He punched the control module to set up an automatic course for Marilyn’s apartment building with its small but adequate roof field.

“She’s probably in love with you,” Heather said, as he parked the skyfly on its tail, releasing then the descent stairs.

“Like forty million others,” Jason said genially.

Heather, making herself comfortable in the bucket seat of the skyfly said, “Don’t be gone very long or so help me I’m taking off without you.”

“Leaving me stuck with Marilyn?” he said. They both laughed. “I’ll be right back.” He crossed the field to the elevator, pressed the button.

When he entered Marilyn’s apartment he saw, at once, that she was out of her mind. Her entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were trying to ingest herself. And her eyes. Very few things around or about women made him uneasy, but this did. Her eyes, completely round, with huge pupils, bored at him as she stood silently facing him, her arms folded, everything about her unyielding and iron rigid.

“Start talking,” Jason said, feeling around for the handle of the advantage. Usually—in fact virtually always—he could control a situation that involved a woman; it was, in point of fact, his specialty. But this … he felt uncomfortable. And still she said nothing. Her face, under layers of makeup, had become completely bloodless, as if she were an animated corpse. “You want another audition?” Jason asked. “Is that it?”

Marilyn shook her head no.

“Okay; tell me what it is,” he said wearily but uneasily. He kept the unease out of his voice, however; he was far too shrewd, far too experienced, to let her hear his uncertainty. In a confrontation with a woman it ran nearly ninety per cent bluff, on both sides. It all lay in how you did it, not what you did.