I tightened my arms and kissed her. It started gently—just a kiss sneaked in between dances—but her arms were growing tighter too, and her fingers were hooking. We held it, while I listened to the blood running in my ears, until we broke apart, both of us dropping our arms, standing and looking at each other, dragging air down our throats.

"Ash! You—"

She started to say something, and broke it. It sounded a little too much like a movie heroine, all of a sudden. She was holding the pose a little too long, too. "Hell, she's a kid—she's doing it the way the grown-ups in the movies do it," I told myself, but I'd danced her out here for a purpose. Maybe she didn't deserve it, but I was sick to death of the little bits of fluff that hung around, drinking in borrowed glamor, getting the big play from boys like Harry Thorsten.

I reached out and grabbed.

"Now comes the part you've really been asking for," I said. I crouched, bent her over my knee, and brought my hand down. Hard. Three times in all, putting everything I had into it.

"Now," I said, letting her get up, "maybe you'll quit bothering guys who worked all their lives to get in a spot where they could go out and be of some help in the only job they ever wanted—the TSN. Do you think you really stack up worth a damn beside the only thing that counts?"

She just stood there, tears of rage in her eyes. I was never sure whether it was what I'd done or what I said that had her so mad, but the last thing I heard her say as I walked away was: "Damn you, Ash Holcomb! Damn you for being such a snobbish stuck-up...."

Well, maybe I was wrong and maybe I wasn't. I didn't know as much in those days as I should have, either. But it was too late now—too late by a war and a hundred revolutions, too late by all the men who'd gone down before my guns, too late by years of loneliness and bitterness.

But if it was too late, why did I remember it all now, with Thorsten up in the Asteroids, a little king in his own right, with me in the New Shanghai, a white ray-burn splashed through my hair, with the Academy a dim thing behind both of us, and Pat—

Why was Pat here? What had she done through the years, while I fought my way from one end of the System to the other, and Harry took the easy way out during the war?

"Hello, Pat," I said. "I haven't seen 

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