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I will never forget how surprised I had been. I had felt instinctively that she was right, that the heart of this mission lay not at all in exploring the stars, but in exploring ourselves, in finding the courage to do this, which now stood out as a key-factor to human survival.
Actually, I should have been more than surprised. I should have been grateful to her on more than one count. The captain, who had stood between us ever since we had set foot on this ship, acting as though it were his special responsibility to chaperon all married people, had been dethroned by her discovery of the law. The first door to exploring one other as human beings had been opened. "I think we are both intelligent enough not to hurt each other as we shed the mythologies," she had said.
Oh I agreed with her! Except, this hadn't altered our relationship to the captain. That remained the same.
The captain was a short man with little dignity. Everybody called him Johnny. Some took it as a joke. To me he seemed like a good friend, except for his madness. This had been hard to handle right from the start.
The first time Natalia came to the table where I played chess with him, I embraced her with a quick kiss and then introduced her to everyone. She had sat down and had watched our game for a while.
"Hey! Watch out for your castle!" She had warned me at one point.
"Ah, but watch this!" I had replied, and not heeding the exposed castle, I had taken the captain's queen with a knight, a worthwhile trade for a castle.
She grinned and left us some moments later.
I recall that she had barely stood up when the captain became uneasy. "I want you to know," he had said to me with the face of a judge passing a life sentence, "that I did not see what has transpired between you, and I will not see it again. Is this understood?"
I nodded. I said, "Yes sir!" I bowed as politely as I could! I was astounded, even perplexed, as I watched him clear the chess board, putting the figures back into their box, all over such a little thing.
"I won't overlook it the next time," he had said and had left the table.
I remembered that I had just sat there with my mouth open. It had come like a shock to Natalia too, when I had told her.
"How is one to deal with a person like that?" she had asked.
I had no idea then, that one day I would have kissed his hand on my knees for the outrageous thing he had done, for Natalia wasn't the kind of person who could ignore things like that and let him get away with it. She was a 'fire' that could change the world. And that she did.
Natalia's studying of the constitution made it quite clear to us that we had a right to stand up against him. What he had tried to shut down became an open door to the most remarkable association between two people that evolved like no other love affair likely ever had, out of an exploration into the fundamentals of law.
"How dry!" you may answer? Well, it wasn't that dry at all. It was exiting.
"Hey look here! Look there!" That's how it went, virtually for the entire first night we met in her quarters for this purpose. "Look, no one at all on this ship has any authority over us!" she exclaimed at one point, with a big grin on her face. She pointed to an article, under discipline: "Any individual who subscribes to the laws of this document may engage in individual personal associations of any form, which shall be acknowledged publicly, neither shall any person or officer interfere with the internal affairs of such associations."
We looked at each other.
Some place deep inside me I felt that she already knew what we would discover.
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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