The Terminal Experiment - Robert J. Sawyer Page 0,8

could really handle.

Cathy was a very bright woman—that had been the first thing that had attracted Peter to her. It was only later that he redefined his own standards of feminine beauty, which had tended toward bouncy blondes à la the beer ads, to find her jet-black hair and thin lips beautiful. She was sitting on the long couch, two of her coworkers—Toby, was it? And that lout, Hans Larsen— on either side of her, so that she couldn’t get out unless one of them moved first.

Cathy looked up as Peter approached, smiled her radiant smile, and waved. Peter still felt a thrill when she smiled. He wanted to sit next to her, but the current deployment of bodies made that impossible. Cathy smiled again, love plain on her face, then shrugged apologetically and gestured for him to take an unused chair from the adjacent table. Peter did so, and Cathy’s coworkers shifted along to make room for him. He found himself sitting between one of the painted ladies on his left—the secretaries and production coordinators who wore too much make-up—and the pseudointellectual on his right. As always, Pseudo had a bookreader sitting in front of him, the cover of the datacard visible through the window in the reader’s shell. Proust. Ostentatious bastard.

“’Evening, Doc,” said Pseudo.

Peter smiled. “How you doin’?”

Pseudo was about fifty, and slim as the Leafs’ chances in the Stanley Cup. His fingernails were long; his hair, dirty. Howard Hughes in training.

Others acknowledged Peter’s presence, and Cathy gave him another special smile from across the table. His arrival had been enough to momentarily stop the separate conversations. Hans, on Cathy’s right, seized the opportunity to grab everyone’s attention. “The old ball-and-chain won’t be home tonight,” he announced generally. “Off to visit her nieces.” That they were Hans’s nieces, too, didn’t seem to occur to him. “That means I’m free, ladies.”

The women around the table groaned or giggled. They’d all heard this sort of thing from Hans before. He was hardly what you’d call a handsome man: he had dirty blond hair and looked something like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Still, his incredible boldness was appealing— even Peter, who found Hans’s infidelity distasteful, had to admit that there was something inherently likable about the man.

One of the painted ladies looked up. Her crimson lipstick had been applied in a shape bigger than her actual lips. “Sorry, Hans. I’ve got to wash my hair tonight.”

General laughter. Peter glanced at the pseudointellectual to see if the notion that cleaning one’s hair might be a priority had registered on him. It hadn’t. “Besides,” said the woman, “a girl has to have her standards. I’m afraid you don’t measure up.”

Toby, on Cathy’s left, chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “They don’t call him little Hans for nothing.”

Hans smiled from ear to ear. “As my daddy used to say, you can always go ’round the edges.” He looked at the woman with the painted-on lips. “Besides, don’t knock it until—until you’ve been knocked by me!” He roared, delighted at his own wit. “Ask Ann-Marie in accounting. She’ll tell you how good I am.”

“Anna-Marie,” corrected Cathy.

“Details, details,” said Hans, waving a mittenlike hand. “Anyway, if she won’t vouch for me, ask that blonde temp in payroll—the one with the big casabas.”

Peter was growing tired of this. “Why don’t you try dating her instead?” he said, pointing at the woman in the Molson’s poster. “If your wife comes home unexpectedly, you can fold her into a paper airplane and send her sailing out the window.”

Hans roared again. He was good-natured, Peter would give him that. “Hey, the doc made a funny!” he said, looking from face to face, inviting them all to share in the supposed wonder of Peter having told a joke. Embarrassed, Peter looked away, and happened to catch the eye of the young man serving drinks. He raised his eyebrows at him, and he came over. Peter ordered a large orange juice; he didn’t drink alcohol.

Hans wasn’t one to let go, though. “Go ahead, Doc. Tell us another joke. You must hear lots of ’em in your line of work.” He roared again.

“Well,” said Peter, deciding to make an effort to fit in for Cathy’s sake, “I was talking to a lawyer yesterday, and he told me a funny one.” Two of the women had gone back to munching on nachos, evidently uninterested in his joke, but the rest of the group was looking at him expectantly. “See, there’s this woman who killed her husband by