Hell's Gate

make it like that.”
        “Ouch. I guess I asked for that. Maybe he made me into a masochist.”
        “And I'm not going to lay here and build your confidence by ranting and raving about how good it was, what a beautiful thing we have together.”
        “Because that's not necessary?” she asked. “Ummm. I guess then what I'm feeling is maybe not so silly.”
        “And what are you feeling?”
        She turned on her side, brought the long clean lines of her body against him. What he felt now was not desire so much as a warm contentment at the touch of her, an appreciation of her line and form and loveliness.
        “I'm feeling that this somehow pieced us together. I can tell a difference in you. In the way you treat me. You are human, warm, open now. You were an enigma before. And I feel more complete than I have since the divorce. It isn't just sex. I could have plenty of that any time. We're like two pieces of a dollar bill that has been torn in half somewhere along the line. One piece ends up in the wallet of an old man in New Jersey, the other in the wallet of a young man in Milwaukee. One day both turn up in Miami in a restaurant. The old man's half falls out of his wallet when he pays the cashier. The young man sees it, takes out his own half, finds they match. Its so impossible you want to hold your breath for fear of blowing the halves apart.”
        She snuggled against him, her mouth against his neck. Her fingers traced patterns on his chest. The smell of her was warm and feminine, musky, yet sweet. He could see why she had been attracted to him from the first. She had married a man she thought she understood and found a demon in him. This time, she would be drawn to a man more complicated, one she could not fathom, in the hope that a simple, sincere man lay beneath the surface. Iron Victor would have presented the mystery she wanted to start with. Soft Victor was the simple, sincere man she sought
        Suddenly he felt like an ogre worse than any Henry March, for he was concealing so much from her when she had leveled so totally with him. “Come on,” he said, getting out of bed and slipping into a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, loafers without benefit of socks. “There's something I have to show you.”
        “ Your explanation now?”
        “Right.”
        She slipped into his robe, which was enormous for her, followed him into the hall, past Intrepid who had been lying watching them. He remembered Intrepid had not been fed and watered, but found she had taken care of that after all.
        He took her to the bedroom where the robot lay, turned the thing over for her inspection. He told her the story, beginning with the morning he had awakened in the cave and set out to buy the Jacobi house, omitting only the fact that he had killed Harold Jacobi, She sat very still and quiet.
        She accepted the story, despite its apparent absurdity. Partly, this was because she was reluctant to consider her lover a madman, partly because there were the marks of the vibrabeam to prove what he said. There were also the featureless, lockless trunks.
        “It's now a quarter to one,” he said. “Which means you will pack and leave before the shooting starts.”
        “Bull!” she said shortly.
        “You might get hurt.” It was an inane statement, one of those lines from a book that are verbal translations of such visual obviousnesses that they cancel themselves out. Perhaps in a moment of stress, all men were reduced to the formula plotting of the fiction they read, mouthing inanities from other stories.
        “And you might be hurt too. You might need someone like you did last night.”
        “Look, Lynda,” he said, ignoring the finality, “you'll be in my way.”
        “Bull.” She just wasn't playing the part of the fragile heroine the way she was supposed to. “Are you throwing me out?”
        “Of course not! But if you stay all night, people will think-”
        “You have no neighbors, and I could really give a damn about what they thought if you did. What concern I have for the opinions of the general populace could be placed in a Coke bottle without obscuring the bottom.”
        “That was a pretty heated delivery,” he said, grinning in spite of himself.
        “I can stay then?”
        “You can stay.”
        Her reaction, surprisingly, was like that of a small girl. She threw her arms around him, giggling. She was an intriguing,