Anti-man

out of the ordinary. Just like, I thought, most of the women I had seduced whose voices were similar to the machine's. I leaned over the keyboard and punched a random series of numbers and, finally, the code series for the Port as it was listed on the directory chart beside the console. "That should do," I said. "Let's go."
        The doors sprung open when we touched the release panels, and we clambered out into the night, taking our bundle of old clothes with us. The car closed up, thrummed like a hummingbird for a moment, then executed a swift turn and whizzed back the way we had come, its amber lights receding and leaving us alone in the darkness.
        "What now?" He asked, coming up beside me, shifting the weight of the pack on His back until it settled just as He wanted it to.
        "We hide these clothes we had on," I said, moving to a drainage ditch and pushing my bundle back into the culvert, out of sight. He followed my example, reaching even farther with His longer arms. "And now we climb the fence into the park."
        "Wait," He said, moving past me to the gate where He stopped, examining the lock. He took off His gloves and placed His hands on the padlock. He stared at the thing a moment, as if imprinting the mechanism on His mind. Finally, He grunted and sucked in huge lungfulls of air. While I watched, the tip of His finger elongated, thinned to the thickness of a coathanger wire, and snaked into the keyhole on the face of the lock. A minute or so passed with the wind beating on us like a hundred rubber sledgehammers. Then something clicked. Clicked again, louder. That was the most joyous sound I had ever heard, for I had not been looking forward to the prospect of scrambling over an eight-foot fence in twenty to thirty mile-an-hour winds with a twenty-five pound pack on my back. Perhaps I'm timid and afraid of new adventures, but I preferred walking through to climbing over. He withdrew His hand, reformed His finger into more conventional shape, put on His gloves, and pushed the big gates inward with a dramatic flourish that showed He had seen or read some pretty melodramatic stuff in His free time back at the laboratory.
        "Very tricky," I said, slapping Him on the back. "You should think about going into show business. Get yourself the proper manager and go on the circuit with a magic act."
        We moved inside, closing the gate behind and locking it again. Except for our prints in the newly fallen snow, there was no sign that the night park had been violated, and the continuing storm would cover even those traces in a few minutes. With that flimsy gate between us and the Port, I felt relieved, though I had no reason to. "We'll follow the road for a while," I said. "It isn't likely anyone will be on it at this hour of the morning and in this weather."
        We began walking, goggles over our eyes and face masks pulled down to thwart the biting cold and the tremendous, razor-edged whip' of the wind. The road had been plowed open after a recent storm, but the new snow was rapidly covering it once more. The snowbanks that had been formed on either side by the plows were layered, so many feet thick for each storm of the season. If this rugged weather continued all winter, the road would be closed before spring with nowhere to shove the succeeding deluges. We had not gone more than half a mile when He pulled off His face mask and said, "Tell me about this place we're going."
        I reluctantly pulled down my own mask and winced at the stinging air. It dried my lips almost instantly and started cracking them until I could almost feel the skin slowly splitting under hard fingers of air. I shivered, blew out a cloud of steam. In the true Arctic, I am given to believe from various works I have read, the temperatures drop so far below zero that the breath, upon exiting the body, really and truly does freeze-at least the moisture in it does. The lungs, in this infernal cold, are susceptible to freezing from contact with the icy, dry air, and one must breathe shallowly to avoid this fate. Now, as we trudged along this park road, far from the ice plains of the true Arctic, I marveled that there could be any place in the world with temperatures so cold that these would be classified as a warm spell. "Is it so important to know that I have to risk freezing my mouth and picking up a lovely blue haze on my pretty face?"
        "I'd just like to know," He said.
        I shrugged.