John Varley - Millennium

"Why don't we take mine, anyway?" she said. "I can drop you off here later."

It sounded like a good idea, until I saw her car.

It was one hell of a car. I looked at it, then at her. She was smiling innocently at me, so I looked back at the car.

I'm not even sure what it was, but it was Italian, looked like it had been built about twenty or thirty years from now, was about eighteen inches high and thirty feet long, and seemed to be doing sixty just sitting there. I figured it had to cost eighty or ninety grand.

Okay. This is her boyfriend's car. Or she has a lucrative side income. Maybe a rich uncle just died, or her parents had money. There was no way she could have paid for it on an airline ticket agent's salary.

Frankly, I was getting a little dubious about her. Small things were adding up the wrong way. For instance, with this sitting in the garage she rode the "underground" to work? And let's be brutally frank. With a face and a body like that, she was eager to go out with a guy like me? I began to fear she might be a disaster groupie. They exist, though they tend to be male.

But when they're female, they can be very weird. Suddenly I remembered that morning in the hangar, when she'd run away from me. She'd been looking very hard at those plastic bags full of debris. Was she getting some kind of kick out of it? Back in the airport she had seemed like an impossible dream. So when I finally understood that she was trying to help me, that she actually wanted to go to dinner with me and was doing her best to get me to ask, I hadn't questioned my good fortune. But what did she really want from me? I doubted it was my dashing good looks and suave conversation.

I shoehorned myself into the passenger seat and she backed out, the foreign fireball under the hood rumbling like a big cat. The car purred along to the parking lot gate and we got in line. She looked over at me.

"Was it very bad today?" she asked.

Right. Here we go. I get to trot out my gruesome stories for the lady.

"It was terrible."

"Then let's forget about it. Let's ban all talk about crashes. Let's don't even talk about airplanes."

So there was another theory out the window. I just couldn't figure where she was coming from. As we neared the toll gate I studied her again in the blue glare of the parking lot lights.

Something else had been bothering me.

It was her clothes. There was nothing wrong with them. She looked good in them. But they were old-fashioned. She was in her civilian clothes now, and I hadn't seen anything quite like them for ten years. I don't claim to be a fashion expert, but even I could see they didn't go together. The skirt didn't match the blouse. The hemline was too high on her skirt. Her blouse was thin enough for me to tell she was wearing a bra.

I was still puzzling over it when she paid the parking charge by dumping a fistful of coins into the attendant's hand and letting him pick out what he needed. I remembered doing much the same thing at Calcutta airport.

Then she eased the lean, hungry machine out onto the access road, and we took off without waiting for clearance from the tower. It was like being in one of those car commercials where they try to prove their machine is more suited for aviation than for mere highways. We made the freeway in one piece, and then she really opened it up. She cut in and out of holes I never even saw, like the other cars were stationary obstacles.

After the first surge of fear I stopped reaching for the brake that wasn't there, sat back, and admired the performance.

Damn it, that lady could drive.

She took me to Jack London Square. I'd heard about it but never seen it. It looked touristy, but then I'm not a gourmet.

She parked, and I pried my fingers loose from the sides of the seat and managed to sort of roll out, amazed to be able to breathe, thankful for my life. She looked at me like she couldn't figure out what was wrong. I felt very old all of a sudden. I decided she probably hadn't been going all that fast, it was just me turning into a fossil. I'm sure I drove just as fast in my own hot-rod days, and as for some of the stunts we pulled in our Navy jets ...

We went into a place called Antoine's, which was crowded. Naturally, we didn't have a reservation. The maitre d' told me it would be about forty-five minutes. I reached for my wallet, thinking I might grease his palm a little, when a magic thing happened. He got a look at Louise.

I guess he couldn't bear the thought of having her cool her heels in the lobby. I didn't see her do anything; hypnosis, maybe. Whatever it was, there was suddenly an available table by the window overlooking the water.

There were a lot of little boats out there, bobbing at anchor and drenched with rain: It was beautiful. I ordered a double scotch on the rocks, and she said she'd have the same. That pleased me. I never did understand why people want drinks that taste like candy and have paper umbrellas in them.

The menu was in French. Guess what? She spoke it like a native. So I let her order, hoping she wouldn't saddle me with snails or eels or something.

Our drinks arrived at a close approximation of the speed of light. I could see in our waiter's eyes that Louise had made another conquest.

Somebody started playing a piano. Louise paused, and I saw that look again. She was consulting the memory banks, but she couldn't have had to look hard for that one.

"'As Time Goes By,'" she said.

"Here's looking at you, kid," I said, and raised my glass.

She drained hers neat. I must have stared.

"I needed that," she said.

I motioned for the waiter, and sure enough, he'd been looking at Louise and some of her magic rubbed off on me, because he was there very quickly with another of the same.

"It certainly looked like it." I needed one, too, but I sipped at mine. She sat sort of sideways in the chair, one arm draped along the back, her legs stretched out to the side of the table. She seemed totally relaxed, and more beautiful than ever. She cocked her head slightly.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Don't get mad, but I've got m say it. You're very beautiful, and I'm doing my best not to stare too much."

She dimpled at that, and accepted it with a wry nod.

"I can hardly believe my good fortune."

The smile faded a little. "I'm not sure how I should take that"

"What I mean is, I know anybody could see what I see in you, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you see in me."

She sat up a little straighter, and her smile faded some more. Actually, by then it was almost a frown.

"At the risk of letting you think I was feeling sorry for you, you looked lonely and depressed. You looked like you needed a friend. Well, so do I, and I don't have any. I wanted m get my mind off the things I saw today and I thought it probably wouldn't do you any harm, either. But if you -- "

"Wait, I'm sorry I said -- "

"No, let me finish. I'm not doing you any favors. And I'm not out to get anything from you. I'm not a reporter. I'm not a disaster freak. Don't talk about me like I'm your 'good fortune.' I'm me, and when I accepted your invitation it was because I was impressed at how you handled all those fools at the press conference and how you seem to be working so hard at unraveling the mistakes made by the people I work for and I thought I might like to get to know you."

She looked me up and down, clinically.

"Of course, I could have been wrong."

I hadn't until that moment thought she might have been a reporter. I still didn't think so.

But I wasn't spending a lot of time worrying about it one way or the other, as all I could see just then was something beautiful in danger of being wrecked by my suspicions.

"I wish I hadn't said that," I said.