the
Project. A man who has spent almost every waking moment from the age
of nine planning and preparing to fit himself for a role in humanity's
first big fling into space doesn't endanger his security status by
risking involuntary contamination from an attractive girl. The little
aircraft plant on the fringes of town was actually a top-secret key
division in the Satellite project, and if you worked there, you took
precautions.

The second time I met him at the luncheonette, he had been waiting so
long, and had so nearly given up any hope of my coming, that he was no
longer watching the road or the door when I finally got there--and
when he left, he was so pleased at having gotten a dinner date with
me, that he didn't notice much of anything at all. Not except out of
the corner of one eye, and with only the slightest edge of
subconscious recognition: just enough so that some niggling detail
that was out-of-place kept bothering him thereafter; and just enough
so that he made a point of stopping in the Security Office again that
afternoon to add my new motel address to the information he'd given
them the day before.

The three-mile drive in back of my Colorado plates was just about long
enough, finally, to make the discrepancy register consciously.

Larry went home and spent a bad night. His feelings toward me, as I
could hardly understand at the time, were a great deal stronger, or at
least more clearly defined, than mine about him. But since he was
more certain just what it was he wanted, and less certain what _I_
did, every time he tried to fit my attitude in the car into the rest
of what he knew, he'd come up with a different answer, and nine
answers out of ten were angry and suspicious and agonizing.

"Now look, babe," he said, "you've got to see this. I trusted _you_;
really, all the time, I did trust you. But I didn't trust _me_. By the
time I went to work this morning, I was half-nuts. I didn't know
_what_ to think, that's all. And I finally sold myself on the idea
that if you were what you said you were, nobody would get hurt,
and--well, if you _weren't_ on the level, I better find out, quick.
You see that?"

"Yes," I said.

"Okay. So I told them about the license plates, and about--the other
stuff."

"What other stuff?" What else was there? How stupid could I be?

"I mean, the--in the car. The way you--Listen, kid," he said, his face
grim and demanding again. "It's still just as true as it was then. I