and an impossible success.
I fretfully switched on the speaker. By luck, the newscaster was talking excitedly of the prospects of a bumper wheat crop, sown by planes across a dust bowl moistened by seeded rains. I listened carefully to the rest of the program (it was remarkably clear of Russian telejamming), but there was no further news of interest to me. And, of course, no mention of the moon, though everyone knows that America and Russia are racing to develop their primary bases into fortresses capable of mutual assault and the launching of alphabet bombs toward Earth. I myself knew perfectly well that the British electronic equipment I was helping trade for American wheat was destined for use in spaceships.
I switched off the newscast. It was growing dark, and once again I pictured a tender, frightened face behind a mask. I hadn’t had a date since England. It’s exceedingly difficult to become acquainted with a girl in America, where as little as a smile often can set one of them yelping for the police_to say nothing of the increasingly puritanical morality and the roving gangs that keep most women indoors after dark. And, naturally, the masks, which are definitely not, as the Soviets claim, a last invention of capitalist degeneracy, but a sign of great psychological insecurity.
The Russians have no masks, but they have their own signs of stress.
I went to the window and impatiently watched the darkness gather. I was getting very restless. After a while a ghostly violet cloud appeared to the south. My hair rose.
Then I laughed. I had momentarily fancied it a radiation from the crater of the Hellbomb, though I should instantly have known it was only the radio-induced glow in the sky over the amusement and residential area south of Inferno.
Promptly at twenty-two hours I stood before the door of my unknown girl friend’s apartment. The electronic say-who-please said just that. I answered clearly, “Wysten Turner,” wondering if she’d given my name to the mechanism. She evidently had, for the door opened. I walked into a small empty living room, my heart pounding a bit.
The room was expensively furnished with the latest pneumatic hassocks and sprawlers. There were some midgie hooks on the table. The one I picked up was the standard hard-boiled detective story in which two female murderers go gunning for each other.
The television was on. A masked girl in green was crooning a love song. Her right hand held something that blurred off into the foreground. I saw the set had a handie, which we haven’t in England as yet, and curiously thrust my hand into the handie orifice beside the screen. Contrary to my expectations, it was not like slipping into a pulsing rubber glove, but rather as if the girl on the screen actually held my hand.
A door opened behind me. I jerked out my hand with as guilty a reaction as if I’d been caught peering through a keyhole.
She stood in the bedroom doorway. I think she was trembling. She was wearing a gray fur coat, white- speckled, and a gray velvet evening mask with shirred gray lace around the eyes and mouth. Her fingernails twinkled like silver.
I hadn’t occurred to me that she’d expect us to go out.
“I should have told you,” she said softly. Her mask veered nervously toward the books and the screen and the room’s dark corners. “But I can’t possibly talk to you here.”
I said doubtfully, “There’s a place near the Consulate. . . .“
“I know where we can be together and talk,” she said rapidly. “If you don’t mind.”
As we entered the elevator I said, “I’m afraid I dismissed the cab.”
But the cab driver hadn’t gone, for some reason of his own. He jumped out and smirkingly held the front door open for us. I told him we preferred to sit in back. He sulkily opened the rear door, slammed it after us, jumped in front and slammed the door behind him.
My companion leaned forward. “Heaven,” she said.
The driver switched on the turbine and televisor.
“Why did you ask if I were a British subject?” I said, to start the conversation.
She leaned away from me, tilting her mask close to the window. “See the moon,”
she said in a quick, dreamy voice.
“But why, really?” I pressed, conscious of an irritation that had nothing to do with her.
“It’s edging up into the purple of the sky.”
“And what’s your name?”
“The purple makes it look yellower.”
Just then I became aware of the source of my irritation. It lay in the square of writhing light in the front of the cab beside the driver.
I don’t object to ordinary wrestling matches, though they bore me, but I simply detest watching a man wrestle a woman. The fact that the bouts are generally “on the level,” with the man greatly outclassed in weight and reach and the masked females young and personable, only makes them seem worse to me.
“Please turn off the screen,” I requested the driver.
He shook his head without looking around. “Uh-uh, man,” he said. “They’ve been grooming that babe for weeks for this bout with Little Zirk.”
Infuriated, I reached forward, but my companion caught my arm. “Please,” she whispered frightenedly, shaking her head.
I settled back, frustrated. She was closer to me now, but silent, and for a few moments I watched the heaves and contortions of the powerful masked girl and her wiry masked opponent on the screen. His frantic scrambling at her reminded me of a male spider.
I jerked around, facing my companion. “Why did those three men want to kill you?”I asked sharply.
The eyeholes of her mask faced the screen. “Because they’re jealous of me,” she whispered.
“Why are they jealous?”
She still didn’t look at me. “Because of him.”
“Who?”
She didn’t answer.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you afraid to tell me?” I asked. “What is the matter?”
She still didn’t look my way. She smelled nice.
“See here,” I said laughingly, changing my tactics, “you really should tell me something about yourself. I don’t even know what you look like.”
I half playfully lifted my hand to the band of her neck. She gave it an astonishingly swift slap. I pulled it away in sudden pain. There were four tiny indentations on the back. From one of them a tiny bead of blood welled out as I watched. I looked at her silver fingernails and saw they were actually delicate and pointed metal caps.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” I heard her say, “but you frightened me. I thought for a moment you were going to . . .“
At last she turned to me. Her coat had fallen open. Her evening dress was Cretan Revival, a bodice of lace beneath and supporting the breasts without covering them.
“Don’t be angry,” she said, putting her arms around my neck. “You were wonderful this afternoon.”
The soft gray velvet of her mask, molding itself to her cheek, pressed mine.
Through the mask’s lace the wet warm tip of her tongue touched my chin.
“I’m not angry,” I said. “Just puzzled and anxious to help.”
The cab stopped. To either side were black windows bordered by spears of broken glass. The sickly purple light showed a few ragged figures slowly moving toward us.
The driver muttered, “It’s the turbine, man. We’re grounded.” He sat there hunched and motionless. “Wish it had happened somewhere else.”
My companion whispered, “Five dollars is the usual amount.”
She looked out so shudderingly at the congregating figures that I suppressed my indignation and did as she suggested. The driver took the bill without a word. As he started up, he put his hand out the window and I heard a few coins clink on the pavement.
My companion came back into my arms, but her mask faced the television screen, where the tall girl had just pinned the convulsively kicking Little Zirk.
“I’m so frightened,” she breathed.
