Part 6
The girl's enraged lover came and stood over her, glaring savagely down at her and shaking his head in a vain attempt to dislodge the gag. He was not aware that the guard had caught and correctly interpreted the Monitor's unspoken message and was now standing directly behind him with a small, metallically gleaming hand-gun in his clasp.
The guard raised the weapon slowly and took careful aim, centering its double sights on a small mole in the middle of the enraged man's back.
The report of the weapon was loud in the Observatory, shaking the scanner-glass as violently as the Monitor's heavily collapsing body had done. The impact of its energy charge lifted the enraged man up and hurled him back against the wall. His body struck the wall and rebounded, hurling him forward to the floor.
He was dead before he struck the floor, but his lifeless body continued to move about erratically for a moment, from the impetus of the energy charge, and its slow dissipation throughout every organ and tissue of his body.
The girl screamed and ran to him, and threw herself upon him, cradling his head in her arms, swaying despairingly from side to side.
Getting at last to her feet, the gaunt woman experienced a moment of terrible remorse, of such acute awareness of what had happened and could not be undone that she swayed also and covered her face with her hands.
In that moment she knew that no one, not even a Monitor, could escape a feeling of guilt for an act of cruelty and violence that could have been avoided, that need not have taken place at all.
For a moment a noose of savage tightness seemed to wrap itself around her heart, making it impossible for her to breathe. Then, gradually, the old hardness reasserted itself and she told herself that she was a fool to feel any sympathy for the girl or remorse over the death of her lover.
Were they not both criminals whose rebellion was a threat to the entire structure of society? Was not the stamping out of such an evil the first duty of a Monitor and could that duty ever be shirked?
What was the girl saying? The girl had raised her eyes and was staring at her, but she couldn't seem to catch the words.
Suddenly she did hear them and for an instant the noose feeling returned, the savage constriction around her heart.
"You will pay in your own way in your own time," the girl was saying. "If there is any justice left in the world, you will pay for what you have done. I no longer even hate you. There is a dark horror in the depth of some minds that destroys everything that is radiant and beautiful in life. In your mind there is such a horror. And in the end it will destroy you, for great evil feeds upon evil until there is nothing left at all."
The Monitor had only the vaguest recollection of speaking to the guard, of gesturing and saying: "Take her away. And remove the body of that criminal from this room. When I return I shall expect to find them both gone."
EIGHT
"The glass," Monitor 6Y9 murmured, aloud to herself. "I must go back and look at the glass again. I must see how the pursuit is progressing, the pursuit of the two worst criminals of all. When they spoke to me as they did on the travel trip a strange premonition came upon me. Those two are my real enemies, for there is in them a will to resist such as I have never encountered before. When I met them a voice seemed to whisper deep in my mind: 'It will be their lives or yours--and the security of all of the Monitors, and the Advisors and all of us who rule will hang in the balance until they are captured and brought to justice. There is in them a power, a defiance, so fierce and intractable that it could disrupt all of the binding energies of our world just as an atom can, by exploding, destroy all matter in its path. A single atom, and when two such atoms are joined...."
The gaunt woman stopped walking and looked up at the high white walls of the corridor she had been pacing, back and forth, like a caged tigress.
"No ... no ... no," she murmured. "I cannot go back and look at the scanner-glass until my mind has grown calmer, and my will has been strengthened, and I am more completely myself again. Perhaps the pursuit has failed and they can no longer be traced. Perhaps they have already been surrounded and have escaped from the trap by a stroke of blind luck, or because some strange destiny has set them apart from all others. Perhaps all of the para-guards are lying dead in the forest."
The gaunt woman drew herself up, a look of stern self-reproach coming into her eyes. "Enough of such fears and misgivings. _They will be captured._ I will find the strength to pursue them relentlessly, night and day, to pursue them until their will to resist has been shattered and they stand broken and defenseless before the Council. If I should need more strength than I possess--and I have great strength--I will draw upon the strength of our world. Wait, wait, let me think. It may help me now to look well upon that strength. The new bio-chemical techniques for changing the structure of the human body, altering its glandular functioning, eradicating the need for love--yes, that great, genius-inspired key, the solution perhaps to all of our problems.
"The experiment in Research Laboratory 79 H! A completely new kind of man--woman later if the experiment is successful, a man without any love impulses at all, but strong and robust, high-minded and socially dedicated. For three centuries we have tried to eradicate the love impulse by rigorously controlled selective mating of the least amorous, until we thought we had succeeded in creating a great and enduring society of completely non-amorous specialists. But we were tragically mistaken and everywhere the old, dangerous ugliness is weakening the very foundations of our world and threatening us all with destruction. And all because our best minds were not sufficiently genius-inspired.
"We knew a great deal about glandular therapy and had even employed it experimentally, in a cautiously limited way, to make the long-range results of selective mating more effective and permanent. But even there we were at fault. We did not proceed boldly enough. We drew back from gland surgery and from combining carefully controlled glandular injection therapy with the newest and most brilliant developments in surgery. We did not have the boldness of vision, the courage and foresight, to create a completely new kind of man--to alter the physical structure of the human body as it has never before been altered in the entire history of our race, except very occasionally by accident and disease.
"A new race of men! Why should we draw back from that, why should we hesitate now when our peril is so great, and we may all go down into everlasting night and darkness?"
The gaunt woman drew herself up. She seemed to draw strength from the vehemence of her own convictions, which she continued to express aloud to herself, as if she were herself a listener and needed to hear her own voice affirming what she knew to be true.
"The experiment in Laboratory 79 H! For six months now we have waited patiently to be told whether it is a success or a failure. We have waited long enough. The Council may condemn me if I go now and demand that the final test be made at once, in my presence. But I shall take that risk. I have the right to demand, I will make my authority felt. The subject has undergone six months of glandular therapy; four of surgery. They might prefer to postpone the final test for another week, but I am quite sure it will not endanger the subject if it is performed at once. I shall be the first to know!"
The gaunt woman stopped pacing and directed her steps toward the end of the corridor, and from there passed quickly down the shorter corridor which branched off from it, and threaded a maze of ten more blank-walled corridors until she came to the closed entrance panel of Laboratory 79 H.
The panel opened with a dull droning when she dialed the code numerals on the combination lock, and she passed quickly into the silent, high-ceilinged compartment and remained for a moment motionless, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light and steeling herself for the stern exercise of her authority which she knew would be required of her, for surgical specialists could be very stubborn.
There were four surgeons in the laboratory, and so absorbed were they in their immediate task that they remained for an instant unaware that the door had opened and closed and that a Monitor stood silently watching them.
It was perhaps just as well that they did not know, for her presence might have unnerved them at a critical moment. In almost the precise center of the laboratory a tall form, swathed in bandages, reposed on a white metal table, and the surgeons were busily engaged in removing the bandages from a pair of legs that seemed abnormally long and from arms that terminated in thick-fingered, hairy hands and were not so much long as abnormally muscular and strong-sinewed.
The shoulders of the man on the table seemed abnormally muscular too, and so broad that they resembled more the shoulders of a giant than those of a man of average weight and stature. The surgeons were whispering to one another as they unwound the bandages, as if the gravity and importance of their task had bound them over to silence or a few words of necessary conversation for so long a period that to raise their voices now, when so critical a moment was at hand, would have seemed like a desecration.
It was the gaunt woman who raised her voice, breaking in upon the whispering with sharp words of command, and causing the surgeons to swing about in consternation.
"You appear to have exceeded your authority," she said. "You were instructed not to remove the bandages or conduct the final test before notifying the Council. I can think of only one explanation and it does not heighten my respect for you. It diminishes it greatly. You so dreaded the possibility of failure that you preferred to conduct the final test in complete secrecy, for a failure that takes place in the absence of witnesses can sometimes be covered up with a fine flow of excuses. Well, there will be no excuses now. I am here to witness everything that takes place and I will report what I have seen to the Council."
The tallest of the four surgeons and the one nearest to the Monitor, a darkly bearded man with eyes so pale that they seemed almost colorless, was the first to recover his composure.
"We were about to conduct the final test," he said. "We were removing the bandages to study the responses of the subject preliminary to the test, which will not take place today. He must be injected with drugs first, so that when he awakens he will not know precisely where he is, and behave accordingly. We wish him to think himself in a mating center or, better still, a temple of love where nothing amorous is forbidden. There were many such temples in the ancient world, as you know, and before we subjected him to glandular surgery we made sure that he would read the ancient books and become familiar with all of the rites and practices which would awaken, even in the kind of man he was originally, amorous impulses of a criminal nature.
"He was, as you also know, a non-sex-privileged man who had experienced the stirring to a moderate extent but had not succumbed to it, and we selected him for that reason. We thought--"
"I do not care what you thought!" the gaunt woman rasped, her impatience making her tremble. "Just tell me what you hoped to accomplish."
"Very well. I will try not to confuse and bewilder you by discussing in detail the surgical aspects of the problem and all of the difficulties which we encountered. Quite simply, our problem was to bring about such a profound physical change in his somatic and glandular functioning that he would experience no amorous emotion at all when he looked upon a woman. We have known for a long time that the pituitary gland exercises a profound influence on the love-impulse. When the gland is very active the love-impulse is inhibited or destroyed completely.
"When the gland is very active the entire structure of the human body changes. The body becomes more massive, particularly the jaw, wrists, hands and ankles. In the past this condition has occasionally been brought about by disease, and the victims of this disease were known as acromegaliacs. When it occurs in childhood it produces a very unusual kind of human being--a pituitary giant. A pituitary giant is robust and virile-looking enough in outer aspect but his amorous impulses are extremely sluggish and in some cases completely absent.
"In this subject we have not only increased the activity of the pituitary gland, we have used many other surgical and glandular injection techniques to alter the functioning of virtually every gland in his body. And we have made some more generalized somatic alterations too, and employed some of the newer chemicals in a very daring kind of body-changing and brain-altering experiment.
"He is truly a new kind of human being. His appearance may do violence to our preconceived ideas of what constitutes good looks in the male, particularly in the eyes of a sex-privileged woman. But if the experiment is a success we shall soon become accustomed to seeing many men of this kind moving about and assuming a dominant role in our society. We shall have solved our greatest problem and removed a threat to our entire way of life."
"And the final test?" the gaunt woman demanded. "You say you were planning to conduct it tomorrow. Could you not conduct it now, in my presence? I have allowed myself to be impressed, despite my better judgment perhaps, by what you have just said. As a ruling Monitor, I could bear witness to your success, if you do succeed, as few others could do. And if you fail my testimony as to your complete honesty of purpose would carry great weight with the Council."
NINE
The tall surgeon stood very still, regarding her for a moment with a level, noncommittal stare. Then, slowly, a look of calculated risk-taking came into his eyes and he turned to the others with a slight shrug. They nodded in assent and he turned back again to face the Monitor.
"I believe we can conduct the test now," he said. "We can inject the illusion-producing drugs now and they take effect almost immediately. We could have wished for more time but--" He shrugged again. "We need not send for the girl. She is here and--"
"The girl?" the gaunt woman cut in sharply.
For answer the tall surgeon turned and walked across the laboratory to a small panel set in the wall. He gripped the projecting knob of the panel and turned it about in his hand and the thin partition of metal glided back into the wall, revealing a glimmering square of radiance.
"You may come out now," the surgeon said. "We have decided to conduct the final test immediately. You have received your instructions and should be prepared to display your great beauty without fear and without shame."
A soft, feminine voice, so strangely beautiful and well-modulated that it seemed almost musical came in reply from deep within the radiance but the Monitor could not catch what was said. She heard only the surgeon's words as he turned, stepping back from the panel aperture and facing her again.
"She has been schooled in every amorous enchantment," he said. "She knows how to dance and sing, and use her body's grace as only the love-privileged can do, when they have been taught far more than the love-privileged are permitted to know. Even when they abandon themselves to love in the mating centers the love-privileged know that what they do must be veiled in secrecy, hidden from the light of day. They know that what they do is really shameful, a necessary evil, and that it would bring a blush to even the virginal cheeks of a woman such as you.
"Only this girl has been schooled in all of the ancient rites, the forbidden mysteries of love. Only this girl can tempt a man to madness without degrading herself in any way. For what she does she does voluntarily, as a great sacrifice, and in the interests of science. If the experiment is successful we will honor her for her courage and even though she is one of the sex-privileged we will think of her as pure. We will think of her as a dedicated specialist, just as selfless in her devotion to all that is best in our society as an engineer or surgeon or skilled industrial worker, and we will know, and be grateful deep in our hearts, that she has helped to save us all."
The gaunt woman's cheeks had flushed scarlet and anger flamed in her eyes. But before she could reprimand the surgeon for speaking so immoderately--was he secretly the girl's lover?--the woman he was defending emerged from the panel aperture and stood with the radiance at her back and her head held high, her eyes darting from the Monitor and the four surgeons to the still form on the table.
The gaunt woman stared at her with a sharp intake of her breath. That a beauty so dazzling should dare to flaunt itself in proud defiance before the eyes of a Monitor who had never given a thought to her own beauty or lack of it, seemed outrageous, too intolerable to be endured.
So great was the girl's beauty that it seemed almost to pass beyond perfection, to envelop her in an aura that was individual and unique, setting her apart from all other women, and igniting a spark of ardent responsiveness in the four surgeons which was plainly visible in their eyes. That the surgeons had looked upon the girl's loveliness before, the Monitor could not doubt, and that very realization increased her anger until she could no longer breathe.
She began violently to tremble, her gaze passing from the girl's lustrous dark eyes and full red lips to her white shoulders and firm young breasts and then downward to the thin gauze garment that did not at all succeed in concealing what seemed the worst affront of all--thighs that seemed fashioned for the caresses of a lover's hands and a darkness in a shadowed hollow that only such a lover, whispering softly in the night, would have felt the slightest impulse to explore, with degradation stamping him for what he was, a passion-aroused beast.
The surgeon turned with quiet dignity and addressed his three associates, his determination to ignore the Monitor's rage clearly evident in the firm tones of his voice.
"Remove all of the bandages, and make the injection before he begins to stir. Remove the bandages first. He has been conscious for several hours now, but perhaps not fully conscious. You will know how to awaken him, but be sure to make the injection before he opens his eyes. It will take effect in twenty or thirty seconds."
For the next five minutes no one in the laboratory spoke. Neither the surgeons, who were too busy carrying out instructions to even exchange glances or the two women who stood facing each other with dagger-points dancing in their eyes.
The girl seemed to sense what the Monitor was thinking and to resent it as a matter of pride. But she remained silent and self-contained and only the tightness of her lips and the dark hostility with which she parried the gaunt women's accusing stare betrayed a vulnerability which her pride could not quite overcome.
What broke the stillness at last was the strangest and most unnerving of all sounds: a groan from the man who had not moved even under the administration of the figures in white hovering over him, a man who had lain as if dead for so long that it seemed impossible that he could stir, and open his eyes and let out his breath explosively after so short an interval of time.
The man on the table sat up. He sat up so quickly that the surgeons withdrew from him in consternation, as if they had not anticipated so instant a response to the gentle massage which they had applied to his chest, and the swiftly following injection.
The Monitor turned pale and took a quick step backward and the girl seemed equally shaken, although she did not remove her eyes from the tall, gaunt figure who sat looking at her with his chest rising and falling and his hairy legs dangling. Only the surgeons retained their composure, recovering quickly from their first shocked recoil and regarding the figure without horror.
The man on the table was both a giant and a monster. His chest was barrel-shaped and ridged with three bands of muscle which completely encircled his body and rose and fell with his breathing. His massive shoulders were ugly and misshapen, the shoulders of a giant whose too rapid growth had brought about the cruelest kind of deformity. His arms, which were matted with coarse black hair, seemed abnormally foreshortened and were less than half the length of his lower limbs, which were very long and only slightly less hairy.
Even more repellent than the giant's ill-shaped body was the almost Neanderthal-like primitiveness of his face. The jaw was massive, the features coarse and the brow sloped as sharply backward as the brow of an ape. But there was nothing apelike in the burning intensity of his deep-sunken eyes, or the intelligence which animated the rest of his features as he fastened his gaze on the girl who still stood silently regarding him, her fingers pressed to her throat.
"Start dancing," the tall surgeon whispered, tapping her gently on the arm. "We'll soon know whether or not he can be stirred in an amorous way. I would have spared you this ordeal if I could, but there is no subterfuge which would enable us to postpone it in the presence of a Monitor. She is envious of your beauty and will not like what you must do. But she will have to watch. The success or failure of this test touches her at too vital a point. She is a Monitor and must become a judge--a cold, impersonal maker of decisions. I am not like that, but--"
"I know," the girl whispered, grasping his hand and pressing it warmly. "If you were love-privileged you might have taken me into your arms and covered my lips with burning kisses. And I should have liked that. I should have liked that very much."
The surgeon tightened his lips and turned away from her, a look of torment on his face. "Dance," he whispered again. "There is no time to be lost. In a few moments the effects of the drug will begin to wear off."
The girl nodded, and walked toward the center of the laboratory. The eyes of the man on the table followed her and when she was standing almost directly in front of him, and less than eight feet from the table, his rigidly erect body seemed to stiffen still more and a look of bewilderment came into his eyes.
The girl began to dance.
Her movements were slow at first, and although no music accompanied the slow turning of her body and the graceful weaving motions of her arms, she seemed to be dancing in response to rhythms sensuous and beguiling and audible to her alone. It was almost as if her inner ear had become attuned, at the very beginning of the dance, to melodies unheard and she was pirouetting about to the accompaniment of measures that, beginning as a series of widely spaced chords, would soon change their tempo and became in an instant tumultuous and wild.
That instant was not long delayed. Faster and faster her movements became and she was suddenly whirling and swaying in utter abandonment, her head thrown back, the veins in her throat pulsing as she whirled.
Faster and faster she moved, until she seemed not so much a living woman as a shape of flame, her thin gauze tunic floating up above her knees and exposing her shapely legs and the milk-white flesh of her thighs.