"When you have some more money," she meant. And it was all over.
For her, not for him. He found he couldn't get her out of his mind. One night was not enough. The xhindi had been right. Now he wanted her for his own, for the rest of his life if not for all eternity.
He had no romantic fancies that she would be willing to go off with him for the sake of true love and himself alone. He had seen himself too often in the mirror panel on the door of his tiny cabin, and he looked there now, with a chill objectivity. Undersized, crippled, pallid with the unhealthy color that comes from spending too little time in any kind of sunlight, Len Mattern was twenty-four and looked forty. Not even an ordinary woman of the planets could love him, let alone a love goddess.
But a love goddess who loved money could be bought. However, in order to win her, he'd need to have really big money. No matter how efficiently he organized the Valkyrie's operations, the ship was just a battered old hulk and, in her sphere, could never be more than small-time. There was only one answer—hyperspace.
He found Schiemann puffing contentedly at his pipe in the Valkyrie's control room. "Look, Pop," he said, "we've been wasting our time on stardust. We have to aim for something big."
Schiemann looked trustfully at the young man. He had no relatives, so he had come to think of Len as his son, and, in fact, had made him his heir. "Whatever you say, Lennie. Figure on breaking out of this sector and moving in closer to Earth, do you?"
"Not exactly. We're going into hyperspace."
"Sure," Schiemann said, blowing a smoke ring. "Can't leave the sector without passing through hyperspace; that stands to reason. But where are we Jumping to?"
Len tried to keep the tautening of his body from becoming apparent. "We're not Jumping anywhere. We're stopping in hyperspace."
The pipe dropped from the old man's mouth. He caught it in his hand and gave a muffled exclamation as the heat burned his palm. Then he looked at his partner. "Of course you're joking, Lennie." And he arranged his face for laughter.