She pulled a print from the brown envelope and held it up for him. In it, she stood in the waiting room, her hand upon the shoulder of a smiling, brown-haired girl seated at the desk. A modest plastic nameplate, barely visible in the lower right corner of the picture, read
“There she is, Mr. Green; no freckles, very little jewelry, no green silk dresses—or at least, I never saw her wear one—and no fur coat. Brown hair, not red. Brown eyes, not green.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s Tina.”
“Tina?”
“Tina’s one of the names she uses. I think that when she looks like that, she calls herself Tina.”
“I see.” Dr. Nilson gave the words no inflection at all. “Can you tell me why she changes her name?”
“No,” he said. And then, “Maybe I can, a little. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”
“I can see you have.”
He said slowly, “Have you ever looked at the sky at night, Doctor?”
“Yes, often. Not really as often as I’d like; there’s so much light from the city that one seldom sees the stars. But last winter there was a blackout—perhaps you remember. I stood on my balcony until I was nearly frozen.”
“And you know how far away they are.”
“Vaguely. I’m not an astronomer.”
“I watched Carl Sagan once, and he said most of them are so far away it takes millions of years for a beam of light to get from them to us, and light’s the fastest thing there is. Haven’t you ever wondered why God put them so far away?”
“I suppose everyone has, Mr. Green.”
“And yet we have Visitors sometimes, and things from our world that just go away.”
Dr. Nilson nodded. “Like the sign at the airport—arrivals and departures.”
“I guess so. I’ve never ridden in a jet, or any other kind of airplane. But I know that people and things just vanish, and sometimes other people and other things show up here.” He tried to recall what Fanny had said about the television channels but decided he could not explain it well enough. He said, “There’s another world, just next door, if you go through the right door.”
Dr. Nilson did something on the underside of her desk top. “Please go on, Mr. Green.”
Explanations
“Suppose that in that world there was a woman—a goddess, really—who wanted to make love to a man from our world.”
Dr. Nilson smiled. “Why should she want to do that, Mr. Green?”
“Because in her world men die after they make love.”
“Like drones, is that what you mean? I must say it would be a nice reversal; here so many of us die after rape, or even before it.”
He said, “I don’t understand about the drones.”
“Male honeybees. Most bees are sterile females; they’re the ones who do the work. A few are fertile females, I suppose they’re called princesses. A few others are fertile males: drones. At the nuptial flight, the strongest drones mate with the princesses, who become queens. Then the drones die.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t really like that, there. The men do a lot of the work. The cop that talked to me at the fire was a man and so was the medic, and later the clerk who wouldn’t let me back into the hotel. But when they make love, they die. Their immune systems collapse. A doctor there told me that—Dr. Applewood.”
Dr. Nilson smiled again. “You mean they have doctors, just as we do? And policemen? I suppose they speak English?”
“Yes, at least in the part I visited. But they must have different languages in different places. I know there’s a man who talks with a German—” Abruptly he fell silent.
“What is it, Mr. Green?”
“I just realized who it was I heard calling Lara when I was talking to her—to your Lora—on the phone. It was him. It was Klamm.”
Dr. Nilson leaned toward him, her hands clasped beneath her chin. “Don’t you realize, Mr. Green, that if there were a world like the one you’ve been telling me about, a world where men die after intercourse, it would have customs—a whole culture—quite different from ours?”
“They don’t,” he said. “It’s a lot like ours.” He paused, thinking. “I hadn’t really worked it all out before, but it has to be. Because the worlds are so close, because it’s so easy to go across. Suppose somebody there thinks up a new word. Pretty soon somebody switches over, maybe not even knowing that he did it, and hears the word and brings it back. Or maybe one of them comes here and uses the word. Probably a lot of customs that we think are ours are really theirs, like the groom wearing black at his wedding.”
There was a discreet tap at the door. Dr. Nilson called, “Come in.”
Two husky black men in the trousered white uniforms of male nurses entered. Both were about his own age, and it seemed to him that their dark, serious faces contrasted oddly with their clothes. One carried a small canvas bag.
“I don’t believe you’ll have trouble with Mr. Green,” Dr. Nilson said. “In many respects he seems quite rational,
