"We'll start a dress shop, darling," Karen had said quickly as if she had already thought about it, which is the way she answered everything. "The sleeper women will want several changes right away."
"You know," he replied, "I think I'll be your manager, set you up. Karen West, Ostarpa's great dress designer. You'll have lots of business and we'll make a fortune."
"I'm not that good," she said, but her face glowed with joy.
Even as he stood there he could hear the words as if they were said a moment ago and he felt as if he should at any moment hear the click of her heels across the floor, and when she'd enter the room, she'd say, "Clifton, what in the world are you doing here?"
The Transit Service had been right. No man was an island. A man might be for a day, perhaps, or a week or even longer. But not for ten years. That's why the service had insisted a man and his wife, proven psychologically compatible, serve together as co-captains of each transit liner.
So it wasn't right that he should spend the next nine years a lonely man. Karen was gone, but what about those hundred people in the sleep locker? He needed someone, a companion, someone to talk to, someone to take Karen's place. Not a woman, of course. That would not be right. Especially after Karen. There could be no other woman like Karen. Besides, suppose they didn't like each other?
"No," he said, standing in the sewing room and shaking his head, "it must not be a woman."
And then he brought himself back to reality. No sleeper had ever been awakened before the liner reached its destination. "And no sleeper is going to be awakened on this trip," he said firmly. He had the power to wake any or all of them in an emergency, but his own personal emergency hardly constituted grounds for that.
But suppose something happens to me? he reminded himself again. Who's going to carry on?
And then he set his lips close together, turned on his heel and left the sewing room. "Nothing," he said aloud, "is going to happen to you. That's why they put medocenters on these ships." And he went to the place and spent the afternoon being checked over.