I took a deep breath. "What about your father, Rena? Do you really think the Company is out to get him?"
She looked at me searchingly, then looked hopelessly away. "Not as you mean it, Tom," she said at last. "No, I am no paranoid. I think he is—inconvenient. I think the Company finds him less trouble in the deep-freeze than he would be walking around."
"But don't you agree that he needs treatment?"
"For what? For the radiation poisoning that he got from the atomic explosion he was nowhere near, Tom? Remember, he is my father! I was with him in the war—and he never stirred a kilometer from our home. You've been there, the big house where my aunt Luisa now lives. Did you see bomb craters there?"
"That's a lie!" I had to confess it to myself: Rena was beginning to mean something to me. But there were emotional buttons that even she couldn't push. If she had been a man, any man, I would have had my fist in her face before she had said that much; treason against the Company was more than I could take. "You can't convince me that the Company deliberately falsifies records. Don't forget, Rena, I'm an executive of the Company! Nothing like that could go on!"
Her eyes flared, but her lips were rebelliously silent.
I said furiously: "I'll hear no more of that. Theoretical discussions are all right; I'm as broad-minded as the next man. But when you accuse the Company of outright fraud, you—well, you're mistaken."
We glowered at each other for a long moment. My eyes fell first.
I said sourly, "I'm sorry if I called you a liar. I—I didn't mean to be offensive."
"Nor I, Tom," she hesitated. "Will you remember that I asked you not to make me discuss it?"