Night Trap. Gordon Kent

have something to tell you, when you’re ready to talk. It’s something wonderful, but you’re not ready yet and I don’t want to spoil it. Okay?”

      “Okay.” He had been thinking about Rafehausen’s shouting at him.

      She pulled into a motel, got them a room, and led him inside. Desire surprised him, its intensity like something that had been lying in wait. His lovemaking was humorless and driven, separate from his mind so that he was a kind of onlooker; yet there was physical relief, and the sense of pleasing her.

      “You’ve changed,” she said. She cradled his head. “My poor lover. Want to share it with me?”

      “What?”

      Tears filled her eyes. “Don’t I mean anything to you?” She wept. “I can’t get through to you!” He saw that he was supposed to comfort her, tried, turned it to sex, and became again humorless and driven.

      1600 Zulu. Tehran.

      Franci will not remember that he is awake sometimes. He will remember things after the sixth day; this is only the fourth day. Yet, he already knows that he has lost one leg. He does not know how he knows it. In fact, a doctor stood by his bed and told another doctor; he has forgotten the event, but his mind has seized the fact. Already, his brain is working on being a different person—no longer young, no longer whole, no longer full of life and promise. He is deadened with drugs and he seems unconscious, but his brain is working on the proposition that a few seconds at the radar post, the flipping of a switch, somebody else’s callousness, have stolen his future. He has not yet been told that he is a eunuch.

      1600 Zulu. Florida.

      His father owned a house near Five Points in Jacksonville. Alan remembered it from visits after the divorce. His mother had waited a year and then married a nice guy from Iowa, and Alan had visited his father during two humid Florida summers. Then his father had had other duty stations, but he liked Florida and kept the house.

      Part of it was rented to a j.g. from another squadron. When Alan’s father was there, they shared the house; when either was away, he locked his bedroom and that was that. A succession of such housemates had trooped through, leaving the house anonymous and male.