it sounds like. But I'm the only one who doesn't. Now you better give
it to me straight, because they've got half the security personnel of
this entire area out hunting for you, and nobody else is going to care
much what the truth is. My God, on top of everything else, you had to
_run away_! Now, give out, kid, and make it good. This one has got to
stick."

I didn't understand a lot of what he said. I started trying to
explain, but he wouldn't listen. He wanted something else, and I
didn't know what.

Finally, he made me understand.

He'd almost believed my story the night before. Almost, but there was
a detail somewhere that bothered him. He couldn't remember it at
first; it kept nudging around the edge of his mind, but he didn't know
what it was. He forgot about it for a while. Then, in the Garden, I
made my second big mistake. (He didn't explain all of this then; he
just accused, and I didn't understand this part completely until
later.) I wanted him to park the car.

Any girl on Earth, no matter how sheltered, how inexperienced, would
have known better than that. As he saw it, he had to decide whether I
was just so carried away by the night and the mood and the moment
that I didn't _care_--or whether my apparent innocence was a pose all
along.

When we separated in front of the hotel that night, we both had to
take the same road for a while. Larry was driving right behind me for
a good three miles, before I turned off at the motel. And that was
when he realized what the detail was that had been bothering him: my
car.

The first time he saw me, I was driving a different make and model,
with Massachusetts plates on it. He was sure of that, because he had
copied it down when he left the luncheonette, the first time we met.

Larry had never told me very clearly about the kind of work he did. I
knew it was something more or less "classified," having to do with
aircraft--jet planes or experimental rockets, or something like that.
And I knew, without his telling me, that the work--not just the _job_,
but the work he did at it--was more important to him than anything
else ever had been. More important, certainly, than he had ever
expected any woman to be.

So, naturally, when he met me that day, and knew he wanted to see me
again, but couldn't get my address or any other identifying
information out of me, he had copied down the license number of my
car, and turned it in, with my name, to the Security Officer on