"You could call him tender," agreed Kintyre. "And yet he was a man. We took some rough hikes and pack trips, during the years we knew each other; and lately, after I got him interested in judo, he was doing very well. In the course of these amusements I've seen him get damaged now and then, sometimes rather badly. But he never admitted feeling any pain."
"I guess you'd consider that a virtue," she said.
They parked in the hills, with the Eastbay cities like a galaxy of stars below them, San Francisco an island universe across darkness. She sighed and leaned against him. He wondered, dimly alarmed, why he had come here.
"What are you going to do?" she asked him.
"Me? In the next few days, you mean? Oh, wind up his University work. Call on his family; haven't seen them in a long time now. What about you?"
"Carry on. What else is there?"
"I don't know," he said in his helplessness.
She turned to him and her fingers clawed at his coat. "Bob, don't take me back to my place," she whispered. "Not tonight. Don't leave me alone."
"Huh? But—"