Part 7

Then, abruptly, she ceased to whirl, and stood poised on the tips of her toes, like a bird in flight coming miraculously to rest amidst a fluttering tumult of beating wings and spinning, skyward-ascending feathers. Her arms were bent sharply at the elbows and she was clutching at both of her breasts and arching her torso backwards.

For a full minute she remained on her toes, her eyes half-closed, her moist red lips opening and closing; as if, hovering in the air above her, an invisible lover was draining the sweetness of her lips between moments of trancelike rapture.

Then her body was in motion again and as she turned slowly about on her toes she unfastened the hem of her tunic and let it slip from her.

White and unblemished and tormentingly beautiful was her unclad body, and in the splendor of that complete baring of all her charms gross sensuality seemed to turn coward, to flee her presence and to hide its face, so that for an instant she seemed almost virginal, a creature of fire and air untouched by passion.

The moment might have passed and changed her again to a woman of flesh and blood, voluptuous in all of her movements, infinitely demanding and infinitely desirable. But before the illusion could be shattered the man on the table cried out hoarsely and descended to the floor with a slow swaying of his entire body.

He advanced upon her with his arms extended, his cavernous, dark eyes aflame with desire--a desire so fierce in its stark, primitive directness that it was pure animal. He caught her in his arms before she could cry out or leap aside, and crushed her to him.

He lowered his head and kissed her lips hungrily and his arms became iron bands that bruised her flesh cruelly. She screamed and struggled and tried to free herself, but there was no escaping from the terrible, primitive strength of those arms or from the hands that had begun to explore every part of her body.

There was no escape and she felt herself to be sinking down into a dark sea filled with horrible nightmare shapes that could only in the end deprive her of reason and cloak a little the horror that was about to come upon her.

It was not a man's strength which saved her, causing the giant to groan and release his grip upon her, causing him to take a staggering step backwards and sink to the floor with a convulsive grimace. It was an instrument of science, a long, sharp needle, jabbed into the giant's right shoulder by a man of cool presence of mind in a moment when a blow would have been worse than useless.

It was the same man who spoke calmly, in reply to a woman's voice raised in a terrible, accusing anger.

"You have failed and the Council will want to know why!" Monitor 6Y9 was screaming. "You will pay for your failure, never fear. The Council will not forgive stupidity."

"No, I am afraid the Council will call us all to account," the man said in reply. "But we did our best. We tried."

It was horrible. She could hardly breathe and every nerve in her body seemed to be in rebellion, causing her temples to pound, her heart to beat tumultuously.

In all her life the gaunt woman had never known such torment of mind and body. Returning to the Observatory she had staggered twice and almost fallen and even now her knees seemed about to give way beneath her.

She clung to the metal frame supporting the scanner-glass and looked deep into the glass and saw nothing that pleased her. A dark expanse of woodland, nothing more. No para-guards moving between the trees, no flying machines in the narrow stretch of sky overhead, nothing.

And then, quite suddenly, she did see something and straightened in stunned disbelief, the wild beating of her heart subsiding.

The trees had thinned out and a clearing had come into view between the trees. In the center of the clearing was a small white dwelling and the scanners were moving slowly toward it.

TEN

Teleman had no way of knowing that the scanners had picked up his trail again as he stood listening to the whispered conversation of the dwelling's two occupants.

Despite the absolute darkness and Teleman's stillness the woman became suddenly aware that she was not alone with the man at her side. Her startled gasp was unmistakable and the stirring and shifting of position which followed immediately left no possible room for doubt. All of the sounds were sounds of agitation and swiftly mounting alarm, a whispered reply from the man which Teleman could not catch, another gasp from the woman, a rustling of the bedclothes, a creaking of the bed as one of the two lovers, probably the man, either sat bolt upright or propelled himself toward the edge of the bed with a violent lurch.

What prompted the woman to switch on the light at precisely that moment Teleman had no way of knowing. It was an act of folly, for it placed them at a disadvantage. The light streamed down from a lamp directly above the bed, flooding the entire room in an instant and defeating any hope which the pair might have had of using the darkness as a shield.

Both the man and the woman were completely unclothed. The woman had drawn the sheets up to her waist but the way the clinging fabric molded itself to her hips and thighs with every tremulous movement of her slender young body would have convinced even a not too observant man that no night garment, however thin, intervened between the sheets and the undraped loveliness which she was striving, in her modesty, to hide.

And Teleman was not an unobserving man. Though he hated himself for it he could not stop staring, for her firm young breasts, suffused with a tender rosiness, her white and beautiful throat and her even more beautiful face excited him physically. It was the face of a young girl just blossoming into womanhood, a face of such unusual loveliness that his breath caught in his throat and he could only stare in enraptured silence.

Her long, unbound hair, pale auburn with glints of gold, descended to the pillow at her back, fell partly over one white shoulder and nestled in the cleavage between her breasts, each strand a shining glory. Those magnificent breasts were swollen with love, the tips standing out dark and proud, and there was a red mark on her lovely throat that could have been made only by a love bite. Her lips were slightly parted and though her eyes were wide with fright there was about her still an aspect of drowsiness, as if she had just awakened from a dream of love--a sleepy-eyed nymph in a forest glade resting on a bank of snow-white flowers, half-asleep and yet aware in her inmost being of love's rapture and more desirable than any completely awakened woman could ever be.

He stood for a moment entranced, unable to move or speak, and that strange paralysis of all his faculties except one, the wondrous miracle of enraptured sight, almost led to his undoing.

The man leapt from the bed with a cry of rage and advanced upon him. There was no escaping the outraged lover's fury or the first grazing blow of his fist, which sent Teleman reeling backwards. There was no escaping the second blow either, delivered just as quickly or the third, which landed squarely on Teleman's jaw and made him sway dizzily for an instant.

But the man had been aroused too quickly from drowsiness and love's languors to bring all of his strength into play, and Teleman was able to back away and keep his distance until a favorable opportunity presented itself.

For a brief instant the other lowered his guard and gave Teleman an opening and Teleman took full advantage of it. He stopped thinking of his opponent as a man whose anger he could understand, a man he could have liked and respected if circumstances had been less harsh and unrelenting and thought of him only as a threat to Alicia's safety.

He saw him as a danger that had to be removed, as an automaton with flailing fists, soulless, mindless, and no longer a man of flesh-and-blood with a just grievance who had every right to attack him with fury.

His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling backwards.

It was a swift, terrible blow, delivered with such force that it tore the flesh of Teleman's knuckles, and half-paralyzed his arm from wrist to shoulder, producing a temporary numbness. It caught the other on the point of the jaw and took him so completely by surprise that his face, as he collapsed backwards, did not contract in pain, but bore only a look of stunned bewilderment.

His expression may have changed as he lay sprawled out on the floor at Teleman's feet. But his face was turned away and as he neither groaned nor stirred Teleman felt convinced that he had lost consciousness and swung about to face the woman. He was breathing harshly and there was a throbbing fullness at his temples and he could not quite shake off a shock-produced, almost nightmarish feeling of unreality.

The woman had not moved. Her eyes were wider than they had been and the fear in her eyes was no longer overcast with uncertainty. It had sharpened into a more intense fear, a fear verging on stark terror. Her eyes darted from Teleman's distraught face to the slumped form of her lover and then toward the door, as if she dreaded what the darkness might hold even more than she feared the man who had come out of the darkness to put an end to her happiness.

Suddenly she moaned aloud and covered her face with her hands.

The words came then, words which Teleman had not intended to speak. He did not quite understand why he abandoned all caution, and spoke as he did, freely and without restraint, keeping nothing back, baring his inmost thoughts. It may have been her great beauty, which had held him so entranced for a moment that it had placed him at a disadvantage and endangered his life. Or it may have been the overwhelming sympathy which he now felt, seeing her so pitiful and broken and despairing.

"I am a fugitive like yourself," he said. "There is a woman with me, and we are both in great danger. We are not fugitives for a night, as you are, for we have never known the freedom of the mating centers, a freedom which you found incomplete and love-destroying. We are not sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be death.

"We cannot hope to escape the death penalty. We offended one of the Monitors, a frustrated old woman who will never forgive us for telling her the truth about herself. And I fought with a para-guard, disarmed him and left him bound and helpless in the forest a few miles from this dwelling.

"We thought this dwelling deserted and took refuge here because we hoped to find here a few metal utensils or household tools which I could use to construct some kind of hastily improvised mechanical device powerful enough to misdirect and mislead the scanners. My specialty is bridge-building and I have enough technical knowledge to construct such a device if I can get my hands on a coil of wire and a few utensils of pliable metal.

"It was a desperate hope at best, the odds against it overwhelming. Even if I had succeeded the Monitors would have located us in a few days, possibly in a few hours. But it was the only hope we had until--"

The woman had uncovered her eyes and was staring at him with a little of the fear gone from her gaze and he paused in relief, hoping that she would not let her thoughts stray from his words to the limp and still unconscious man on the floor. He was almost sure that the man had not been seriously hurt, but if her thoughts returned to him too quickly, if memory of the struggle came flooding back, nothing that he could say would convince her that he spoke with complete sincerity. The shock would be too great. She would give way again to panic and stark terror and his words would fall on deaf ears.

He went on quickly, keeping his eyes on her face, his words taking on the eloquence of a deeply moved man who speaks only the truth with no attempt at evasion.

"We did not think we would find anyone here. We were quite sure that we would not be taking a great risk, or deliberately walking into danger, for the place, as you know, looks abandoned. But I came upstairs to make sure.

"I was standing in darkness at the end of the hallway when I heard you speaking. I would have gone back downstairs if your words had not given me so great a shock, for to intrude on your privacy at such a moment would have been the act of a man lost to all honor. But your words were strange beyond belief. I had never thought to hear such words from the lips of the sex-privileged.

"You were also in revolt. You had come here to escape from the tyranny of the Monitors, to experience again joys that would not be tolerated in the mating centers. To you love and romance were inseparable parts of one imperishable experience and without tenderness in love, without complete freedom of choice, love becomes a mockery. The deep, undying love of one man and one woman--that was something we too could understand.

"Her name is Alicia, and I love her more than my own life and I would give my life gladly to spare her suffering. As I stood in the hallway listening I thought: 'I cannot let her be taken captive. She will be condemned to death and I will die a thousand deaths before my own life is ended. Even if I am executed first, I will die a thousand deaths just knowing that she will die too, and I will be powerless to save her.'

"I came to a decision then, a decision that was forced upon me. I would take you both captive, bind you and make the Monitors believe that you had fought desperately to resist capture. I would overturn furniture, leave this room in wild disorder. Then you would not be accused of complicity and we would have at least a fighting chance of outwitting the Monitors. We would be safe not for a few hours or a few days, but long enough to make new plans for evading capture.

"We would take refuge in a mating center. We would put on your garments and wear your insignia and carry with us the identifying seals that cannot be counterfeited, for the scanning of seals is so accurate a process that a forged seal would be instantly detected."

She was looking at him steadily now, her breathing rapid and her lips slightly parted but all of the dread had vanished from her eyes. Her expression had softened, and there was a strange mistiness in the depth of her pupils, as if from some secret reservoir of strength she had drawn the will to listen and understand.

He thought he saw sympathy begin to grow in her eyes as he went on. "I did not want to resort to violence. But circumstances sometimes compel us to do hateful things to protect those we love. The choice was a hard one and I am not even sure I could have used violence against a man I would have been proud to call my friend if he had not mistaken me for a criminal intruder and left me no choice."

"No choice?" she whispered, "Yes, I believe you. But if he is hurt badly--"

For answer Teleman turned and went to the man on the floor and bent above him.

Teleman had felled the man with a powerful blow, but it had not been a blow to his skull and could not have resulted in a concussion. And he had not hit his head against the floor in falling. But in the back of Teleman's mind was the fear that the man might still have been hurt severely. That fear diminished the instant he felt the other's pulse and found that it was beating strongly and regularly. It diminished still further when the man stirred and opened his eyes and stared up at Teleman.

A look of bewilderment came into the man's eyes for an instant. Then his right eyelid twitched, his jaw muscles tightened and the look changed to one of slowly dawning recognition.

In a moment the man's eyes were blazing with a fury that Teleman hardly knew how to contend with, for he could not bring himself to resort to violence again, but knew that calm reason, or anything he might say, would be worse than futile. The man had regained his strength and the full use of his limbs, and was struggling violently to free himself from the tight grip of Teleman's hands on his shoulders.

The woman had left the bed and crossed the room so silently that Teleman was not aware that she was at his side until he saw her white arm crossing his in a gesture of caressment and felt the weight of her slender young body pressing against his right shoulder. The woman was running her fingers through the man's hair and gently stroking his face in an effort to calm and reassure him. She seemed unaware of her nakedness. Teleman was unable to tear his eyes away from those magnificent breasts, grazing her husband's chest and nestling in the hollow of his neck as she bent over him.

"It's all right, darling," she whispered. "It's all right. This man is not a Monitor or an agent of the Monitors and he bears us no ill-will. He is not a criminal either, darling. He is not a housebreaker who came here to rob us or who came--and I know you feared this above all--to force his love upon me, to take me by brutal violence, to kill you and make me his woman. That is happening everywhere now, when men who are brutal and cruel and think only of themselves are turned into beasts by the strange, new stirring which has come upon so many.

"Darling, darling, you must try to understand. This man feels as we do. There is a woman with him, and they both feel as we do about love. They are both as desperately, as badly in love as we are, and they are fleeing because they have aroused the anger of a Monitor. That anger that is so implacable, so blind and unmerciful, so full of envy and malice and fear. Some of the Monitors have experienced the stirring. But they are all too greedy for power to allow their supremacy to be swept away, and those who have experienced it shut the glory of it away in a dark corner of their minds and there it continues to glow brightly. But they cannot endure the glow and warmth, because it shames and humiliates them, and makes them more tragically aware of how wretched they are.

"This man and the woman with him had every right to take refuge here. They were being pursued through the forest by para-guards as if they had committed some monstrous crime when all they did was make love as we have so often done with the tenderest of embraces in the night. They have walked in beauty and know the full splendor of love's fulfillment.

"They have more to fear than we. They have taken far greater risks, for they are not love-privileged and if they are caught they will pay for their rebellion with their lives. Will we have the courage to do what this man hesitated to ask of us--allow ourselves to be bound and when the Monitors question us say that we struggled to defend ourselves but were overpowered by this man's criminal strength? Will we have the courage to lie to save them, my darling? Will we have the strength? I do not know. I am myself all too human and when I think of the price that even we would have to pay--I do not know."

The man had ceased to struggle. He lay very still, a strange quietness in his gaze and Teleman rose slowly to his feet, aware of the risk he was taking, but somehow trusting the woman, knowing that, despite the human frailty that had been revealed in the complete baring of her thoughts, she was speaking in his defense, earnestly pleading with her lover to give her strength.

"To allow ourselves to be bound is only a part of what he wants us to do," she went on quickly. "He wants us to give him and the woman with him our garments and our insignia, so that they may take refuge in a mating center and for a short while remain there disguised as a love-privileged man and woman. It will give them the time they need to make new plans. The Monitors will not think of searching for them in a mating center."

The man spoke then, for the first time. "Yes," he said. "Yes ... I understand."

There was a great weariness in his eyes, as if the suffering of all the world's outraged and disinherited rested upon his shoulders alone.

"Will we have the courage, darling? Or is it too much they ask? Without your love to give me courage I would lack the strength of purpose and even with your love I am not sure. Because, darling, your happiness is more important to me than--"

The man silenced her with a quick look of tender understanding and a firm hand on her arm. "You need not tell me," he whispered. "I know. It is very strange how love such as ours can give us the strength not to think only of ourselves. And perhaps we will only be doing what nine lovers out of ten, completely sure of each other, knowing their love to be undying, would not hesitate to do. No, he does not ask too much of us. We will escape with a stern censure, nothing more. It is the least we can do."

He arose to a sitting position on the floor, took firm hold of the woman's shoulders and drew her to him, kissing her hair and lips and eyes, his hands caressing her back, her hips and thighs, without embarrassment. "We will do as he asks," he whispered. "Tell him that our garments and insignia are in the wall cabinet by the window; our identification seals as well. There is some heavy cord in the cellar. Tell him to overturn the furniture to make the Monitors believe that we put up a furious struggle. And he had better gag us."

A brief, warming smile appeared on her woman's lips. "He thought of all that. Oh, darling, this is what I wanted you to say, what I secretly hoped you would say, deep in my heart. But my woman's frailty--"

"I know, I understand. You need not tell me. But tell him that there is no time to waste. He must be a man of great resourcefulness and courage or he would not be here at all. It is difficult to confuse the scanners and they are almost certain to pick up his trail again."

The man got to his feet, his arm encircling the woman's waist and helping her to rise with him, his lips pressed to the small cluster of curls just above her right temple.

Teleman stood very still, his eyes shining, too deeply moved to speak for a moment. He had overheard all of their whispered conversation and they seemed to sense that he had, for neither said a word in explanation or apology.

The man simply extended his hand and Teleman clasped it, the gratefulness in his eyes speaking for him, telling the man and the woman all that needed to be said and making speech unnecessary.

ELEVEN

The explosion came abruptly, shaking the entire room, hurling Teleman to his knees and sending the man and the woman staggering backwards. It did not come from within the room, but from somewhere in the forest outside the house. But close, close ... Teleman could feel its nearness in his bones, the shock waves and the concussion, as the thunder of it roared in his ears, half-deafening him, and a bright burst of accompanying flame danced and flicked on the vibrating panes of the window.

For an instant the panes continued to vibrate and then, abruptly, the glass was shattered and fell in tinkling fragments to the floor. But one of the spinning fragments was hurled with such violence from the window's upper frame that it did not drop to the floor. With the speed and flashing brightness of a tiny, keen-bladed spear, thrown with a deadly accuracy of aim, it went flying through the air to bury itself in the woman's chest, just above the heart.