Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [69]
"Guns?"
"I brought a souvenir back from 'Nam. Registered lost."
"So did I." Mark gave up on the map. "We'd want a siphon. For awhile you'd find abandoned cars—"
"I always carry a siphon."
"Hey. Why don't we get together about the time the head's supposed to pass?"
Frank didn't answer immediately. Joanna said, "Even if nothing happens, it'd be a great comet-watching party. Maybe we could get Lilith in."
Frank Stoner thought it over for a few seconds longer than was tactful. He did not make promises lightly, and the comet was becoming real to him. Mark was a good man in a fight, but he couldn't always do what he said he could do, and he tended to drop things, and there was that brand-new beer belly. To Frank, that belly was a piece of personal sloppiness. Still … "Yeah. Okay. Not here, though. Say we take some sleeping bags up onto Mulholland the night before."
Mark raised his saki cup in salute. "Good. It'd take a bitch of a tsunami to reach that high. And we could go off the road if we had to." He would have been displeased if he could have followed Frank's reasoning.
Frank was concerned for Joanna. He didn't think Mark could protect her. And Joanna, with her kung fu training and Women's Lib self-confidence, probably thought she could protect herself.
It took Eileen almost half a minute to realize that Mr. Corrigan was sitting on the edge of her desk, studying her. Bolt upright at her desk, she sat with her fingers motionless on the keyboard. Her eyes seemed to study a blank wall … and then, somehow, they found Corrigan in the foreground. She said, "Yah!"
"Hi. It's me," said Corrigan. "Care to talk about it?"
"I don't know, Boss."
"About a month ago I would have sworn you were in love. You'd come in with that sappy look, and sometimes you'd be dead tired and grinning all over. I thought your efficiency would go down, but it didn't."
"It was love," she said, and smiled. "His name's Tim Hamner. He's indecently rich. He wants me to marry him. He said so last night."
"Um," said Corrigan, not liking that. "The crucial question, of course, is whether the business will collapse without you."
"Naturally that was the first thing I thought of," said Eileen, but with a pensive look that Corrigan didn't quite know how to take.
"Occupational hazard," he said briskly. "Do you love him?"
"Oh … yes. But … nuts. I've already made up my mind," she said, "but I don't have to like it." And she attacked her typewriter with a ferocity that drove Corrigan back to his own desk.
She called Tim three times before she found him home. Her first words were, "Tim? I'm sorry, but the answer's no."
Long pause. Then, "Okay. Can you tell me why?"
"I'll try. It's … it'd make what I've been doing look silly."
"I don't see that."
"Just before we met I made Assistant General Manager at Corrigan Plumbing Supplies."
"You told me. Listen, if you're afraid of losing your independence, I'll settle, say, a hundred thousand dollars on your cringing head and you'll be as independent as anyone."
"I don't know how I knew you'd say that, but … that isn't it. It's me. I'd change more than I'd like. I made myself what I am, and I want to stay proud of the result."
"You want to keep your job?" Tim had trouble getting the word out; he must have thought the idea was silly. But—"Okay."
Eileen pictured herself arriving at Corrigan's every morning in a chauffeured limousine—and she laughed. After that, things went all to hell.
Colleen was reading a paperback novel. Her hair was in curlers. She'd switched on the stereo, and sometimes her fingers tapped in rhythm on the table beside her easy chair.
Fred wondered wistfully what she was hearing. He knew