Her dark eyes flashed and she wriggled her shapely shoulders angrily with interesting shock waves.
"Since when is this Wisconsin?" she cried. "It's HOAGS' exploding that caused this cold!" She paused. "Isn't it?"
"HOAGS!" I echoed. Things started to add then that by logic couldn't. HOAGS is a new installation, an accelerator where two streams of particles orbiting in opposite directions were caused to meet head-on. Hence the HO.
HOAGS is at Cape Canaveral, Florida, whence American satellites have lanced spaceward since IGY. Cape Canaveral in February boasts the weather that permits if not cries for the abbreviated type of costume this gorgeous young damsel was wearing.
While I was thinking I was also listening and she was spluttering that her father was General Schoener of the Atomic Energy Commission and that he would have me suitably punished if I had kidnapped her—
"Now wait a sec," I said, throwing her my parka after a natural period of bug-eyed hesitation. "I wouldn't be about to kidnap anyone, least of all a flighty teenager."
"I'm twenty-one," she said, her eyes flashing with indignation, and proceeded to enfold the parka around everything save the tip of her cold-pink nose and her long curved legs. The elusive tip of her nose wasn't worth trying to follow as she buried her raven-haired head in the fur collar; there was more of the curvaceous lower extremities in view which merited and claimed my attention. Devoted attention.
"Well?" she said.
"Yes, thank you," I answered, glad the heat—the furnace's thermal radiation, that is—was coming up.
"I mean, what'll we do?"