"Aldiss, Brian W - Short Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

greater than one might expect. Except in the totally unprece-
dented circumstances, I mean. We must talk about this in the
next few days."
She waited for him to go on, not unamused by the play
with the cigar. Then he looked straight up at her and said,
"Frankly, Mrs. Westermark, we think it would help your
husband if you could have sexual relations with him."
A little taken aback, she said, "Can you imagine" Cor-
recting herself, she said, "That is for my husband to say. I am
not unapproachable."
She saw he had caught her slip. Playing a very straight bat,
he said,"l'm sure you're not, Mrs. Westermark."
With the light out, living, she lay in Peter's bed
She lay in Peter's bed with the light out. Certainly she
wanted him: pretty badly, now she allowed herself to dwell on
it. During the long months of the Mars expedition, while she
had stayed at home and he had got farther from home, while
he actually had existence on that other planet, she had been
chaste. She had looked after the children and driven round
the countryside and enjoyed writing those articles for wom-
en's magazines and being interviewed on TV when the ship
was reported to have left Mars on its homeward journey. She
had been, in part, dormant.
"Then came the news, kept from her at first, that there was
confusion in communicating with the returning ship. A sensa-
tional tabloid broke the secrecy by declaring that the nine-
man crew had all gone mad. And the ship had overshot its
landing area, crashing into the Atlantic. Her first reaction had
been a purely selfish oneno, not selfish, but from the self:
He'll never lie with me again. And infinite love and sorrow.
At his rescue, the only survivor, miraculously unmaimed,
her hope had revived. Since then, it had remained embalmed,
as he was embalmed in time. She tried to visualise love as it
would be now, with everything happening first to him, before
she had begun toWith his movement of pleasure even
before sheNo, it wasn't possible! But of course it was, if
they worked it out first intellectually; then if she just lay
flat.... But what she was trying to visualise, all she could
visualise, was not love-making, merely a formal prostration to
the exigencies of glands and time flow.
She sat up in bed, longing for movement, freedom. She
jumped out and opened the lower window; there was still a
tang of cigar smoke in the dark room.
// they worked it out intellectually
Within a couple of days, they had fallen into routine. It was
as if the calm weather, perpetuating mildness, aided them.
They had to be careful to move slowly through doors, keeping
to the left, so as not to bump into each othera tray of
drinks was dropped before they agreed on that. They devised
simple knocking systems before using the bathroom. They