She would have called me or her parents to let us know she was safe.Or would she? If she wasn't supposed to tell anyone where she was, she couldn't ve...y well tell them she was okay, could she? Sure she could. She could call me. I knew where she was. Even if she couldn't get me, she could check in with her parents without saying anything about the explosion. Round and round I went, and where I stopped I did not know.Breakfast at the Swordfish was good and it was plentiful. The last meal I'd kept. ?This is not to say that the men of this planetare ignorant of such machines. On the contrary, they discovered theirmechanical principles long ago and only the paucity of sufficient metals andthe non-existence of any sort of industrial base prevent their widespread use.They do have personal, portable computers cum mobile message senders, but theyare crudely constructed and somewhat unreliable; necessarily the case when eachman must assemble and programme his own machine. They have ships,. . Her hand, gently, pushed me down again. “Three days of mourning,” she said, “three days for me to recover in solitude from the shock of my father’s sudden death from heart attack. Three days before I have to take up my duties as the Queen, and begin to console his subjects, my subjects now, for their tragic loss.” She smiled. “Three days in which to succumb to my grief, undisturbed...” She half bent over me, the tip of the index finger of her left hand trailed the thin red line down from my. I (jimmy) and my twin brother Johnny were 17 at the time; I and Johnny are about five foot six, about 125 pounds, with blond hair and green eyes. Billy is about five foot three and 110 pounds, with brown hair and light grey eyes. Me and Jimmy saved up every piney we got for over a year to by what we needed, we laughed a lot about how Billy thought we were saving for a sex toy (from a senior in school) to jack off with. And in a way we were. To be clear we didn’t hate Billy, quite the opposite.