Soft come the dragons

windscreen, and it was the sound of rocks smashing down a mountainside. I threw up my psychic defenses and dulled my cybernetic tendencies.
    It was an old dream. Five years old. I wiped the sweat from my brow and looked at the unwinding map. It was an old dream, but nevertheless disconcerting.
    Sector three, segment two-ought-two. And while that registered, the car drifted to a halt, was scanned by a private robogateman, and swung again into a tree-lined drive.
    In the right mood, I might have laughed. It was Freudian. Positively Freudian that when I wanted to punch a random set of coordinates, I would select those that brought me here. I didn't laugh, however, my mood bordering on morose.
    She said, "Jessie, come in."
    She was wearing a black mini-suit, and her honey hair spilled like wild, sparkling rivers down her slender shoulders. Her eyes were blue, skylike pieces of crystal.
    "Fine," I said. "I'd like to."
    "Should I send the servants away?" She was wealthy enough to afford human rather than robo servants.
    "No. Training begins tomorrow, and I must just as well begin denying myself tonight."
    She curled up on the couch, tucking her legs under her. "You're set on going then?"
    "Yes."
    She was everything the newspapers and magazines and Tri-D tanks said she was. Her breasts were high and firm, her belly flat, her legs long. Goddess legs. And her face fairy tale princess', sugar, and naughty spice. Mandy Morain had been the rage of Modern Hollywood until a year earlier when she startled the filmworld with "I wish solitude to find the man I love."
    She had received four thousand offers overnight.
    She could easily have had many more attractive lovers than Jessie Poul, cybernetist. Much more responding lovers too, lovers without my periodic "trouble."
    I had met her on the set of Languish Queen. They had hired me to cybernet a cave to tell them just when to expect a cave-in. I was to scream a warning three minutes ahead so they could remove MM and the other stars to safe ground. We hit it off immediately. We seemed—almost— to fit like two pieces of a puzzle in our own snug corner of the total picture.
    She leaned over and kissed me. I felt myself, like fireflies, melting into the darkness of her sheltering night "No," I said.
    "No?"
    "Tomorrow is training."
    My eyes seemed to rivet to the leaping flames in the simu-fireplaoe.
    "Tomorrow has not yet come." Her voice was a like a soft summer breeze.
    The flames were orange and red and yellow and tinted with green.
    "Tonight is the threshold to tomorrow." I'm not sure whether I ran out of the house or walked, but when I got home, I let the videophone ring, knowing it was she. With malice aforethought, I drank myself into a fitful sleep. Dreams filled my head, and a face without eyes asked me why do you want to go to the sun? Why to the sun, the sun?
     
    The following weeks were what Krison had promised-work that would break a bull's back. We ran and reran emergency situations. We tested the ship. I familiarized myself with it, with the feeling of the intricate wiring, the platings, the cyberpickups, the shields. In all the lanes of space, there was no ship so heavily shielded as ours. She would have to withstand more raw radiation than we really had a right to ask of her. Other ships had become death traps in radiation storms of less intensity than the ones we would face. If it had been economically feasible to build all ships as well insulated as she, then our trip would be unnecessary. But the cost was—to make a pun—astronomical. The only other alternative was to study the origin of the solar winds in hopes that we could eventually predict radiation storms in space and detour ships around them. Ours was a history-making ship. She was a good ship. There are good ships and good women.
    "There are good ships and good women," said Malherbe, the captain.
    "I only knew one," I said.
    "One? Why, I've captained a half dozen good ones in the last twenty years."
    "I meant women," I said, putting down the coffee and moving to the window to watch the sunset. It was difficult to imagine soaring toward that lantern, toward the gaseous, nebulous, semiliving creature in the sky. But in a few weeks . . . There were pinks and yellows and soft blues, and a man could lose his thoughts, could hypnotize himself almost like watching a painted spiral on a wheel-spinning and spinning and spinning and . . .
    It happened the next morning at eleven o'clock. Malherbe, First Officer