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"A bit more."
"Your contract was for a year."
"That's right."
I passed her an envelope, and, "This cancels it," I said.
"What do you mean?" she asked, the smile freezing, diminishing, gone.
"Whatever I say, always," I said.
"You mean I'm dismissed?"
"I'm afraid so," I told her, "and here's a similar amount, to prove to you it isn't what you think." I passed her the second envelope.
"What is it, then?" she asked.
"I've got to go away. No sense to your wilting here in the meantime. I might be gone quite awhile."
"I'll wait."
"No."
"Then I'll go with you."
"Even if it means you might die along with me, if things go bad?"
I hoped she'd say yes. But after all this time I think I know something about people. That's why Reference A was handy.
"It's possible, this time around," I said. "Sometimes a guy like me has to take a few risks."
"Will you give me a reference?" she said.
"I have it here."
She sipped her drink.
"All right," she said.
I passed it to her.
"Do you hate me?" she asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why?"
"Because I'm weak, and I value my life."
"So do I, though I can't guarantee it."
"That's why I'll accept the referral."
"That's why I have it ready."
"You think you know everything, don't you?"
"No."
"What will we do tonight?" she asked, finishing her drink.
"I don't know everything."
"Well, I know something. You've treated me all right."
"Thanks."
"I'd like to hang onto you."
"But I just scared you?"
"Yes."
"Too much?"
"Too much."
I finished my Cognac, puffed on the cigar, studied Florida and my white moon Cue Ball.
"Tonight," she said, taking my hand, "you'll at least forget to hate me."
She didn't open her envelopes. She sipped her second drink and regarded Florida and Cue Ball also.
"When will you leave?"
"Ere dawn," I said.
"God, you're poetical."
"No, I'm just what I am."
"That's what I said."
"I don't think so, but it's been good knowing you."
She finished her drink and put it down.
"It's getting chilly out here."
"Yes."
"Let us repair within."
"I'd like to repair."
I put down my cigar and we stood and she kissed me. So I put my arm around her trim and sparkling, blue-kept waist and we moved away from the bar, toward the archway, through the archway and beyond, into the house we were leaving.
Let's make it a triple-asterisk break:
Perhaps the wealth I acquired along the way to becoming who I am is one of the things that made me one of the things that I am; i.e., a bit of a paranoid. No.
It's too pat.
I could justify the qualms I feel each time I leave Homefree by saying that this is their source. Then I could turn around and justify that, by saying that it isn't really paranoia if there really are people out to get you. And there are, which is one of the reasons things are arranged to such an extent that I could stand all alone on Homefree and defy any man or government that wanted me to come and take me. They'd have to kill me, which would be a fairly expensive proposition, as it would entail destroying the entire planet. And even then, I think I've got an out that might work, though I've never had to test it under field conditions.
No, the real reason for my qualms is the very ordinary fear of death and non-being that all men know, intensified many times, though once I had a glimpse of a light that I can't explain ... Forget that. There's me and maybe a few Sequoia trees that came onto the scene in the twentieth century and have managed to make it up until now, the thirty-second. Lacking the passivity of the plant kingdom, I learned after a time that the longer one exists the more strongly one becomes infected with a sense of mortality. Corollary to this, survival--once a thing I thought of primarily in Darwinian terms, as a pastime of the lower classes and phyla--threatens to become a preoccupation. It is a much subtler jungle now than it was in the days of my youth, with something like fifteen hundred inhabited worlds, each with its own ways of killing men, ways readily exportable when you can travel between the worlds in no time at all; seventeen other intelligent races, four of whom I consider smarter than men and seven or eight who are just as stupid, each with its own ways of killing men; multitudes of machines to serve us, numerous and ordinary as the automobile was when I was a kid, each with its own ways of killing men; new diseases, new weapons, new poisons and new mean animals, new objects of hatred, greed, lust and addiction, each with its own ways of killing men; and many, many, many new places to die. I've seen and met a lot of these things, and because of my somewhat unusual occupation there may be only twenty-six people in the galaxy who know more about them than I do.
So I'm scared, even though no one's shooting at me just now, the way they were a couple weeks before I got sent to Japan for rest and recuperation and found Tokyo Bay, say twelve hundred years ago. That's close. That's life.
I left in the dead of pre-dawn night without purposely saying goodbye to anybody, because that's the way I figure I have to be. I did wave back at a shadowy figure in the Operations Building who had waved at me after I'd parked my buggy and had begun walking across the field. But then, I was a shadowy figure, too. I reached the dock where the _Model T_ sat squat, boarded her, stowed my gear, spent half an hour checking systems. Then I went outside to inspect the phase-projectors. I lit a cigarette.
In the east, the sky was yellow. A rumble of thunder came out of the dark mountains to the west. There were some clouds above me and the stars still clung to sky's faded cloak, less like confetti than dewdrops now.
For once, it wasn't going to happen, I decided.
Some birds sang, and a gray cat came and rubbed against my leg, then moved off in the direction of the birdsongs.
The breeze shifted so that it came up from the south, filtered through the forest that began at the far end of the field. It bore the morningdamp smells of life and growth.
The sky was pink as I took my last puff, and the mountains seemed to shiver within their shimmering as I turned and crushed it out. A large, blue bird floated toward me and landed on my shoulder. I stroked its plumage and sent it on its way.
I took a step toward the vehicle ...
My toe struck a projecting bolt in a dock-plate and I stumbled. I caught hold of a strut and saved myself from a complete fall. I landed on one knee, and before I could get up a small, black bear was licking my face. I scratched his ears and patted his head, then slapped him on the rump as I rose. He turned and moved off toward the wood.
I tried to take another step, then realized that my sleeve was caught in the place where the strut I had grabbed crossed over another one.
By the time I'd disentangled myself, there was another bird upon my shoulder and a dark cloud of them flapping across the field from the direction of the forest. Above the noise of their cries, I heard more thunder.
It was happening.
I made a dash for the ship, almost stumbling over a green rabbit who sat on her haunches before the hatch, nose twitching, pink, myopic eyes staring in my direction. A big glass snake slithered toward me across the dock, transparent and gleaming.
I forgot to duck my head, banged it on the upper hatchplate and reeled back. My ankle was seized by a blonde monkey, who winked a blue eye at me.
So I patted her head and pulled free. She was stronger than she looked.