Passage to Gomorrah. Robert F. Young

was a business transaction and nothing more.

      Still—

      He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can go to hell, he thought—

      But she didn’t. She went to New America, instead. He accosted her on a sunny avenue in Little Chicago and they turned, hand in hand, down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The season was spring, and the warm air had activated the thermo-statically controlled Hi-Fi’s hidden in the foliage, and the air was filled with the singing of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that wound up to a secluded cottage, and they walked through scented coolness to the door. He noticed, then, that all the while they’d been walking, she’d been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been raining, too, despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with rain-drops, and raindrops twinkled on her long, tanned legs—

      He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. “I’ll be damned!” he said. There was a persistent bell-like sound in his ears, and presently he recognized it as the beeping of the communicator. He got up, then, and went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message which the receiver had emitted:

      From: Port Authority, Wine-Women-and-Song, Thais

      To: Nathaniel Cross, Pandora

      A Priori disturbance reported bulding up in path of your reality-flow. Emerge into normal space at once and await further instructions. Acknowledge.

      Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clairvoyant? Had she known there was going to be a storm?

      He hurried toward the control panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel again, the towel and the deliberate shower. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to work off her passage, but it didn’t do any good, and his anger kept intensifying till it superseded his common sense, till it transformed him from a seasoned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control panel simply hadn’t been designed to be operated by a frustrated schoolboy, and when his fingers sought to punch out the pattern that would snap the Pandora back into normal space, they punched, instead, a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.

      The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons and, at the same time, it temporarily incapacitated the particular unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back against the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the automatic shock, his body going numb. He slid slowly to the deck, still conscious but unable to move his limbs.

      The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer. Lying there, watching the room dissolve around him, he experienced a strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how much he really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just made had been the result of his anger, or whether his anger had merely been a trumped-up excuse for making the mistake; whether the entire action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the Lady Berenice’s past....