Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [11]
Eileen Susan Hancock was thirty-four years old. She was on the thin side of very pretty, and the reason showed in her hands, which were always in motion, and in her smile, which was nice, but which flashed always too suddenly, as if she'd turned on a light bulb, and in her walk. She had a tendency to leave people behind.
Somebody had once told her that was symbolic: She left people behind both physically and emotionally. He hadn't said "intellectually," and if he had she wouldn't have believed him, but it was largely true. She'd been determined to be something more than a secretary long before there was anything like a women's rights movement; and she'd managed that despite the responsibilities of a younger brother to raise.
If she ever talked about it, she laughed at how trite the situation was: Older sister puts younger brother through college but can't go herself; helps younger brother get married, but never marries herself; and none of it was really true. She'd hated college. Maybe, she sometimes thought (but never said to anyone), a very good college, a place where they make you think, maybe that would have worked out. But to sit in a classroom while a timeserver lectured from a book that she'd already read, to teach her nothing she didn't already know—it had been sheer hell, and when she dropped out the reasons weren't financial.
And as to marriage, there wasn't anybody she could live with. She'd tried that once, with a police lieutenant ( and watched how nervous he was to have her living there without benefit of City Hall license), and what had been a good relationship came apart inside a month. There had been another man, but he had a wife he wasn't going to leave, and a third, who'd gone east for a three-month assignment that hadn't ended after four years; and …
And I'm doing all right, she told herself when she thought about such things.
Men called her "hyperthyroid" or "the nervous type," depending on education and vocabulary, and most didn't try to keep up with her. She had an acid wit that she used too much. She hated dull talk. She talked much too fast, otherwise her voice was pleasant with a touch of throatiness derived from too many cigarettes.
She'd been driving this route for eight years. She took the curve of the four-level interchange without noticing; but once, years before, she had swept her car down that curve, then pulled off at the next ramp and parked her car and strolled back to stare at that maze of concrete spaghetti.
She'd been laughing at her own picture of herself as a gawking tourist, but she'd stared anyway.
"Wednesday," the recorder told her. "Robin's going to come through on the Marina deal. If he does, I stand to be Assistant General Manager. If he doesn't, no chance. Problem … "
Eileen's ears and throat were red in advance, and her hands shifted too often on the steering wheel. But she heard it through. Her Wednesday voice said, "He wants to sleep with me, it's clear it wasn't just repartee and games. If I cool him, do I blow the sale? Do I go to the mat with him to clinch the deal? Or am I missing something good because of the implications?"
"Shit-oh-dear," Eileen said under her breath. She ran the tape back and recorded over that segment. "I still haven't decided whether to accept Robin Geston's dinner invitation. Memo: I should keep this tape cleaner. If anyone ever stole the recorder, I wouldn't want to burn his ears off. Anyone remember Nixon?" She switched the recorder off, hard.
But she still had the problem, and she still felt burning resentment at living in a world where she had that kind of problem. She thought of how she'd word the letter to the goddamn manufacturer who'd sent out the filters without checking to see that all the parts were enclosed, and that made her feel a little better.
It was late evening in Siberia. Dr. Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik was finished for the