"I appreciate your being concerned for me. You have shown your friendship. But a man who moves as I do can leave no hostages to fortune. I cannot be a man and hold this job. Therefore I must be all job. The only life I ever have is the life I live in these roles." With sad drollery he mocked his own role of Mr. Kabashima and thickened his Japanese-accented English, "Rike ziss. Sank so much for having runch wiss me, nice American miss!" When he smiled at her, there was rue behind the smile.
"But I—" Sarah stopped. This was no time for elaborate man-and-woman chess-moves which might permit a man and woman to approach one another in a formal pantomime of daring advance and sweeping retreat. She was talking to a man who was about to catwalk the brim of death, preying upon vast and poisonous Atomsk. Dugan had already faded halfway out of sight into the shabby Mr. Kabashima; he might soon fade into complete strangeness, into distance, into extinction. Yet she would not, could not tell him, "I love you." That was too much.
People don't say "I love you" to grinning Japanese confidence men. What do people say?
With one of the bravest gestures of her life she reached out and took his arm, seizing it firmly. "I do take you seriously… Michael. And you must come back. For my sake."
The Kabashima face remained impassive, alert, courteous, remote as though paned behind ice; Dugan remained incredibly far away, behind the blind mask of his Japanese wraith.
Then his voice, and his voice alone, became Dugan:
"Don't say it!" he rasped in a rapid whisper. "Not another word of it! It'll hurt you, hurt you, Sarah. And I don't want you hurt. A man who's half Aleutian and half Irish can't have a personal life. I found that out when I was in high school." Old bitterness echoed in his words.
She started to protest, but he silenced her with a prohibitive Japanese gesture so odd that it seemed almost Masonic.
His thin hissed whisper went on. "In a week I'll be up in a plane. You know where I'll hit. Over yonder. Near Them. And who do you think I will be? Dugan? Kabashima? Anybody you or I ever heard of? No. Some new man, risen out of that place, proper to that land. Could I think of you while I slip from this person to that, become young or old, white or Asiatic? What's there to me if I dare stop long enough to be me? Do you think that I dare be myself?"
"But, Michael…"