Dinner finished, Brad and Felicia left the Crystal Palace. He saw that they would have to pass a table filled with department heads, and Adrian Kosoff, who was cheerily telling a longish joke as they approached.
“Oh, oh,” Brad muttered.
Felicia took his hand in hers and said, “Pay them no attention.”
Kosoff hit his punchline and the whole table erupted in raucous laughter. Brad hoped that Kosoff wouldn’t notice them, but he thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Kosoff’s face abruptly turn from laughter to smoldering anger as he and Felicia passed by.
“He’s sore at me,” Brad said as they reached the restaurant’s door.
“He’s sore at us,” Felicia corrected.
They walked hand in hand to the moving stairs, then down two levels to the area where their living quarters were, Brad feeling as if they were being watched every step of the way.
When they reached Felicia’s door, she said, “I’m pretty sure that I have some lime juice in the fridge.”
Brad hesitated, but only for a moment. Kosoff can see the surveillance camera footage, he knew. All the passageways are scanned constantly. But not the living quarters, they’re private.
Yet he heard himself say, “It’s a little late. Thanks for having dinner with me. I hope we can do it again.”
Felicia seemed neither surprised nor hurt. Releasing Brad’s hand, she merely said, “Sure, anytime.”
Impulsively, Brad leaned down and kissed her. Felicia’s lips felt warm and soft.
“Goodnight,” she whispered.
Feeling awkward and stupid, Brad mumbled, “Night.”
Then he turned away and started down the passageway. He heard Felicia’s door slide open and, a moment later, click shut again.
And he realized he was heading the wrong way. Hoping she wouldn’t see him go past, he put his head down and resolutely marched to his own quarters.
* * *
The phone woke him. Casting a bleary eye at its screen, Brad saw that it was 0645 hours, and his caller was the head of the anthropology department, not Felicia.
The black, heavy-browed face of the chief of the anthropology team filled the phone’s screen. James Littlejohn was an Australian Aborigine: short, slightly potbellied, but nimble both in body and mind.
“Sleeping the day away, Bradford, my boy?”
Brad told his phone, “Audio only,” then rose to a sitting position, the sheet slipping from his shoulders onto the floor.
“I’m awake, sir.”
Littlejohn smiled maliciously. “A strenuous night, eh?”
“Nossir, nothing like that.”
“According to Professor Kosoff you had a very romantic dinner with a lovely little biologist.”
“I, uh, had dinner, yes.”
“You must have impressed Kosoff. He called me at the crack of dawn.”
Dawn, on the ship, was 0600 hours, when the internal lighting system went into its daytime mode.
“About me?”
“Yes. He tells me that you brought up a good point at the bio team meeting yesterday.”
“I did?”
Littlejohn barely suppressed the grin that was trying to curve his thick lips. “He thinks so. Come over to my quarters and we’ll have breakfast over it.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour, sir.”
Littlejohn’s eyes flicked away from the phone camera for an instant. Then he said, “Take your time, no hurry. I’ll see you here in forty-five minutes.”