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Read Ebook: Time and the Woman by Dewey G Gordon
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Ebook has 918 lines and 65475 words, and 19 pages
TIME and the WOMAN
Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight. There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements.
She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns--just one frown--could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle. One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and there--the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, smoothing them.
Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a figure where they were beginning to blur and--sag.
No one else could see it--yet. But Ninon could!
Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved. Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old philosopher had said, "If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!" Crude, but apt.
Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to feel that sureness of power in her grasp--the certain knowledge that she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew how.
Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.
There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A book. "Time in Relation to Time." The name of the author, his academic record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For Ninon!
The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch--Robert was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and opened it.
A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.
"Ninon, my darling," he whispered huskily.
Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the years, it had deepened.
"Not yet, Robert," she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such experiences with men had given her.
Then, "Come in, Robert," she said, moving back a step. "I've been waiting for you."
She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside the young spaceman on the silken couch.
His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced each other.
"Ninon," he said, "you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long time--to carry your image with me through all of time and space."
Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny pout. "If you could just take me with you, Robert...."
Robert's face clouded. "If I only could!" he said wistfully. "If there were only room. But this is an experimental flight--no more than two can go."
Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.
"Wait!" Ninon said, pushing him back.
"Wait? Wait for what?" Robert glanced at his watch. "Time is running out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn--three hours from now."
Ninon said, "But that's three hours, Robert."
"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should rest a little."
"I'll be more than rest for you."
"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes."
"Not yet, darling." Again her hands were between them. "First, tell me about the flight tomorrow."
The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. "But Ninon, I've told you before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back...."
Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away from him. But he blundered on.
"... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light--how many times faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it works, the universe is ours--we can go anywhere."
"Will it work?" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her voice.
Robert said, hesitantly, "We think it will. I'll know better by this time tomorrow."
"What of you--of me--. What does this mean to us--to people?"
Again the young spaceman hesitated. "We ... we don't know, yet. We think that time won't have the same meaning to everyone...."
"... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?"
"Well ... yes. Something like that."
"And I'll be--old--or dead, when you get back? If you get back?"
Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair which swept down over Ninon's shoulders.
"Don't say it, darling," he murmured.
This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right, and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no wrinkles--there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and flexible, of real youth.
She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.
Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. "What were those clicks?" he asked.
Ninon's arms stole around his neck. "The lights," she whispered, "and a little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go...."
The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....
Two hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's tousled hair and shook him gently.
"It's time to go, Robert," she said.
Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. "So soon?" he mumbled.
"And I'm going with you," Ninon said.
This brought him fully awake. "I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!" He sat up and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.
Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.
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