after I’d finished my drink. I even managed to smile, and he managed to smile back. He said, We might as well get started, don’t you think?’ So I went in the head.
“I took off my things and left my gun on the bench beside the wash basin. I gave myself my Watson in the thigh.”
“The usual Watson?” the huxley asked as she halted. “Oestric and anticoncipient injected subcutaneously from a sterile ampule?”
“Yes. He’d had his Watson too, the priapic, because when I got back…” She began to cry.
“What happened after you got back?” the huxley queried after she had cried for a while.
“I just wasn’t any good. No good at all. The Watson might have been so much water for all the effect it had. Finally he got sore. He said, ‘What’s the matter with you? I might have known anything Marine was in would get loused up.’ “
“That made me angry, but I was too upset to defend myself. ‘Tension reduction!’ he said. ‘This is a fine way to promote interservice harmony. I’m not only not going to sign the checking-out sheet, I’m going to file a complaint against you to your group.’”
“Oh, my,” said the huxley.
“Yes, wasn’t it terrible? I said, ‘If you file a complaint, I’ll file a countercharge. You didn’t reduce my tension, either.’
“We argued about it for a while. He said that if I filed countercharges there’d be a trial and I’d have to take Pentothal and then the truth would come out. He said it wasn’t his fault! He’d been ready.
“I knew that was true, so I began to plead with him. I reminded him of the cold war, and how the enemy were about to take Venus, when all we had was Mars. I talked to him about loyalty to Defense and I asked him how he’d feel if he was kicked out of Air. And finally, after what seemed like hours, he said he wouldn’t file charges. I guess he felt sorry for me. He even agreed to sign the checking-out sheet.
“That was that. I went back to the head and put on my clothes and we both went out. We left the room at different times, though, because we were too angry to smile at each other and look happy. Even as it was, I think some of the neutral-area personnel suspected us.”
“Is that what’s been worrying you?” the huxley asked when she seemed to have finished.
“Well… I can trust you, can’t I? You really won’t tell?”
“Certainly I won’t. Anything told to a huxley is a privileged communication. The first amendment applies to us, if to no other profession.”
“Yes. I remember there was a Supreme Court decision about freedom of speech…” She swallowed, choked, and swallowed again. “When I got my next dighting slip,” she said bravely, “I was so upset I applied for a gyn. I hoped the doctor would say there was something physically wrong with me, but he said I was in swell shape. He said, A girl like you ought to be mighty good at keeping interservice tension down.’ So there wasn’t any help there.
“Then I went to a huxley, the huxley I was telling you a-bout. It talked philosophy to me. That wasn’t any help either. So—finally—well, I stole an extra Watson from the lab.”
There was a silence. When she saw that the huxley seemed to have digested her revelation without undue strain, she went on, “I mean, an extra Watson beyond the one I was issued. I couldn’t endure the thought of going through another dight like the one before. There was quite a fuss about the ampule’s being missing. The dighting drugs are under strict control. But they never did find out who’d taken it.”
“And did it help you? The double portion of oestric?” the huxley asked. It was prodding at the top buttons of its waistcoat with one forefinger, rather in the manner of one who is not quite certain he feels an itch.
“Yes, it did. Everything went off well. He—the man—said I was a nice girl, and Marine was a good service, next to Infantry, of course. He was Infantry. I had a fine time myself, and last week when I got a request sheet from Infantry asking for some pig pedigrees, I went ahead and initialed it..That tension reduction does work. I’ve been feeling awfully jittery, though. And yesterday I got another blue dighting slip.
“What am I to do? I can’t steal another Watson. They’ve tightened up the controls. And even if I could, I don’t think one extra would be enough. This time I think it would take two.”
She put her head down on the arm of her chair, gulping desperately.
“You don’t think you’d be all right with just one Watson?” the huxley asked after an interval. “After all, people used to dight habitually without any Watsons at all.”
“That wasn’t interservice dighting. No, I don’t think I’d be all right. You see, this time it’s with Air again. I’m supposed to try to find out about porcine nutrition. And I’ve always particularly hated Air.”
She twisted nervously at the control of her hearing aid. The huxley gave a slight jump. “Ah—well, of course you might resign,” it said in a barely audible voice.
Sonya— in the course of a long-continued struggle there is always a good deal of cultural contamination, and if there were girls named Sonya, Olga, and Tatiana in Defense, there were girls named Shirley and Mary Beth to be found on the enemy’s side—Sonya gave him an incredulous glance. “You must be joking. I think it’s in very poor taste. I didn’t tell you my difficulties for you to make fun of me.”
The huxley appeared to realize that it had gone too far.
“Not, at all, my dear young lady,” it said placatingly. It pressed its hands to its bosom. “Just a suggestion. As you say, it was in poor taste. I should have realized that you’d rather die than not be Marine.”
“Yes, I would.”
She turned the hearing aid down again. The huxley relaxed. “You may not be aware of it, but difficulties like yours are not entirely unknown,” it said. “Perhaps, after a long course of oestrics, antibodies are built up. Given a state of initial physiological reluctance, a forced sexual response might… But you’re not interested in all that. You want help. How about taking your troubles to somebody higher? Taking them all the way up?”
“You mean—the CO?” The huxley nodded.
Major Briggs’ face flushed scarlet. “I can’t do that! I just can’t! No nice girl would. I’d be too ashamed.” She beat on her musette bag with one hand, and began to sob.
Finally she sat up. The huxley was regarding her patiently. She opened her bag, got out cosmetics and mirror, and began to repair emotion’s ravages. Then she extracted an electronically powered vibro-needle from the depths of her bag and began crafting away on some indeterminate white garment.
“I don’t know what I’d do without my crafting,” she said in explanation. “These last few days, it’s all that’s kept me sane. Thank goodness it’s fashionable to do crafting now. Well, I’ve told you all about my troubles. Have you any ideas?”
The huxley regarded her with faintly protruding eyes. The vibro-needle clicked away steadily, so steadily that Sonya was quite unaware of the augmented popping in the huxley’s chest. Besides, the noise was of a frequency that her hearing aid didn’t pick up any too well.
The huxley cleared its throat. “Are you sure your dighting difficulties are really your fault?” it asked in an oddly altered voice.
“Why— I suppose so. After all, there’s been nothing wrong with the men either time.” Major Briggs did not look up from her work.
“Yes, physiologically. But let’s put it this way. And I want you to remember, my dear young lady, that we’re both mature, sophisticated individuals, and that I’m a huxley, after all. Supposing your dighting date had been with… somebody in… Marine. Would you have had any difficulty with it?”
Sonya Briggs put down her crafting, her cheeks flaming. “With a group brother? You have no right to talk to me like that!”
“Now, now. You must be calm.”
The sputtering in the huxley’s chest was by now so loud that only Sonya’s emotion could have made her deaf to it. It was so well-established that even her laying down the vibro-needle had had no effect on it.
“Don’t be offended,” the huxley went on in its unnatural voice. “I was only putting a completely hypothetical case.”
“Then… supposing it’s understood that it’s completely hypothetical and I would never, never dream of doing a thing like that… then, I don’t suppose I’d have had any trouble with it.” She picked up the needle once more.
“In other words, it’s not your fault. Look at it this way. You’re Marine.”
“Yes.” The girl’s head went up proudly. “I’m Marine.”
“Yes. And that means you’re a hundred times—a thousand times—better than any of these twerps you’ve
