Stranger in a Strange Land

baritone voice asked.
                "Speaking. That you, Ben?"
                "The stalwart upholder of the freedom of the press in person. Little one, are you busy?"
                "What do you have in mind?"
                "I have in mind taking you out, buying you a bloody steak, plying you with liquor, and asking you a question."
                "The answer is still 'No.'
                "Not that question. Another one."
                "Oh, do you know another one? If so, tell me."
                "Later. I want you softened up by food and liquor first."
                "Real steak? Not syntho?"
                "Guaranteed. When you stick a fork into it, it will turn imploring eyes on you."
                "You must be on an expense account, Ben."
                "That's irrelevant and ignoble. How about it?"
                "You've talked me into it."
                "The roof of the medical center. Ten minutes."
                She put the street suit she had changed into back into her locker and put on a dinner dress kept there for emergencies. It was a demure little number, barely translucent and with bustle and bust pads so subdued that they merely re-created the effect she would have produced had she been wearing nothing. The dress had cost her a month's pay and did not look it, its subtle power being concealed like knock-out drops in a drink. Jill looked at herself with satisfaction and took the bounce tube up to the roof.
                There she pulled her cape around her against the wind and was looking for Ben Caxton when the roof orderly touched her arm. "There is a car over there paging you, Miss Boardman-that Talbot saloon."
                "Thanks, Jack." She saw the taxi spotted for take-off, with its door open. She went to it, climbed in, and was about to hand Ben a backhanded compliment on gallantry when she saw that he was not inside. The taxi was on automatic; its door closed and it took to the air, swung Out of the circle, and sliced across the Potomac. Jill sat back and waited.
                The taxi stopped on a public landing flat over Alexandria and Ben Caxton got in; it took off again. Jill looked him over grimly. "My, aren't we getting important! Since when has your time become so valuable that you send a robot to pick up your women?"
                He reached over, patted her knee, and said gently, "Reasons, little one, reasons-I can't afford to be seen picking you up-"
                "Welll"
                "-and you can't afford to be seen being picked up by me. So simmer down. I apologize. I bow in the dust. I kiss your little foot. But it was necessary."
                "Hmm ... which one of us has leprosy?"
                "Both of us, in different ways. Jill, I'm a newspaperman."
                "I was begimiing to think you were something else."
                "And you are a nurse at the hospital where they are holding the Man from Mars." He spread his hands and shrugged.
                "Keep talking. Does that make me unfit to meet your mother?"
                "Do you need a map, Jill? There are more than a thousand reporters in this area, not counting press agents, ax grinders, winchells, lippmanns, and the stampede that headed this way when the Champion landed. Every one of them has been trying to interview the Man from Mars, including me. So far as I know, none has succeeded. Do you think it would be Smart for us to be seen leaving the hospital together?"
                "Umm, maybe not. But I don't really see that it matters. I'm not the Man from Mars."
                He looked her over. "You certainly aren't. But maybe you are going to help me see him-which is why I didn't want to be seen picking you

                "Huh? Ben, you've been out in the sun without your hat. They've got a marine guard around him." She thought about the fact that she herself had not found the guard too hard to circumvent, decided not to mention it.
                "So they have. So we talk it over."
                "I don't see what there is to talk about."
                "Later. I didn't intend to let the subject come up until I had softened you with animal proteins and ethanol. Let's eat