"Ah, you don't want my ideas. They're as mad as your own." She leaned over the arm of the couch and touched several glowing spots on its outer surface; at once the illumination of the room cooled and faded. The forest green walls, complimentary to her own coloring and to the clothing she wore, appeared to recede and become the dark depths of a woodland on a moonless night; the furniture seemed to change into moss-grown stumps and great misshapen rocks. Overhead, the ceiling turned dusky blue under the play of hidden tint-beams, and miniature galaxies twinkled and gleamed across its surface, their varying incandescence giving the illusion of tridimensional infinity.
Alan set down his glass and looked over at her. She was a shape of nocturnal secrecy, sinuous darkness against which her nails and eye-lashes burned with phosphorescent sapphire. Her use of the luminous lacquer was an artful bit of technique. It made her into a fantastic mystery which cried out to be solved. Although Alan had seen the trick before, he could never resist it. It was unbelievable that the sober girl in a shapeless smock who sweated in the metallurgy lab was also this Cleopatra, this shadowy temptress; Troy's exquisite Helen, yearning for love, her strong enchantments designed to make her both conqueror and conquest.
Forgetting the half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, forgetting the supermen and everything else but his physical craving, he threw himself down on the wide couch beside her. His hands touched the live softness of the halter and slid to her back. The sweet strong muscles glided under his fingers as she lifted her arms to take his face between her hands. Then his hands went down from flesh to fabric and he felt her long body pressing tight against him, close as his own skin.
He opened his eyes and saw the glowing purple of her lashes and in the thick gloom the dimmed luster of her teeth between the parted lips. He kissed her and closed his eyes again. He touched her throat, where the blood throbbed close to the surface in a fast steady rhythm; he found other pulses and held his fingertips on them until his own caught their beat and merged with it and the separate throbbings were one.
It was dark, then very dark, the dark of a sunless sea lapping all about them, and slowly it grew lighter and he was sitting up to run his fingers through his unmanageable hair and remember that some time ago he had been holding a cigarette.
"Hey," he said, "what happened to my Rocketeer?"
Win stretched out a lazy arm and brought the lights up once more. "Sure you didn't put it out?"
"I swear I didn't. My God, here it is," he said, picking it off the couch where it had been smashed and its tobacco scattered. "What did I stub that out on?"
"Probably the couch. It doesn't matter, it's resistant."