s that somewhere between now and then I'll learn how
to toss talk back and forth the way they do."

"Yes," he said glumly.

"James," said Martha brightly, "we should be somewhat better than a pair
of kids who don't know what it's all about, shouldn't we?"

"That's what bothers me," he admitted. "We're neither of us stupid. Lord
knows we've plenty of education between us, but--"

"James, how did we get that education?"

"Through my father's machine."

"No, you don't understand. What I mean is that no matter how we got our
education, we had to learn, didn't we?"

"Why, yes. In a--"

"Now, let's not get involved in another philosophical argument. Let's run
this one right on through to the end. Why are we sitting here fumbling?
Because we haven't yet learned how to behave like adults."

"I suppose so. But it strikes me that anything should be--"

"James, for goodness' sake. Here we are, the two people in the whole
world who have studied everything we know together, and when we hit
something we can't study--you want to go home and kiss your old machine,"
she finished with a remarkable lack of serial logic. She laughed
nervously.

"What's so darned funny?" he demanded sourly.

"Oh," she said, "you're afraid to kiss me because you don't know how, and
I'm afraid to let you because I don't know how, and so we're talking away
a golden opportunity to find out. James," she said seriously, "if you
fumble a bit, I won't know the difference because I'm no smarter than you
are."

She leaned forward holding her face up, her lips puckered forward in
a tight little rosebud. She closed her eyes and waited. Gingerly and
hesitantly he leaned forward and met her lips with a pucker of his own.
It was a light contact, warm, and ended quickly with a characteristic
smack that seemed to echo through the silent house. It had all of the
emotional charge of a mother-in-law's peck, but it served its purpose
admirably. They both opened their eyes and looked at one another from
four inches of distance. Then they tried it again and their second was a
little longer and a little warmer and a little closer, and it ended with
less of the noise of opening a fruit jar.

Martha moved over close beside him and put her head on his shoulder;
James responded by putting an arm around her, and together they tried to
assemble themselves in the comfortably affectionate position seen in
movies and on television. It didn't quite work that way. There seem