ed of starvation with the riches she'd given them
still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places
or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the
illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had
been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care
could have made a great and honored scientist out of him.

They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me
their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible.

I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone.
Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no
right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who
reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are
impossible to work out ever could.

I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came
over to where I was sitting.

"You knew we wouldn't find her," he said.

"That's what I kept telling you."

"Where is she?"

"In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in
veils for the depraved--"

"Cut out the kidding! Where is she?"

"What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?"

"That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead."

"She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else,
just that."

He hauled me out of the chair and stared hard at my face. "You aren't
lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not."

"All right, then."

"But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any
part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but
she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and
better-looking than her, for one thing--"

"Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man
when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my
naked scalp. "With a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens
to be a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me--they
checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The
only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head,
which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten
together like gin and tonic."

* * * * *

Lou arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on
you?"

"Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glanced out the
window at the smoky city. "That's why.