The wrong Venus - By Charles Williams Page 0,3

now and was trying to break open one of the little plastic bags in which they were sealed. It was tough, and she was making slow work of it. She solved this by taking a corner of it between her teeth and tearing it. He tore the other open. together they dipped the two of them into the crème de menthe. The malevolent pulsing of the mainsprings died with the first contact, like spiders in cyanide. They looked at each other and winked. Then the plane dropped from under them.

They were against the door in a frozen and exaggerated tango step, the girl leaning backward under him with her face against his chest, looking upward. His clothing, which had flown off the hook, began to settle. The shirt fell across his head like a white burnoose. She grinned, and began to hum “The Sheik of Araby.”

The plane was shooting upward now and he couldn’t straighten against the pull of gravity. Something was digging into his shoulder, and he realized that it was the watch movement she still had in her hand. He looked around on the floor for the other.

“It’s in my bra,” she said.

“Oh . . . which side?”

“Don’t be so technical.”

The plane’s upward lunge ceased abruptly and it lurched to port. Colby swung up off the door like an inverted pendulum and staggered back in another tango step with the girl still in his arms. He sat down on the chemical toilet, which fortunately was closed, and she came over onto him, clutching his head with his face pressed into her breast.

“I can feel it,” he said.

“You can feel it? I can tell what time it stopped.”

They flew upright again. This time Colby managed to execute a turn step before they were plastered against the door once more, so his back was against it.

She pulled her face out of his shoulder and turned it up to look at him. “If you have a free hand, would you see if you can pull my skirt down?”

Colby reached down and tugged, but it was caught between them. “I’m sorry. Maybe on the next step across. . . .”

“Well, I suppose at least we could introduce ourselves. I’m Martine Randall.”

“How do you do? My name’s Lawrence Colby.”

“I’m sorry about the lipstick on your chest.”

“That’s all right—” The plane topped out and yawed again. They took a step off the door and then back against it. “Is your skirt all right now?” he asked.

“I think so. I don’t feel tweed any more.”

“Is it Mrs. Randall, or Miss Randall?”

“I’m divorced.”

“So am I.”

The plane was on an even keel for a few seconds. She removed one arm from around his neck and shoved her hand down between them. When it emerged she was holding the watch movement. She glanced at it. “Ten till eleven,” she said. “I’ll probably look like a stamped timecard the rest of my life.”

One of the watches began to buzz in the vest, which was lying on the floor under the washbasin. Colby glanced at his own watch and felt the chill along his nerves again. They were due in London in twenty-five minutes, and so far they’d stopped two of them.

But maybe they were out of the turbulence. The plane continued to bore straight ahead. They untangled themselves and he grabbed up the vest. In a moment they had evolved a system. She pushed them out of the pockets, Colby bit off the plastic bag, dropped the latter in the towel disposal, dipped the watch movement in the crème de menthe, handed it back to her, and she returned it to the vest. They worked swiftly and in silence. He counted . . . ten . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . sixty. . . .

Twenty minutes to London.

The plane slammed into another wall of turbulence. It shot forward and to the right, and they were against the door again. “Damn!” Colby said.

“And just when we were doing so beautifully—”

The knob rattled, and on the other side of the door a feminine voice called out, “I’m sorry, but I must ask you to return to your seats—” There was a horrified gasp, and then the voice went on, “You can’t be in there together!”

“Why not?” Colby asked. “It doesn’t say so.”

“Of course not, but everybody knows—”

That was just what they needed, he thought—a refresher course in la différence while the plane continued to zero in on London at four hundred miles an hour. Why the