These specialists, the models and gladiators, were something of a race apart, computer-picked in infancy and raised for their professions like Japanese sumo wrestlers. They were scarcely expected to enter the more sensitive realms of the arts, business affairs or government.
It was, Lindsay decided, a hell of a state of affairs.
Nina Beckwith, Lindsay's Earth-assigned personal secretary, was leaning far back in her tilt-chair with her feet on the desk. Her eyes were squinted behind chartreuse-tinted flat-oval lenses to avoid fumes from a cigarette stuck in a corner of her wide mouth. She had shut off the air-conditioner, opened the picture window and pulled the pants of her coverall far up above her knees to let the warm New Orleans September air wash over her skin.
Lindsay looked at her legs with surprise—it had not occurred to him that Nina owned such a long and shapely pair. He whistled softly through his teeth.
Nina removed her smoke, sighed and made a move to stand up and let her coverall fall back over the exposed limbs. Lindsay said, "Not on my account—please! Those are the first good looking legs I've seen since leaving Mars."
"Watch yourself, boss," said Nina and indulged in a slow half-smile. Then, putting her feet back on the floor, "You certainly lost a lot of friends and disinfluenced a lot of people down there today. If you'd prepared your speech on the machine I'd have fixed it up for you."
"Which is exactly why I prepared it in my hot little head," Lindsay told her. "I wanted to knock some sense into them."
Nina got out of her chair and snuffed out her cigarette in the disposal tray, then sat on the edge of the desk and poked at the untidy dark-blonde hair she wore in a knot on top of her head. She said, "Night soil! You'll never knock any sense into that mob."
Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, "Why in hell do you work for them then?"