TIME and the WOMAN By Dewey, G. Gordon [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] [Sidenote: HER ONLY PASSION WAS BEAUTY--BEAUTY WHICH WOULD LAST FOREVER. AND FOR IT--SHE'D DO ANYTHING!] [Illustration ] Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight. There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements. It was true that some of her joints seemed to have a hint of stiffness in them, but only _she_ knew it. And if some of the muscles beneath her polished skin did not respond with quite the resilience of the youth they once had, only _she_ knew that, too. _But they would again_, she told herself fiercely. She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns--just one frown--could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle. One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and there--the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, smoothing them. Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a figure where they were beginning to blur and--sag. No one else could see it--yet. But Ninon could! Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved. Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old philosopher had said, "If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!" Crude, but apt. Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to feel that sureness of power in her grasp--the certain knowledge that she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew how. Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.