Suzy — A Reader’s Guide

That was Suzy's job on earth, in a drab little office with an engineer who controlled her channels, and sometimes blushed at what he heard go out over them. She spoke, sometimes gaily, sometimes gently, sometimes with all the frail strength of her body, into a microphone beamed to each capsule in turn, and in those capsules were men, who, but for her, would go mad before their time was up.

And Suzy never cheated, and she never lied, and she never changed. She was the love light of outer space, she and a dozen others at Point Magu. She kept men sane, and she brought them home, and she kept her promise never to love and never to marry until they came back again.

"Whit? What we were talking about yesterday. Did you think about that?"

"You mean about the gardenias?"

"Umhummm. My gardenias, to pin on my blouse."

"Suzy, I'll bring you a thousand, one each day, until you say you love me. I'm drawing them now, on paper, one every day, for you."

"Aw, Whit, you're awful nice."

Then, after frantic good-byes, shouting, screaming, pounding on the microphone, hoping that the dead metal would somehow speak once more, Whit would settle back for another day's dreaming of Suzy, while he kept his tiny house-in-space, read his little gauges, and kept his dreams alive. It was only in the afternoon that madness came too close, and in the power-saving darkness he raged and cursed and pled and begged, until Suzy's voice came winging out of space to comfort him for another day, when they talked of all the beautiful things that people talk about when there is love between them.

For Suzy loved her men, all seven of them. To know them well, to listen time and again to their recorded conversations, to pick out points that were worth repeating, to avoid the subjects that depressed them, to say what would bring them home in love with her was a pleasure to her, and she worked hard at the job. All alone, late into the night, Suzy would sit in her little office, listening to her records, and planning the next day's battle for the sanity of her men.

"Now Al," she'd muse, "he'll want to know how that recipe came out, the one with the mushrooms. Poor guy, he does like to eat. I'll tell him about the party I went to with Sheila, and how she ate up all the rum cakes and could hardly find her way home again. He'll like that."

"And Jim. He'd like to have another problem, like the twelve coin one. I wish I had a mind like his. Maybe Miss Graham can find me a book on math problems that a man can do in his head. And I'll tell him how nice it would be to be a professor's wife, and a little college in the north. He doesn't want _me_ yet, but he wants somebody...."

"I guess I'll have to talk sex to Crazy Cat, too. It's about the only thing he likes to think about, and that's my job. I hope he doesn't realize I'm not the hellcat he seems to think I am. Maybe some of the girls could give me some ideas he'd like to think about; my dates are pretty dull. They really should have given Crazy Cat to somebody else. Some psychiatrist slipped up there, I guess. But I'll bring him down! I'll bring him down sane if I have to wade in filth up to my eyeballs! That's a joke."

"Whit's hopeless, he loves me so. I hope he doesn't go off the deep end, and end up whacky. Maybe we'll have to relay him some instrument checks, to keep him busy. Or maybe, if I told him I'd marry him it would keep him leveled for a while. Can't say that too soon, though, or he'd go nuts from jealousy. I guess I'll just have to keep on letting him love me, just being me, just showing him I care about him as much as I can. He's a dear, really."

That was the way Suzy mused, in her drab little office, after hours, doing her job for her men, her hopes up in the sky where only her voice and her love could reach them.

Miss Graham was stiff, and stood tall in her prim tailored suit. Her dark man's necktie clashed with her hair and her complexion, but her face was kind and her voice, although firm, was soft and understanding.

"Suzy, I want to talk to you. Don't get up."

"I've been listening to some of your records. Some of this stuff you've been putting out is going to make us trouble, you know."