Free Time Waits for Winthrop by William Tenn

looked at him incredulously. “Adventure-some? Exciting?
Edgar?
The only time
he
ever gets close to sport is when he sits on his behind all night playing poker with the boys in the payroll department!”
    Gygyo rose and barged around the room aimlessly, shaking his head. “The casual, half-contemptuous way you say it! The constant psychic risks run, the inevitably recurring clashes of personality—subliminal and overt—as hand after hand is played, as hour after hour goes by, with not two, not three, but as many as five, six or even seven different and highly aggressive human beings involved—the bluffs, the raises, the outwitting, the fantastic rugged contest of it! There is not a man in my entire world who’d be able to stand up to fifteen minutes of such complex psychological punishment—yet, to you, it’s almost nothing!”
    Her gaze was very soft and tender as she watched him knock unhappily about the room. “And that’s why you went into that awful microscope, Gygyo? To prove that you could be as good a man as Edgar is when he’s playing poker?”
    “It’s not just the poker. That’s hair-raising enough, I grant you. It’s so many things. Take this used car that he drives you around in. Any man who’d drive one of those clumsy, unpredictable power-plants through the kind of traffic and the kind of accident statistics that your world boasts—
and every day, as a matter of course!
I knew the micro-hunt was a pathetic, artificial affair, but it was the only thing available that even came close!”
    “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Gygyo.”
    “Maybe I don’t,” he brooded. “But I had reached the point where I had to prove it to myself. Which is quite silly when you come to think of it, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And I proved something, after all. That two people with entirely different standards for male and female don’t have a chance, no matter how attractive they find each other. I can’t live with my knowledge of your innate standards, and you—well, you certainly have found mine upsetting. We don’t mesh, we don’t resonate, we don’t
go
. As you said before, we shouldn’t be in the same world. That’s doubly true ever since—since we found out how strongly we tend to come together.”
    S he nodded. “I know. The way you stopped making love to me and—and said—that horrid word, the way you kind of shuddered when you wiped your lips—Gygyo, it tore me absolutely and completely to bits. I knew right then I had to get out of your time forever. But with Winthrop acting the way he is—I don’t know what to do!”
    “Tell me about it.” He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together as he sat beside her on a section of upraised floor.
    By the time she had finished, his recovery was complete. Dismayed, Mary Ann watched him become once more a highly urbane, extremely intelligent and slightly supercilious young man of the twenty-fifth century, and felt in her very bone marrow her own awkwardness increase, her garish, none-too-bright primitiveness come thickly to the surface.
    “I can’t do a thing for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”
    “Not even,” she asked desperately, “with the problems you and I have? Not even considering how terrible it’ll be if I stay here, if I don’t leave on time?”
    “Not even considering all that. I doubt that I could make it clear to you, however much if I tried, but I can’t force Winthrop to go, I can’t in all conscience give you any advice on how to force him, and I can’t think of a thing that would make him change his mind. You see, there’s a whole social fabric involved which is far more significant than our personal little agonies, however important they may be to us. In my world, as Storku pointed out, one just doesn’t do such things. And that, my sweet, is that.”
    Mary Ann sat back. She hadn’t needed the slightly mocking tone of Gygyo’s last words to tell her that he was now completely in