se cultural queers!

No, she looked like she _belonged_ in the Deathlands. But then why the
counter?

Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her boot
an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.

Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back up
knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met the
super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they
tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.

Maybe she was _testing_ the counter, planning to use it some other way
or trade it for something.

Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter made
good sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?

Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hoped
that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the
trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And
wouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise
gambit?

Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!

She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started to
edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my
whole mind to watchfulness.

Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lunging
range without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn't
spoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd
had to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheral
vision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or six
seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes in
the trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one of
the "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'd
been able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass for
his exclusive pleasure.

* * * * *

The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up and
metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical
pale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the
inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up
between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it
disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of her
forehead.

I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time.

I could even tell the color of