.. can't bear him touching me any more." She looked at me lovingly. "But you're all soft and gentle and smooth like a newborn kitten. I hope you won't...think badly of me. I'd feel awful if you did."I hugged my aunt close and smelled the fragrance of her newly washed hair. My voice quavered when I spoke. "I liked it, Aunt Linda... even if it is wrong." Maybe it isn't, baby." Linda put an arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek. "Maybe it isn't."It took me a long time to go to sleep after my. I wondered if I had done a single damn thing to make the world a better place. I really couldn’t tell anymore.I knew that John had four years to try to make an impact. By the time the 2012 elections rolled around, we would have had three straight Republican administrations, twelve years, an above average record. The big winners had been FDR and Truman, who had racked up twenty years, but that would never be seen again. Reagan and Bush 41 had done twelve years, and Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. They frowned and started to walk down the passage. Private Kelly stopped and turned. “What about our concubines?”“If you pass your CAP retests, we’ll send a transport to pick up your pods and bring them here,” Major Greenfeld said.“You want me to trust you? You are going to retest us,” Private Sarkozy whined.“You haven’t exactly been great citizens,” I said. “I could imagine that a retest might identify people who don’t belong as part of the military.”“And you are too young to be a captain. I. Both of John and Helen’s kids, Allen and Rachel, had left the nest years ago, so I knew it wasn’t their cars in the driveway. We walked up the driveway and rang the bell, and Helen opened the door. She had a cordless telephone to her ear and looked terribly distracted. “Oh, good, you’re here! No, some people at the door...”, she then said into the phone. I smiled at Marilyn. Helen kept on with her two-way conversation until her husband came up to us and took the phone from her hands.He spoke.