
money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big
Island, with a two-hour stockholders' meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those
beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas
glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was
exhausted.
Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn't
care if you're physically exhausted. He doest care if you've got a broken leg; he only wants to
know if you dream about screwing your mother.
I say that. I say, "I'm tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don't you stop making small
talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma."
"Did you have any, Robby?"
"Doesn't everybody?"
"Do you want to talk about them, Robby?"
"Not particularly."
He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up
like a boy's room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake
window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of
boys' stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and-- I can't read the rest of the titles.
It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and
almost filled by the old sofa I slept on.
"Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?" Sigfrid probes gently.
"You bet." Then I reconsider. "Well, no. I'm not sure." Actually I do know. Something had
hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It's a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent
drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat
next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the
same one I'd had before, and she, I already knew better.
So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking
drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And -- every time the girl was
drowsing, or in the ladies' room, and the stewardess was looking the other way -- racked with
silent, immense, tearful sobs.
And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the
make.
"Do you want to just say what you're feeling at this second, Rob?"
"I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was."
"Don't you know, really? Can't you remember what was in your head while you weren't
talking, just now?"
"Sure I can!" I hesitate, then I say, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be
coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn't believe how it hurt. I
was crying like a baby."
"What was the insight, Robby?"
"I'm trying to tell you. It was about -- well, it was partly about my mother. But it was
also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these . . . I had--"
"I think you're trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex
with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?"
----------------------------------------
MISSION REPORT
Vessel A3--77, Voyage 036D51. Crew T. Parreno, N. Ahoya, E. Nimkin.
Transit time 5 days 14 hours. Position vicinity Alpha Centauri A.
Summary. "The planet was quite Earth-like and heavily vegetated. The color of the
vegetation was predominantly yellow. The atmosphere matched the Heechee mix closely. It is a warm
planet with no polar ice caps and a temperature range similar to Earth tropics at the equator,
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Earth temperate extending almost to the poles. We detected no animal life or signatures (methane,
etc.) thereof. Some of the vegetation predates at a very slow pace, advancing by uprooting
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