Part 8

The woman moaned and raised her hand to the soft flesh of her bosom, then let it fall limply to her side again. The sliver of glass had pierced deeply, but there was only a tiny dot of crimson to mark that mortal wounding and mar the whiteness of her skin. Her eyes, wide with shock and pain, remained unfocused for an instant, then sought the face of her lover. Realization seemed to come to her slowly, tormentingly, as if it carried with it a burden, to one so deeply in love, that could not be accepted at once and must not be too quickly shared.

It was not her own pain which seemed to overwhelm her, but the grief and agony which would come to her lover when she was no longer at his side. There was love and compassion and overwhelming tenderness in her eyes as she swayed, reached out with one hand to steady herself against the wall at her back, and then sank without a murmur to the floor.

The man cried out and threw himself down beside her, taking her into his arms and holding her tightly, whispering to her words of love and pleading with her to tell him how grievously she had been hurt, how deep the wound.

"Darling," she whispered, her fingers moving lightly over his face, her lips white and trembling. "Darling, I--"

She went limp so suddenly that the man seemed unaware that he was no longer holding a living woman in his arms. He continued to whisper to her pleadingly, and even the glaze which had overspread her pupils could not make him accept the tragic and terrible finality of his loss. Only after a long moment did he cover his eyes with his hands and begin to sob.

The echoes of the explosion had died away completely and the room was silent again when Teleman heard footsteps ascending the stairs and moving swiftly toward the room along the upstairs hallway. The relief which he experienced was sudden and overwhelming, but it did not keep him from crossing the room and laying a firm hand on the sobbing man's shoulder.

"There is nothing I can say," he whispered, his voice tremulous with emotion. "Nothing to ease your pain. She was your whole life and when a man's life is at an end ... it will not be forever, but that, too, mocks grief at such a moment. There is nothing that a stranger can say that will be to you more than the words of a stranger. Even someone very close to you, a father or a brother, could not ease your grief in any way. Just know that you have befriended a man and a woman who needed help desperately, a man and a woman who will never cease to be grateful to you. In all this world, I will never have a better friend, or meet a man I would be prouder to claim as a friend. You are no longer a stranger to me."

The man said in a choked voice, "I can feel nothing now except a terrible sense of emptiness, of loss ... the dark gulf that separates me from my beloved. Can it ever be crossed, do you think? Is there any hope at all?"

"I do not know," Teleman said. "It is something that every man must find out for himself. I have no right to speak with assurance, for I am as human as you are and as fallible. I possess no wisdom that you do not possess and false confidence is no comfort at all."

"I am grateful for your honesty," the man said. "It _has_ helped me a little. Go now, quickly. I would like to be alone with her. Take the garments and the insignia and go. We will have no further need of them. Fight. Fight for your love as I would have fought for mine, for if you lose her you will have nothing. You will be as despairing and empty as I am. I will always think of you as a friend."

When Teleman turned he saw Alicia standing by the window, her face drained of all color, her eyes on the dead woman and the man who was cradling her in his arms. The man had begun to sob again.

"The explosion!" she whispered, her voice barely audible. "Did it--kill her? I thought it was outside the house. It shook the stairs and I was afraid for you, terribly afraid. I wasn't sure I could climb the stairs. I had no strength at all for a moment--"

"Are you all right now?" Teleman asked, his voice harsh with concern.

"Yes, I am all right. But that woman--"

"She was killed by a flying splinter of glass. The dwelling is probably completely surrounded by para-guards. They must have picked up our trail again and are dropping bombs near the house, perhaps to frighten us and force us to leave. They must want to take us alive or they would have bombed the dwelling itself. They would have no trouble pin-pointing it as a target for demolition bombing.

"Then we'd better stay here as long as we can. You have a hand-gun and you could pick them off as they come through the door from the top of the stairs."

"No, that would only delay our capture by a few minutes. They'll drop fifty guards, if necessary. We'll have to do what they expect us to do, risk capture by trying to get past them in the open. They're probably under orders not to blast us down, unless we give them no alternative. And every circle of armed guards has to be widespread. There'll be some unguarded, foliage-choked pathways leading deep into the forest on the far side of the clearing, pathways as black as pitch. If we can just get to one--"

"But can we?" Alicia cut in. "Suppose they've stationed guards in a tight circle a few yards from the dwelling, with only a few feet between them. Every circle _doesn't_ have to be widespread, if it's near enough."

"If there was a circle of guards directly outside they would never have dropped a bomb so close to the dwelling," Teleman said, impatiently. "Darling, we're wasting precious seconds. Take off your clothes. Quickly, strip yourself naked."

Alicia's eyes widened in shocked dismay and she stared at him wordlessly, as if she feared that he had suddenly become bereft of his senses.

"It's another string to our bow," he said, quickly. "We're disguising ourselves as a sex-privileged man and woman. The garments are here, and the insignia."

"The garments? You mean--"

For answer Teleman went to a built-in wall cabinet on the opposite side of the window, jerked it open and removed all of its contents: two knee-length tunics of pale blue fabric, two identification disks with corrugated surface markings, and two shining silver insignia, bearing the emblem of the sex-privileged, a nude man and woman locked in an embrace that made them seem almost to blend into a single reclining figure.

"These garments are a gift to us," he said. "Surrendered freely and with nothing asked in return by a man who has become, in just these few moments, a friend I shall never forget. When the gift was made he did not know that the garments would mock his grief and be of no further use to him. Let me never be cynical, and doubt human nature, darling, its capacity for generosity and unfaltering courage in moments of shared danger."

Teleman explained to her swiftly how the garments would be used, and why the mating center plan had a better chance of success than any of the other plans he had thought of as second-choice possibilities.

She was quick to agree and was removing her garments before the second blast came. The room shook again, but this time there was no glass to splinter and it seemed less loud than the first explosion. A dropped bomb falling into a pond and detonating under water perhaps, or a small bomb hurled by hand. Teleman had no intention of letting it unnerve him and he gestured reassuringly as Alicia paused to stare at him with fear in her eyes, a tangle of dropped garments at her feet and her nude body bathed in light from the window--a light so dazzling it made her blink furiously--she had the white-limbed grace of a statue carved in stone.

She was naked for a moment, for Teleman tossed her one of the two garments he had taken from the cabinet, and she caught it deftly, a smile appearing for an instant on her lips, and put it on, loosening the belt at the waist a little and adjusting the bosom-sheaths until they fitted snugly over the twin mounds of her gently swelling breasts. There was a flame-colored sheath lower down, where the garment became more tight-fitting, and this she adjusted carefully too, smoothing out the cloth here and then and twisting her body about until she appeared to be wearing a garment which had been made for her. There was no fold out of place or too tight-fitting, and when she raised her arms the garment seemed to mold itself even more perfectly to her slender torso, its smooth-flowing, silken texture enhancing her body's grace.

Teleman removed his own garment while she was fastening the insignia to her breast and put on the man's tunic, experiencing, despite the grimness of his mood, a slight twinge of amusement at the embarrassment he was quite sure they both felt. How strange were the ways of love, when a man and a woman who had surrendered completely to love could still feel the tug of modesty when the occasion in no way concerned love!

Teleman transferred his hand-gun to the left pocket of the new garment and glanced once more at his benefactor. The man's shoulders were still bowed in grief, and he had not looked up. A last goodbye and a final word of thanks arose to Teleman's lips. But he decided that silence would be better. The man would know and understand, and Teleman could not bring himself to further intrude on his grief.

"Come on," he whispered, taking firm hold of Alicia's hand. "Try not to see anything in the forest that isn't there. Just stay close to me, and remember--flickering shadows can look very much like advancing para-guards."

TWELVE

In the darkness and silence of the dwelling's upper hallway, and the shadowed gloom, no longer pierced by shafts of early morning sunlight, of the main-floor room, it was hard for them to realize that it was still broad daylight outside the house. But the instant they emerged from the dwelling's paneled doorway the brightness of the sky and the almost shadowless clearing made them instantly aware again that only the forest was a gloom enveloped sanctuary.

They stood for an instant motionless in the doorway, dazzled by the brightness and experiencing a sharp stab of apprehension. If a para-guard had been crouching at the edge of the clearing, with steady eyes and a leveled weapon, blasting them both down would have presented no problem. They had to trust to their instincts solely, the feeling that they both had that the house was not yet completely surrounded. Or that if it was, the guards were under orders not to open fire, but to take them by stealth, withholding all violence until they moved around and away from the house and reached the high wall of wind-stirred foliage at the rear of the dwelling, where the forest began again and the shadows clustered thickly.

Teleman pressed Alicia's hand and whispered: "We've got to move very fast and keep moving. They may close in on us the instant we're between the trees, so we'll have to keep our wits about us, and watch out for the slightest stir of movement. If we see a guard I'll know what to do. Trust me."

"I will, darling!" she breathed. "And I'm not too frightened to think clearly."

"All right. Here we go then."

They did not break into a run immediately, but waited until they had moved cautiously around to the back of the dwelling and were facing away from it, with an open space that could be quickly crossed stretching out in front of them. The forest wall was less than eighty feet away and could be reached in a matter of seconds. Teleman's hand had darted to his pocket and he was firmly clasping the stock of the hand-gun.

They exchanged no words, but started across the clearing at once, running swiftly with only a few feet separating them. They were out of breath when they reached the trees, but paused only for the barest instant, their eyes darting toward a patch of weaving darkness where the foliage was dense enough to provide instant shelter but not too close to keep them from tearing a few of the branches apart with their hands and clearing a wide enough space to move about in until they could find a natural path in the underbrush or beat their way through it toward a more open stretch of forest.

They were several feet inside the foliage screen, breathing harshly and keeping their heads lowered to avoid the stinging backlash of whipped-apart branches, when the para-guard came crashing toward them. There was blood on his face and he was cursing savagely and in an instant briefer than a dropped heartbeat there flashed into Teleman's mind an image of the man waiting for them, crouching in the underbrush and prevented by the dense growth from leaping instantly out at them.

The image blurred and vanished and Teleman saw only the man himself, the looming, dangerous bulk of him. The hand-gun was recoiling in his clasp, its roar deafening, in what seemed no more than another split second of time, so quickly that Teleman had no clear recollection of whipping it from his pocket, only of leveling it and firing it at almost pointblank range.

The para-guard screamed and went staggering backwards, his hands clutching at his chest. Light from the expiring energy charge bathed his head and shoulders for an instant in a ghastly, pale green radiance, making him look almost ghostly as he sank to his knees, and fell forward on his face. His arms jerked convulsively for a moment, and then the trembling and twitching ceased and he lay completely still, a crimson gleaming appearing in both sides of his body and spreading outward over the dry leaves of the forest until they resembled leaves but recently fallen, all of their autumn brightness restored.

Alicia swayed and turned deathly pale. Teleman went to her, drew her into his arms and held her tightly, stilling her trembling with a few, calmly spoken words.

"If I hadn't killed him, if I had just wounded him, he might still have had the strength to go on fighting. He might have seized you and used you as a shield, or grabbed me by the legs and dragged me down. He was too near, coming right at us. It was his life or ours."

"Yes, I know," she breathed, her arms tightening about his shoulders with an understanding that went deeper than words. "He was only obeying orders, but they were brutal orders and it would have been madness to take risks with a man so enraged. If we had resisted, he would have killed us without hesitation. He might even have tried to ravish me. Did you see his face?"

"I saw it," Teleman said. "We've got to get through the forest and try to reach one of the travel strips on the other side before another face like that has a chance to wear the kind of smile that means he's won and we're either dead or bound hand and foot. That hand-gun blast may bring a dozen guards down on us before we can get far. But we're not giving up, or stopping to let the possibility weaken what we've got--a strength that comes only to lovers. It's a very special kind of strength and we've got to believe in it. Is that clear?"

"Yes, darling, very clear."

"Then the only important thing right now is to keep moving. Our luck has held so far. And there are seven more charges in this gun. I'll shoot to kill as many times as I have to."

The forest was alive with shadows and almost night-dark where the trees towered in groups of five or six, gigantic oaks with interlacing branches that completely blotted out the sky. Even the few, downstreaming shafts of sunlight had become fewer and more widely scattered and the gloom was so all enveloping that it brought a chill to Alicia's heart.

They were a mile and a half from the thick tangle of underbrush where the guard lay with his body half in shadow and the leaves about him turning dark again when they heard the rustling. It was faint at first, but it came swiftly nearer and for an instant Teleman thought that more para-guards were descending to the forest floor through the rustling canopy of leaves and interlocking branches directly ahead of them.

He stopped advancing abruptly and gripped Alicia's arm, drawing her quickly into the deep shadows which clustered about the base of a moss-grown oak so huge that its bole had the girth of a dozen slenderer trees fused by some strange freak of lightning into a massive whole, its charred surface completely hidden by the bright emerald moss, and circular patches of darker coloration where the moss had shriveled and died.

The rustling had taken on a strange and disturbing loudness, hard to associate with just the swaying of the foliage about the descending boots of para-guards, and the dry leaf crackle of their tread on the forest floor. It was accompanied by clickings and a dull, droning sound, and suddenly, as Teleman stared with a coldness creeping up his spine, light flashed between the trees and a deafening blast echoed and reverberated through the forest, shaking the ground and filling the aisles of the forest with a swirling shower of leaves.

Teleman was hurled back against the oak and Alicia was thrown with such violence to the ground that she lay for an instant motionless, too stunned to cry out or free herself from the tangle of charred creepers and smoke-blackened leaves which had descended upon her face.

Teleman dropped to his knees and dragged himself toward her, his temples pounding, a dull ache in his back. He cleared away the clinging vines with a single sweep of his arm and lifted her up, holding her tightly and gently massaging her cheeks with the back of his hand.

Her eyes opened and she stared up at him, her eyes wide with fright.

"Hurt bad?" he whispered, afraid of what her answer might be and wishing that he did not have to ask the question at all.

She shook her head. "No, I'm all right. Help me to get up. What was it? Another bomb? For a moment I thought--"

"Don't try to talk," Teleman said, his voice sharp with concern. "I think I know what it is, and it's coming toward us fast. We've got to get away from here!"

He helped her to rise and they stood for an instant swaying a little, still too shaken to do more than stare. Teleman was the first to speak decisively, and with all uncertainty driven from his mind by the ground-shaking tread which had come to his ears.

"It's one of the new walking ground-warfare machines," he said, his fingers tightening on Alicia's arm. "All metal, segmented, and equipped with scanners and atomic blast tubes. They weigh several tons and are fifty feet tall. Too heavy to be transported here in a flying machine. It must have been set in pursuit of us right after I killed that guard and has apparently circled around in front of us and is blasting the trees directly ahead in an effort to halt our advance. It is operated by remote control and its scanners have probably flashed back our exact position. We'll have to try to break that circuit in some way. I still think they're trying to capture us alive, but we can't be sure."

"How long have we got, darling?"

"I don't know. It's very near. We'll have to do some circling back ourselves. They'll expect us to flee in the opposite direction, back toward where we were. But if we make that mistake we'll be welcomed by a dozen or more armed guards. We'll have to move sideways, circling back just a little but keeping almost parallel to this tree."

"But what if that--that terrible machine follows us. If it's equipped with scanners isn't it certain to follow us?"

"It's certain to, yes. But if we can find--never mind, we haven't time to talk about it now. It's coming straight toward us. It may still be several hundred feet away, because that was a restricted atomic blast and all we felt were the vibrations at the edge of it. Those charred leaves were blown toward us from a considerable distance."

"But the sounds! I can hear its tread!"

"That rustling sound may have been made by terrified birds and small animals directly in its path. Its tread we can hear now because it is very near and is moving ponderously. But it could still be a considerable distance away. We'll have time to get out of its path if we hurry."

"Do you think it can overtake us, if we run? How fast is it moving?"

"I don't know," Teleman said. "I've never seen one of the machines in action and I just don't know. I don't think it's moving very fast, but it takes enormous strides. It will overtake us in ten or fifteen minutes at the most, unless we can mislead the scanners. Come on, let's get started."

They were just turning when the foliage lighted up again, but this time there was no thunderous detonation. The foliage at the far end of the forest aisle, a hundred feet from the massive oak tree, was merely enveloped for an instant in a blinding glare that spread outward until it filled every shadowed crevice and swaying vine-canopy between the tree and its point of origin. As it spread it became more diffuse and less blinding, until every boulder, plant and fallen log that it touched began to glow with a cold, almost spectral radiance.

The foliage at the far end of the clearing burst into flame as the great, robot-like figure came into view, a metal giant with long, segmented legs and globular body-box, surmounted by a conical head with almost human features.

That the ground-warfare machine looked both intelligent and terrifyingly humanoid in aspect would not have surprised or startled anyone familiar with the psychological subtlety which the Monitors were capable of exercising. It had been built with the terror motif in mind, and if it was an almost unbelievably efficient mechanism of destruction it was equally efficient as a shape which could inspire such fear in the beholder that he would become completely demoralized, particularly if he harbored rebellious impulses or thought of himself as a criminal.

But Teleman and Alicia did not think of themselves as criminals and Alicia had been forewarned by Teleman's description of the machine and had visualized it as both formidable and terrifyingly robot-like.

That the actual machine surpassed in hideousness the mental image she had formed of it was not a sufficiently shock-producing circumstance to make her succumb to panic, and after the first moment of shock her strength of will carried her past the danger point and enabled her to look upon the machine simply as a very dangerous weapon of warfare that threatened her life and the life of the man she loved, but in no way menaced her sanity.

It was Teleman who for a moment experienced the most acute fear, not for himself but for the safety of the woman at his side. He gripped her wrist tightly and urged her forward, moving away from the tree with such rapid strides that she had to run to keep up with him.

For ten minutes they fled through the forest in silence, climbing over logs and lichen-encrusted boulders, and sinking ankle-deep at times in soggy patches where damp leaves in heavy layers and the moisture in the soil made walking difficult and running impossible. They had put a mile between themselves and the towering ground-warfare machine when they were brought up short by a pool of still, dark water.

THIRTEEN

The gaunt woman was staring into the scanner-glass, and gripping the metal frame so tightly that her knuckles had a mottled look.

"At last!" she breathed, leaning sharply forward. "Those machines have never proved their worth until now. What a fool I was to oppose the project on the grounds of economy. Only two machines when we could have had twenty. But never mind, the two are doing very well."

"Are they?" said a quiet voice at her side. "I would not be too sure. The man is clever as well as courageous. And the woman knows how to keep fear at arm's length, always. You have met your match in that pair."

The woman swung about, an angry flushing suffusing her face and accentuating the boniness of her cheekbones. The flush was of short duration, for fear and anger seldom walk hand in hand, and pallor is very likely to accompany fear.