Read "Mars is my Destination" by Frank Belknap Long online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
We'd been talking for twenty minutes and I still didn't know her name. She wasn't being secretive or coy or holding out on me because she didn't trust me as much as I trusted her. I just hadn't gotten around to asking her, because we were both still talking about what had happened at the bar and it was so closely tied in with what was happening in New York and London and Paris and every big city on Earth -- and on Mars as well -- that it dwarfed our puny selves -- extra-special as the blonde's puny self happened to be from the male point of view.
I didn't know whether she was Helen or Barbara, Anne or Ruth or Tanya. I just knew that she was beautiful and that we were sipping Martinis and looking out through a wide picture window at New Chicago's lakeshore parklands enveloped in a twilight glow.