"Look here."
Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.
The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair; something beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in the space between central room and shell, had knifed through wall and board as sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal had sliced the center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the back.
No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot averred he had done.
He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....
CHAPTER IV
That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment. Win—short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her that—opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had died away.
The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display artist with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a pale aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it was drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral of silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back. Her nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity, was graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe nails were lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of her blue eyes were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.
Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.