“Uh huh.” She nodded and looked up again, half defiantly.
“Was he a jerk?”
“No. He was all right. I was the jerk.”
Deitrich sipped his wine. “Don’t feel so bad about it, Sara,” he said. “Don’t feel so bad about running away. The universe is full of people who are running away all the time.”
“Oh, I know,” she replied. “I’ve got over it. I’m a full forty-six now—subjectively. But you were curious. So I told you.”
The woman on the bar had stopped singing and gone away. From somewhere a weird orchestra was playing tunes from the outer colonies.
“Now you tell me what you ran away from,” she said.
“Me?” Deitrich mused. “Nothing. I was just a crazy kid. It was the new thing, very marvelous. The pay was much better than you could get anywhere else with my experience, so I signed up.” He smiled wistfully. “You should have seen me strut the first time I got back. All my old buddies were middle-aged by then, and I was still the cocky kid. It must have taken me a week to realize that they wouldn’t have a thing to do with me.”
She gazed at him over the rim of her wineglass. He watched the faint creasing of tired lines around her eyes as she smiled. He grinned happily back at her.
There was more wine, and they sat there, talking the language of their own time, stumbling occasionally on the half-forgotten constructions, and laughing delightedly at the jokes that were laughed at then. Although their spheres of activity had been so diverse that neither actually could recall anyone that was personally known to both, it was enough that they both knew the same world. They reviewed the minor catastrophes that had been so important. A half-remembered fragment of a popular song, and the theater, and one excursion season when they both had been in Lunar City, Luna—apparently at the same time. The fact that there had been seven million other humans in Lunar City along with them did not seem to lessen the intimacy of the coincidence in the slightest.