Hanging on

pilot watched her jugs. He seemed hypnotized. When he began to speak, he sounded far away, as if repeating something he'd memorized in church but had never really believed. "I am not aroused by you, because General Blade wouldn't like it if I were aroused by you and brought you back. You'd go around telling everyone about Kelly and this camp and the general's contingency plan, and you'd get the general in all sorts of trouble."
        She moved slightly as she shook her head and her breasts shivered deliciously, the nipples swelling, the cleavage touched with a blush. "No, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't tell a soul. What would happen-you and I would have lots of fun. That's all that would happen."
        "Gosh," the Texan said, still squirming. "Gosh."
        The pilot licked his lips. He was shaking like a train on a bad track, close to derailment. Half the coffee in his cup was gone now, though he had not drunk any of it. "I know you better than that," he said. "I've heard you curse the general, and I know what you'd do. The general wouldn't want you to come back. Whatever the general wants, I want. There's a war going on. In a war, the little people only survive if they do what the big people tell them to do. I'm a little people. The general is a big people. The general doesn't want me to be aroused by you, and therefore I'm not aroused."
        Lily slipped out of her costume altogether.
        The Texan sucked in his breath and almost choked.
        "You've got an erection," Lily told the pilot.
        "I haven't." He was shaking so badly now that his coffee cup was empty. The controls in front of him gleamed wetly; steam rose off them.
        Lily dropped one hand to the juncture of her thighs and performed a magic trick in which one of her fingers disappeared. "Yes, you have."
        The pilot looked down at his lap, at the telltale, arrow-headed bulge in his slacks.
        Lily was running both hands up and down her body now, cupping her fine breasts, now her buttocks, caressing her thighs, almost encircling her waist.
        The pilot opened his thermos bottle and dumped the whole batch of steaming coffee into his lap. He winced, bit his lip until blood came, but did not move otherwise.
        "It didn't work," Lily said.
        The pilot looked at his lap. He was still erect. "Damn," he said. By now, he had bitten his lip so hard that blood gleamed on his chin. His clothes were sodden with perspiration, and his hair lay in lank, damp strands across his dripping forehead. "I want what the general wants."
        "You'll run out of coffee sooner or later," Lily said.
        "No, I won't," the pilot said. "I brought three thermos bottles." He showed her the other two. "I want what the general wants," he repeated.
        She stared him straight in the eye for a long minute, then sighed. She stopped caressing herself and picked up her costume. "I guess you're telling the truth."
        "I am."
        "It's sad," she said.
        She turned and started out of the cockpit.
        "Wait a minute, Lily!" the Texan said.
        She turned, breasts slapping together, flushed green by the control lights. "What is it?"
        His Adam's apple hobbled up and down. "I-Well, I don't care what the general wants."
        "Yeah," she said. "But you aren't the pilot."
        "I could be-one day soon."
        "Hey!" the pilot said. "What's that supposed to mean?"
        The Texan shrugged. "You might take a flak fragment in the neck." He smiled at Lily, as if he were anticipating that development with pleasure.
        "If it happens," Lilly said, "then we'll talk."
        She went back through the plane, down the narrow corridor in the center of the fuselage, toward the hatchway where she had come in. She stopped only once, to slip back into her velvet costume and pull up the zipper.
        Outside, on her way back to the hospital bunker, she began to think about the only two words that mattered: death and sex. Deep down in every man or woman's mind, those were the two words that really counted for anything, two animal urges or conditions of the species which drove you relentlessly through life. You tried to avoid death for as long as possible, while grabbing all the sex you could get. Ordinarily, built as she was and uninhibited as she was, she would be able to function well in a world governed by those drives. But the war had turned everything around. She had sex to