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She smiled. "Yes, I believe that. I had noticed you staring at me," she added moments later. She spoke with a smile that belonged to a world of its own, a world that no mathematical formula could ever describe.
I remained in a daze. A door had opened that moment to a New World and to a New Dance. This was a different dance than I had danced before. Had I already become the master of my dance and moved with it into this new sphere of boundless wonders?
I vowed to be careful not to put any limitations on what this dance might present. I certainly had never felt something like this.
"You are a star among stars," I whispered to her, to my own surprise. "That's why I couldn't keep my eyes off you. If one blinks, the wonder is all too often lost and the star is gone."
I think we both blushed.
"Oh, now you are trying to flatter me, or entice me," she replied gently. Her voice appeared so very clear, as though I had never heard the likes of it before. It had a quality that no electronic imaging system could ever map out in true justice.
"No, no!" I stuttered. "I just.... Well, I just tried to put words to a reality that I seemed to have perceived for the first time in my life."
To judge by her look, she didn't seem to believe me. How could she?
"You are very kind," she said politely.
At this moment the elevator arrived.
"I must go to work," she said. The open elevator must have seemed like an escape-opportunity for her. Still, she hesitated for a split second and smiled.
"Oh how wonderfully complex a human being is?" I said to myself. A computer makes absolute choices. It answers, yes, no, but never anything in between. No machine is yet capable of scanning a near infinite range of implications and come up with an answer that is a sixty percent Yes and forty percent No.
"Allow me to accompany you," I replied as swiftly as I could get my reasoning in order to formulate a sentence.
She pressed the button for level six. "Let me warn you, I'm a sewer worker," she said.
I looked at her clothing. A black evening dress and a blouse made of silk seemed inappropriate. A row of silver buttons were narrowly spaced in the front of the blouse, put through perfectly stitched buttonholes. A delicate chain of gold graced her neck, made of a pattern of tiny links woven into a design that resembled the texture of reptile skin.
"A sewer worker?" I heard myself say with amazement. "I had never had much to do with the sewer station. I had seen it once a long time ago, before it had been put in operation. It had been originally designed to employ water hyacinths as I remember." That was all that I knew about it.
She nodded slightly and smiled.
"Yes, I would love to see the sewer station," I answered.
"As you wish," she said gently and smiled again.
"I have ten minutes," I heard myself say to her as I looked at the clock in the elevator. The next moment I heard myself mentally correcting this statement. "NO! Time is an invalid concept!"
"You work on level six, that's near the forty-percent gravity mark, isn't?" I said, just to break the silence.
"It's actually just under forty-percent," she said, "but you guessed very accurately. Are you an engineer?"
"Forty percent is better than zero-percent," I replied. "Forty percent seems like heaven compared to weightlessness."
"You've worked in zero-percent gravity, haven't you? This means that you are an engineer?"
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Stories about
War
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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