Soft come the dragons

refused to be restrained by lips and teeth and gum. "Sorry, sorry," I shook my head, exiting from the conference chamber via a small door at the rear of the stage.
    Krison was waiting in the hallway.
    "Fine," he said.
    Krison always said, "Fine—but—"
    "But," he said on schedule, "perhaps you shouldn't have been so abrupt, so—well, antisocial."
    "I can afford to be," I snapped.
    "But the project can't. We at Space Cent get our funds from Congress, and Congress, in turn, gets its funds from the public. Tell them what they want to know. Straight off the proverbial shoulder, tell them that unmanned probes have discovered as much as possible. Tell them that men must now go in a heavily armored ship to study surface turbulence at close quarters. Tell them about solar flares and solar wind and about how we must know these things before safe space travel is made cheap and easy. But for God's sake, don't brush off the people!"
    "My job isn't public relations. I promised to cybernet the ship to and from—not to answer a lot of foolish questions."
    "If you didn't want to be the center of public interest," he said with a moronic grin, "you shouldn't have had an affair with Mandy Morain."
    "It isn't an affair," I snorted and walked even faster toward the door at the end of the hall, beyond which rested my hovercar.
    He paced me. "Remember, tomorrow starts a four week period of training, exhaustive runs. Mandy. Morain will be out of the schedule for awhile."
    "Yes, coach. I know the rules." I slammed the door as quickly as I opened it. But it only hummed shut softly, and I could feel his grin on my back. Bruce Krison was the ultimate pest—a perfectionist.
    It was raining a misty, cold sort of rain. It nibbled at my bone marrow. The temperature inside the hovercar, a Champion, was a comfortable seventy-four, so I took off my coat, loosened my tie, and settled back in the seat. There was a stiff pain in my neck. I needed relaxation, but there was no place in particular I cared to relax at. The bars would be crowded since the offices closed within the hour, and crowds weren't much to my liking. I thumbed the city-oriented group of maps into the car's "brain" and punched several random coordinates. Closing my heavy eyes, I settled back to rest with the soft moan of rushing wind blowing under the rising craft . . .
     
    "No" she said. "God, God, no."
    He coughed blood and stared at it lying in a black pool.
    His leg seemed pinned beneath the rubble, but when he looked, it wasn't. It was simply turning slightly blue, streaming blood where he could see the skin through torn trouser leg. Slowly, he became aware of her soft moaning, mixed now and then with a thick, gurgling noise.
    Explosion!
    There were other sounds around him. Now and then a chunk of plaster fell with a crash. The whine of white metal cooling to red was the screeching of wild animals in his brain. Steam hissed. There were other moans in the distance, and the sounds of sirens seeped through the watts of flames.
    "Marie," he whispered, for he was afraid to speak aloud.
    There was an indistinct mumble, a thick gurgle. He forced himself to his knees, and his leg felt better. Only a slight cut, the blue color proving to be concrete dust. The entire scene was out of Dante. The fire watts were high, and the wreckage of the theater was mixed with parts of what he recognized as a cybership. Some Sensitive had been used to his limits and had not been able to center the ship into the landing cushions of the Port two blocks away. He had set her down, rather had crashed her into the theater.
    "Marie," he whispered again, feeling the throb of his heart race almost out of control. Then, dragging himself through the dust-choked ruins, he topped a pile of rubble and saw her. . . .
    Her eyes were gone.
    Her face was blistered and blackened.
    And the black sockets of her eyes bled rust water . . .
    "My God. Kill me. Kill me," she screeched at him.
    "Marie," he whispered.
    "Mercy. Kill me!"
    His stomach fluttered, tumbled. He couldn't! Not kill her! God please strike them both dead!
    He staggered away. He broke into a run. But to the far limit of the fire walls, he could hear her. "Kill me! Jessie, Jessie, please!"
    And the worst of it was, he felt no pain. She suffered, and sitting next to her, he escaped.
    The fire walls danced.
    JESSIE! The scream shook the world, and hands from outside putted him through the fire watts . . .
     
    I woke to the crash of raindrops against the