Farradyne's mind at first refused to work on any but the single thought: Why didn't it work on Carolyn? Then he wondered whether Norma, so obviously normal now, would react to any gesture of affection, and absently he took a step towards her. He felt once again that flush of pity for her, and anger for the rotten devils who had done this to her; he wanted to comfort her. She had changed visibly from a hardened, lackluster woman whose beauty was stiff and unnatural, to a girl whose loveliness was vivid enough to shine through the hard facade of heavy makeup.
"Norma," he said.
She smiled at him warmly but shook her head. Her arms raised as she tucked the love lotus in the heavy hair over one ear. The gesture slimmed her waist and raised her breasts, and through the triangle of her arms he could see her eyes. They were sultry, but they rejected him as she shook her head slowly.
"No," she said, and Farradyne stopped. "You're a nice sort of idiot, Charles, and I've stopped hating you for the moment, but that doesn't mean that I want you to make love to me." The smell of the love lotus, identical to the heady perfume of a gardenia, permeated the room. Norma breathed it in, lifting her face as she inhaled and closing her eyes. "The smell of this is all I want."
She put her head back, and rested. A smile crossed her face, and Farradyne realized that she had dozed off in an ecstasy of relaxation. He wondered what to do next; his mind was torn between the desire to protect her by letting her sleep off the effects of the love lotus, and the certain knowledge that if he did, Norma would never leave him in time for his meeting with Carolyn Niles tomorrow night. And of the two, the latter was by far the more important.
XVIII
As Farradyne stood wondering what to do, a knuckle-on-metal rap came at the spacelock entrance and he turned to see Howard Clevis coming in. Clevis said nothing, for he had caught sight of Norma. He stopped stock still and looked her over from hair to heels. His face grew bitter and hard, and he turned away from her to face Farradyne.
"Farradyne, this isn't the contact you've managed to make?" The tone was heavy with scorn.
Farradyne shook his head sourly. "She's the one that got me started," he said. "But—"