Lee looked up from the charts on which he had been working; his eyes were tired and so was his mind after ten hours of hard concentration. That was probably what set his thoughts wandering. But strange that they should always wander to those blind spots in his mental vision so intriguing because he knew there was something there that he could not lay a finger on.
The first of these blind spots hovered somewhere between Scriven's words and Scriven's deeds; between The Brain as an ideal of science and The Brain's reality as in instrument of national defense. Somehow the two didn't connect; there was a break, some layer of thin ice, a danger zone which nobody seemed willing to discuss or tread, not even Oona Dahlborg.
Oona; she was that other white spot on Lee's mental map and to him it was much bigger and more dangerous than the first. He loved her as can only a man who discovers loves secret with greying hair and after the loneliness of a desert hermit. He understood, or thought he understood, that because he had failed to live his life to the full in its proper time, this love had come to him as a belated nemesis. His brain knew that it was hopeless; every morning when he shaved, his mirror told him very plainly one big reason why. But then, as the brain told the heart in unmistakable terms what was the matter, the heart talked back to the brain to the effect that the brain didn't know what it was talking about. It was a new thing and a painful thing for Lee to discover that he knew very little about himself and less about the girl.
He had seen Oona on and off over these last months, mostly at the hotel, but he had never been really alone with her. She always seemed to be on some mission, always the center of some group or other of "very important persons", senators from Washington, ranking officers in civvies, big businessmen. Her duties as Scriven's private secretary apparently included the role of a first lady for Cephalon.
Despite this preoccupation an intimate and tense relationship existed between him and her. Sometimes she would invite him to join her group and then for one or two brief moments their eyes would meet above the conversation and her eyes seemed to ask: "What do you think of these people?" or "How do I look tonight?"
His eyes would answer:
"These people are strangers to me; you know that I'm a bit out of this world. But you handle them expertly and you are looking wonderful tonight."
She was tremendously popular, especially with the set of the young scientists who made the hotel their club. This new generation, born in the days of the Second World War, was changing the horses of its feminine ideals in the mid-stream of its youth. The old ideal, the "problematic woman" who had ruled over and had made life miserable for three generations of American males, was on its way out. The new ideal was the woman who would unite beauty and intellect into one fully integrated, non-problematical personality. The ideal being new, the feminine type which represented it was rare. Oona in her perfect poise, in her rare beauty combined with her importance as Scriven's confidential secretary was the perfect expression of the new desired type; it was natural that these young men should worship her as "the woman of the future."
With the hopeless and—in consequence—unselfish love he had for her, Lee wasn't jealous of her popularity. On the contrary, he was rather proud of it like a knight-errant who rejoices in the adoration bestowed upon the lady of his heart. What worried him was a very different problem: Was Oona really all those others thought she was? Was she really that "fully integrated", that "non-problematical" personality she appeared to be?
He couldn't believe it, and the conflict came in because all those others were so certain that she was. He couldn't get over his first impression of her. He had met her in that cabin in the sky, the most synthetic, the most perversely artificial setup one could dream up in the second half of the 20th century. She had impressed him as something "out of this world", a goddess, a Diana with a golden helmet for hair, so radiant as to blind the eyes of mortal men. She was the confidential secretary of a man of genius, Scriven, one of those rare comets which fall down upon this earth and remain forever foreign to its atmosphere. With all these thoroughly abnormal elements entering into her life and forming her, it would be a miracle for any girl to develop into a "non-problematical", a "fully integrated" personality.