Someone To Watch Over Me
By CHRISTOPHER GRIMM
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction October 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
In the awfulness of hyperspace, everything
was the nightmare opposite of itself ... and
here was where Len Mattern found his goal!
I
Len Mattern paused before the door of the Golden Apple Bar. The elationthat had carried him up to this point suddenly wasn't there any more.Lyddy couldn't have changed too much, he'd kept telling himself. Afterall, it hadn't been so very long since he'd seen her. Now he foundhimself counting the years ... and they added up to a long time.
But it was too late to go back now. A familiar thought. The commitmentwas moral only, and to himself, no one else—the same way it had beenthat other time, the time that had changed the direction of his wholelife, and, possibly, of all other lives in his universe as well. Therewas only one human being with whom he kept faith—himself. Therefore,the commitment was a binding one.
He pushed open the door and went in.
He saw Lyddy at the end of the bar, surrounded by a group of men. Lyddyhad always been surrounded by a group of men, he remembered, unless shewas up in her room entertaining just one. She half-turned and he sawher face. The sun-pink lips were parted, her eyes still comparable tothe heavens of Earth. She stood erect and lithe and slender.
She had not changed at all!
The tension that had built up inside him snapped with the weightof sudden relief. He lurched against a small hokur-motal table. Itrocked crazily. The zhapik who owned the Golden Apple came out frombehind the carved screen where he'd been sitting segregated from thecustomers. Many of the zhapiq, who had been native to Erytheia beforethe Federation took over, owned businesses catering to humans. It mightbe degrading, but it paid well.
"Maybe you've had enough to drink, Captain?" he suggested. "Maybeyou'd like to come back another time?"
"I haven't had anything at all to drink," Mattern said curtly. "What'smore, I haven't come for a drink."
He strode across the room, firmly now, and brushed aside the men whoclustered around Lyddy. "I've come for you," he told her.
She didn't say anything, just looked him up and down. The beautifulblue eyes skillfully appraised his worth as a man and as a customer.Then she smiled and patted the gilded hair that streamed past her bareshoulders to her narrow waist.
"You're not a Far Planets man," she said. "How come you know about me?"
Funny he should feel disappointed. Sure, he'd been thinking of her allthose years, but he'd never expected her to have been thinking of him.Yet he found himself blurting out, "Don't you remember me, Lyddy?"Then he cursed himself; first because he didn't want her to rememberhim as he had been; second, because he knew every man who'd ever sleptwith her—or a woman like her—would ask the same question. And, ofcourse, she'd have the standard answer, something like "Why, of courseI remember you, honey. I'm just not good at names."
But she just looked at him levelly. "No, dear, I'm afraid I don'tremembe