With his fair height and breadth of shoulder, his tanned good-looking features beneath short-cropped light hair, Ray wore all the outward trademarks of a twelfth-century Viking chief or a twentieth-century football hero. But inside, Lynne thought, he was a Mickey Mouse. His very gentleness, his willingness to adjust, made him easily led.
Lynne forced herself to down another spoonful of Helthplankton and thought it tasted exactly like what it was—an artificial compound composed of sea-creatures, doctored up to taste like cereal.
Mother Weedon looked down at her from the head of the table and said, "What's the matter, Lynne—don't you feel well?"
"I'm all right, Mother Weedon," she said. She felt a pang of fear that stirred the discomfort between her temples. If she were really sick, mentally or physically, Mother Weedon might recommend that she be dropped from the team. After therapy she would be reassigned to some other group—and the thought was insupportable.
"Don't worry about our Lynne." Janet's tone bore a basis of mockery. "She has the stamina of a Messalina."
Damn Janet! Lynne regarded the other third of the team with resentment. Trust her to bring a name like Messalina into it. Even Ray caught the implied meaning and blushed beneath his tan. Mother Weedon looked at Lynne suspiciously.
"Better take things a bit easier," Mother Weedon suggested tolerantly. "After all, the team comes first."
"I know," Lynne said listlessly. She pushed her food away from her and waited sullenly while the others finished theirs. Unable to face the possibility of mental illness, she concentrated on Janet, wondered what the girl was trying to do.
There was always danger of conflict, she supposed, when two young women and a young man were set up as a team. Usually the members were balanced the other way or were all of one sex. But mentally at any rate Lynne and Janet meshed perfectly with Ray. So they had been assigned to live and work together on the group-machine under Mother Weedon's watchful eye. They had been together now for eleven months.
The trouble with Janet, Lynne thought, was that she wasn't the sort of girl who registered on men at first sight. She was tall, her lack of curves concealed by astute willowiness of movement, her half-homely face given second-glance allure by a deliberately and suggestively functional use of lips and eyes. Janet was competitively sexy.