He talked with Karen every two or three days. Sometimes he'd call, sometimes she would. She called one of the nights he stayed late at the office and, when he called her the next day, accused him of having been out with a floozie. "'Bimbo' is the eighties word," he told her. They both laughed.

Just when he was eagerly looking forward to having her home, she let him know she'd have to stay another two weeks. "I'm sorry," she said, "but the situation here is so complicated that if we don't straighten it out now once and for all, we'll have to keep messing with it for the next five years."

"What am I supposed to do, pitch a fit?" He felt like it. "I'll see you in two weeks." From his tone of voice, she might have been talking about the twenty-first century?and the late twenty-first century, at that.

However much they tried not to, the days crawled by. Another clich?d thing for a man to do is hug his wife silly when she finally gets off her plane. Mike did it.

"Well," Karen said, once she had her breath back. "Hello."

He looked at his watch. "Come on," he said, herding her toward the baggage claim. "I made reservations at the Szechuan place we go to, assuming your flight would be an hour late. And since you were only forty minutes late?"

"?we have a chance to get stuck on the freeway instead," Karen finished for him. "Sounds good. Let's do it."

"No, I told you, we'll have dinner first," he said. She snorted.

The world?even traffic?was a lot easier to handle after spicy pork and a couple of cold Tsingtao beers. Mike said so, adding, "The good company doesn't hurt, either." Karen was looking out the window. She didn't seem to have heard him.

When they got back to the condo, she frowned for a few seconds. Then her face cleared. She pointed to Mike's fish tanks. "I've been gone too long. I hear all the pumps and filters and things bubbling away. I'll have to get used to screening them out again."

"You've been gone too long." Mike set down her suitcases. He hugged her again. "That says it all." His right hand cupped her left buttock. "Almost, all anyway."

She drew away from him. "Let me get cleaned up first. I've been in cars and a plane and airports all day long, and I feel really grubby."

"Sure." They walked to the bedroom together. He took off his clothes while she was getting out of hers. He flopped down on the bed. "After five weeks, I can probably just about stand waiting another fifteen minutes"

"Okay," she said. She went into the bathroom. He listened to the shower running, then to the blow dryer's electric whine. When she came back, one of her eyebrows quirked. "From the look of you, I'd say you could just barely wait."

She got down on the bed beside him. After a while, Mike noticed long abstinence wasn't the only thing cranking his excitement to a pitch he hadn't felt since their honeymoon and maybe not then. Every time, every place she touched him, her caress seemed a sugared flame. And he had all he could do not to explode the instant she took him in her mouth. Snakes wished for tongues like that, he thought dizzily.

When at last he entered her, it was like sliding into heated honey. Again he thought he would come at once. But her smooth yet irresistible motion urged him on and on and on to a peak of pleasure he had never imagined, and then to a place past that. Like a thunderclap, his climax left him stunned.

"My God," he gasped, stunned still, "you've been taking lessons!"

From only a few inches away, he watched her face change. For a moment, he did not know what the change meant. Of all the expressions she might put on, calculation was the last he expected right now. Then she answered him. "Yes," she said, "I have…"

The law for non-lawyers course did not go to waste. A couple of months later, she did their divorce herself.

Earthgrip

I

The prince of T'Kai let the air out of his book lungs in a hiss of despair. "Of course we will fight," K'Sed told the four human traders who sat in front of his throne. "But I fear we are done for." His mandibles clattered sadly.

The humans looked at one another. No one was eager to speak first. K'Sed watched them all, one eyestalk aimed at each. Jennifer Logan wished she were anywhere but under part of the worried alien's gaze. Being back at her university library was a first choice, but even her cabin aboard the merchant ship Flying Festoon would have done in a pinch.

At last Bernard Greenberg said, "Your Highness"?the literal translation of the title was One With All Ten Legs Off The Ground?"we will do what we may for you, but that cannot be much. We are not soldiers, and there are only the four of us." The translator on his belt turned his Spanglish words into the clicking T'Kai speech.

K'Sed slumped on his throne, a brass pillar topped by a large round cushion on which his cephalothorax and abdomen rested. His walking-legs?the last three pairs?came within centimeters of brushing the carpet and giving the lie to his honorific. His two consorts and chief minister, who perched on lower toadstool seats behind and to either side of him, clacked angrily. He waved for silence.

Once he finally had it, he turned all his eyes on Greenberg. Even after most of a year on L'Rau, the master merchant found that disconcerting; he felt as if he were being measured by a stereopantograph. "Can you truly be as weak as you claim?" K'Sed asked plaintively. "After all, you have crossed the sea of stars to trade with us, while we cannot go to you. Are your other powers not in proportion?"

Greenberg ran a hand over his bald pate. Just as he sometimes had trouble telling the crablike G'Bur apart, they only recognized him because he wore a full beard but had no hair on his crown.

"Highness, you have exposed the Soft One's cowardice!" exclaimed K'Ret, one of K'Sed's consorts. Her carapace darkened toward the green of anger.

"Highness, do not mistake thought for fear." That was Marya Vassilis. She was the best linguist on the Flying Festoon's crew and followed the T'Kai language well enough to start answering before the translator was done. "We do not want to see the M'Sak barbarians triumph any more than you do. Where is our profit if your cities are overthrown?" She tossed her head in a thoroughly Greek gesture of indignation.

"But by the same token, Highness, where is the Soft Ones' profit if they die fighting for T'Kai?" put in B'Rom, K'Sed's vizier. He was the most cynical arthropod Jennifer had ever known. "For them, fleeing is the more expedient choice."

"Manipulative, isn't he?" Pavel Koniev murmured. The other humans glanced at him sharply, but he had turned off his translator. "Get us to feel guilty enough to do or die for T'Kai."

One of K'Sed's eyestalks also peered Koniev's way; Jennifer wondered if the prince had picked up any Spanglish. But K'Sed made no comment, turning all his attention back to Greenberg. "You have not yet answered my question," he pointed out.

"That, Highness, is because the answer is neither yes nor no," Greenberg said carefully. K'Ret gave a derisive clatter. Greenberg ignored it and went on, "Of course, my people know more of the mechanic arts than yours. But as you have seen on all our visits, our only personal weapons are stunners that hardly outrange your bows and slings."

"That might serve," K'Sed said. "If a thousand of the savages suddenly fell, stunned, as they charged?"

Greenberg spread his hands in regret. "A hundred, perhaps, Highness, but not a thousand. The guns have only so much strength in them. When it is gone, they are useless, except as clubs."