"You made it clear enough. They misinterpreted our behavior and were shocked out of their self-righteous puritanical skins."
She shook her head. "Shocked, yes—but not enough to have rushed us through a ceremony that under ordinary circumstances would have required days of preparation. There must have been another reason." Suddenly she glanced up through the foliage at the sky. "It is growing dark."
There was no longer any denying the fact. The roseate radiance of the youthful afternoon had transmuted to a sort of gray murk; moreover, the air had grown appreciably colder. Gordon stood up. "I think we'd better be on our way," he said. "It's going to rain."
A good three hours passed, however, before he felt the first drop. He and Sonya were in the hills now, and the ridge was far behind them. The rain was gentle, but it was persistent too, and both of them were soaked before another hour had gone by. "We will go to my ship," Sonya said, brushing back a rain-wet strand of horse-chestnut colored hair from her forehead. "It is much closer than yours."
Somehow her offering him shelter in a Soviet ship did not strike him as being in the least incongruous. And when, a moment later, he slipped his arm around her waist, that didn't seem incongruous either. And when she permitted it to remain there, even that didn't seem incongruous. For some crazy mixed-up reason life seemed singularly devoid of incongruities all of a sudden. And amazingly forthright and simple.
The rain was extremely penetrating—so penetrating, in fact, that it penetrated his skin as well as his clothing. And it had a curious lulling effect. No, that wasn't the word. A curious soporific effect. No, that wasn't the word, either. Well what word was it, then?
He couldn't call it to mind till after they reached Sonya's ship and were standing at the base of the Jacob's ladder. By then it was too late. By then he was gazing softly down into her eyes and she was gazing softly up into his, and the world was well on its way toward being well lost.
He tried to force himself to step back and regard the situation with the cold and objective eye of a scientist, to evaluate this strange and wondrous quality that fell in the form of rain and to tie it in with the Venusians' motivation in marrying him and Sonya posthaste. In vain. All he could think of was the tune she had been humming by the brook and the hole he had seen in one of her cheap cotton stockings. And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her rain-wet lips, and Washington and Moscow were forgotten place-names on a map that had no more meaning than the paper it was printed on.
The rain continued to fall. Softly; gently. Insistently. It sang soft songs in the leaves. It murmured; it whispered. It laughed.