Part 3

How many human lovers had she known? he wondered. A woman that beautiful could hardly have escaped lovers, but it did not matter to him at all. It disturbed human males, sometimes even drove them to acts of violence, but he was not that kind of a fool. He could make any woman forget any lover in her past. He was sure of it. He could blot the memory from her mind, make it seem less than the shadow of a dream. She would exist for him alone and believe that she had come into his arms completely virginal.

A little violence at first perhaps might be needed. He must be firm and unbending, but it would not be for long. She would quickly enough dissolve in his arms when the monster image was destroyed by an embrace more passionate and unyielding than she could have dared to hope for, even during those moments of wild surrender when a woman is asleep and dreaming and restrained by nothing sternly forbidding and unfair to her nature in the waking world.

The four men and four women had seen the ship now and were on their feet, pointing, shouting, their faces contorted with terror. The girl by the brook had dropped her pail and was running toward the others, her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, her white limbs gleaming in the sunlight.

Tragor swayed a little, so aroused and stimulated by her great beauty that he was unable to take command. He stood very still, his heart beating wildly, knowing that it was not really necessary for him to act. Others would act for him, as they had often done in the past. In the absence of direct orders the ship would veer slightly, and then remain stationary, hovering above the women who were to be taken captive and the men who were to be destroyed. A wide section of the hull would swing open, and five heavily armed Martians would descend to the ground over a collapsible metal stairway. The stairway would be instantly withdrawn and not lowered again until the men had been killed, the women taken captive.

It was happening now. Tragor could hear the thrumming of the opening hull section, the metallic clatter of weapons and equipment as the marauding party waited with no attempt to conceal their impatience for the stairway to be lowered.

Then, through the view-glass, he saw the stairway go down and the first of the five Martians start to descend, his massive shoulders and hairless skull giving him the formidable aspect of a trained warrior who would give and expect no quarter. The brutishness of the warrior caste never failed to repel Tragor a little, but he realized that warriors were necessary.

A human woman might almost be justified in looking upon a Martian warrior as a monster. A straggle-legged brute, hairy and uncouth and utterly lacking in refinement. To be seized by a warrior, roughly slapped, and carried screaming and kicking to a space ship could hardly fail to be abhorrent to a sensitive and delicate woman. But a desirable woman could not be allowed to escape and the women of Earth were often incredibly fleet of foot.

Two warriors were descending the stairway now and a third was just emerging. The structure grazed the ground, but did not rest solidly upon it. It was necessary to keep the ship in motion, and a grounded stairway could cause unimaginable havoc.

Below there was havoc of a different sort. Two of the men were standing their ground and one had picked up a rifle. But the fourth man was in headlong flight, his shoulders jerking as he ran, his coat flapping open. He stumbled and fell and picked himself up again, stopping for an instant to look back in horror. He did not seem to care that he had stamped himself a craven and cut a woefully pitiful figure, for he added to his shame by crying out hoarsely. He changed his course slightly and headed directly for the grove, moving slowly and awkwardly now, as if fear had begun to paralyze him.

The gaunt, mannish woman was standing very still, shading her eyes with her hands and watching the Martians descend with no pronounced change of expression. But her face was drained of all color. The two stout women were clinging to each other and screaming.

But the girl whom Tragor had seen first by the brook and now saw in a different light, with the sunlight aureoling her hair and a man to defend her, did not appear to be the kind of woman who could be easily demoralized. She stood straight and still by the man with the rifle, her head tilted back in defiance, her lips slightly parted.

All five of the Martians were on the stairway now, and the first to emerge from the ship had been passed by the second, an equally muscular warrior with an even more brutish countenance. With a quick leap he was on the ground, his puckered, heavy-lidded eyes darting toward the four women with lascivious eagerness, the pupils strangely luminous.

The Martian directly above him paused for an instant on the stairway, raised to his shoulder a small, compact weapon that bore a slight resemblance to a sawed-off shotgun despite its technical complexity and took careful aim at the running man, who had almost reached the grove.

The weapon leapt in the Martian's clasp and a sharp crack echoed like a pistol shot across the open countryside, from the hollow, metallic sounding board of the ship's hull to the distant cluster of trees.

The running man screamed, threw out his arms and crumpled at the edge of the grove. The spurt of blood from a severed artery was visible from the ship, a thin, crimson jet that spattered the grass and the foliage and gleamed brightly on the boles of the trees until the crumpled body began to smoke. The smoke spiralling up from the slain man obscured the gleaming, and was blown by the wind between the trees, filling the entire grove with a thin, drifting haze.

One of the stout women swayed, released her hold on her companion's arm and sank to the ground in a dead faint. The other went on screaming, so shrilly and hysterically that for a moment no other sound could be heard--not even the heavy tread of the Martians moving toward the four women and three men with their weapons raised.

The slender girl, who Tragor coveted, gripped the arm of the man beside her in desperate appeal.

"Don't shoot, Kenneth," she whispered, her face pale with fear. "They'll kill you too!"

"They'll kill me anyway," the man said, closing his hand tightly over her trembling fingers and gently freeing his arm. "This is one nightmare that seems to be real. They're certain to kill us all. But I'm going to get one of them first."

The rifle was at his shoulder before she could cry out in protest.

There was another sharp crack, not unlike the report which the Martian's complicated weapon had made. The nearest Martian came to an abrupt halt. For an instant his green-fleshed, masklike face remained totally devoid of expression. Then the lineaments seemed to shrivel and darken. The cruel, slitted mouth lost its firmness and the flesh around the eyelids began to sag. Slowly, horribly the entire face changed color, the green fading to an ashen gray, the pinkish hue of the eyelids darkening to a deep crimson which did not fade.

From a ragged cavern in the Martian's chest there came a brighter flood of crimson. It stained the fabric of his dark-textured, tight-fitting garments, dripped from his garments to the ground and formed a widening pool at his feet.

He swayed a little, but he did not totter and fall. He died standing up, with the animation fading slowly from his eyes. The eyes clouded over, became opaque. But still the Martian remained upright, a standing corpse which maintained its equilibrium by the sturdiness of its firmly planted legs and the sheer massiveness of its barrel-shaped torso and dangling arms.

The mannish woman sank to her knees, covered her eyes with her hands, and began to moan. The man with the rifle stood motionless, his lips white, smoke pouring from the barrel of the half-lowered weapon. The stout woman had ceased to scream. Her face looked gray and frozen and her fingers had gone to her throat. She was plucking at the flesh of her throat, as if the sudden tightening of her vocal cords was causing her unendurable torment.

The slain Martian's costly delay in killing the man with the rifle appeared to enrage his companions. With brutal callousness two of them moved forward, and hurled the lifeless body to the ground. Then, they took care not to repeat his mistake. They killed all three men, with such rapid bursts of weapon fire that they were lifted into the air, hurled backwards and were dead before their bodies struck the ground.

The slender woman whom Tragor coveted cried out in anguish and ran toward the crumpled form of the man with the rifle, her eyes shining with a near madness that went far beyond shock and made her waver as she ran. He was still clasping the rifle, his fingers snagged in the trigger frame. There were no visible wounds on his body, but blood stained his left temple and his eyebrows and hair had been singed. His face was ashen, the eyes blankly staring. She knew at once that he was dead and flung herself upon him, weeping, moaning, her body racked by uncontrollable sobs.

She did not hear the slow, heavy tread of a Martian drawing near and if she had heard she would not have cared. She had no desire to go on living, and had ceased to know the meaning of fear. Her life was over. At that moment she realized, as never before, that no one dies alone.

He had taken her with him and she had died too. Only the hollow shell of a living woman remained. She did not care what happened to that shell. There is no fate worse than death to a woman who has ceased to live.

At first, when she felt herself being seized and lifted up, she struggled only to remain where she was--close to the man whose life she had shared and would go on sharing forever, despite death and change and Time's relentless tyranny in a universe which spared no one.

She was not even aware of the Martian's fleshly strength, the savage cruelty of his embrace, the way he was drawing her to him mercilessly, encircling her shoulders and refusing to relax his grip on her arms until his flat, hard chest bruised her numbed breasts.

At first the Martian was no more than a hindrance, an obstacle, a disembodied force that was keeping her from her dead lover. It was as if a magnetic web had enmeshed her limbs and was lifting her from the slain man's side, forcing her to abandon him.

It wasn't until the Martian had swung about and started back toward the ship, his arms tight about her, that she started to struggle. Even then her struggles were blindly instinctive, her flesh rebelling while her mind remained remote and grief-shattered.

She was not the only captive. Both of the stout women were struggling furiously in the arms of warrior-caste Martians, their faces flushed and despairing, their bodies arched backwards, as if to remain pressed cruelly to the boardlike chests of captors so brutish and alien, their screams silenced by force, was a horror and a degradation which no woman could sanely endure.

The gaunt, large-boned, mannish-looking woman was not being carried to the ship. She was being propelled forward by nudgings from the weapon of a Martian who wore upon his masklike face an unmistakable look of distaste.

There was a cold anger in her eyes and she walked with dignity despite the proddings, her composure completely restored now, her lips set in tight lines.

Tragor, staring through the view-glass, had missed nothing of the deadly, ten-minute struggle. He was pleased and almost beside himself with eagerness to take the captive whose beauty had so maddeningly aroused him from the arms of the warrior-caste brute and carry her to his own sleeping compartment.

The warriors had done well, but he had no intention of congratulating them. Discipline forbade it. A wave of revulsion swept over him again when he thought of how crude the warriors were in their lovemaking. They had no delicacy of perception, no true understanding of how to make love to a woman. They went about it in the most brutal imaginable way. Firmness, yes--that was necessary. You had to be very strong and sure of yourself. The slightest doubt or hesitation could be fatal.

In fact, you could develop what human psychologists called a complex in regard to one particular woman if you failed at the wrong moment, no matter how accomplished you were with other women. He had been on Earth long enough to understand these things, to realize that Martians were no different from human males in that respect. One failure, and a woman could be lost to you forever. And she might be the most desirable woman you'd ever known, and couldn't do without.

It was important to understand all this, because when a Martian made love to a woman who regarded him as a monster, failure might very easily occur the first time. And that failure might be impossible to overcome later on.

No, no, he told himself angrily. It wouldn't happen this time. The captive who had stirred him beyond reason was now being carried up the stairway into the ship. She was still struggling and her red-gold hair had come unbound and fallen over her shoulders and he could see the entrancing curvature of her half-revealed breasts. She was slender and yet her beauty seemed full-blown in a pulse-stirring way, as the beauty of a young girl often seems in the magic mirror which draws no sharp distinction between a girl of twenty and a woman of thirty. If she is lovely enough, she becomes not one woman, but two, her youthful charms blending with the ripeness which will soon be hers and making that ripeness another aspect of her present self.

It couldn't happen this time, he told himself again. He desired her too overwhelmingly and her beauty was too irresistible. She would stir him instantly to an amorous frenzy. He was sure of it. He would experience no misgivings, no apprehension. Already he could feel her lips moving against his. Her lips were full, red and enticingly curved. He would drain the sweetness of her mouth like a thirsty man, a parched desert wayfarer....

He straightened, anger creasing his brow. The warrior-caste brutes were taking unwarranted liberties with two of the captive women when they were under strict orders to do no more than clasp them firmly and carry them into the ship. It did not anger him too much, because the women the brutes had captured would probably soon become their mates. But what if it gave the warrior who was carrying the slender woman ideas?

The brute did not know that she was the woman of Tragor's choice. He had not assumed command and he had issued no orders. What if the warrior assumed that Tragor was hard to please and would not be likely to have made a choice when so many opportunities were open to him? Hadn't he surrendered even more beautiful women to warriors with a shrug, simply because they hadn't seemed quite so desirable as the slender woman who might, unless he acted quickly, find herself in the deadliest kind of danger?

A sudden trembling seized him. His worst fears seemed about to be realized. The warrior-caste Martian had paused a short distance from the top of the stairway, and had taken firm hold of his captive's unbound hair. He was drawing her head backwards, with the unmistakable intention of implanting a kiss on her lips--a kiss that would be savage and prolonged. Just to be kissed in that way by such a brute was a desecration in itself. And Tragor knew that the brute would not be satisfied with a kiss. It would not stop there. His hands....

Tragor left the observation compartment in three long strides, dark anger surging up in him, a fury that he was powerless to control. He knew that the warrior was not too much to blame, for he had issued no orders. But if it went beyond a kiss, he swore that the brute would die.

He had gone beyond a kiss but not too much beyond. Standing at the head of the stairway, with the opened section of hull looming at his back, Tragor took careful note of what the warrior-caste Martian was doing. The brute had placed one of his taloned hands squarely on his captive's back, and was running the other over her body, over the smooth curvature of her hips and back and forth across her knees. Her knees were drawn up and she was kicking her legs in protest, but her efforts to free herself did not seem to be discouraging the Martian.

Tragor did not move at all for a moment. Then he stepped forward into the light which was flooding up from below and spoke to the warrior-caste Martian.

"Come into the ship. Put her down and walk away from her. Do you understand? I expect instant obedience."

The warrior obeyed in complete silence. He cast one doubtful glance at Tragor and then did as he was told. The slender girl slumped to the deck the instant she was released, rolled over on her side and moaned.

The warrior spoke then, for the first time. "I did not harm her. You saw--"

"I saw," Tragor said.

"If I did her no harm, why are you angry?"

"Your orders were to bring her into the ship without making love to her."

"But you gave no orders--"

"They are permanent orders. All captive women are to be brought to me first. I will decide who is to claim them."

The warrior nodded. "I am sorry," he said.

"You had better be. Turn now and walk away from me."

The warrior-caste Martian took a slow step backwards. He began to tremble. "You will not--"

"You heard what I said. Walk away from me."

The Martian turned without a word and walked away from Tragor along the deck.

Tragor removed a small metallic box from his three-pocketed waist jacket, opened it, and withdrew the dart projector from its sterile container. He raised the projector to eye level and took careful aim.

The dart struck the warrior-caste Martian at the base of the neck and went completely through his skull, passing upward through his brain to emerge at the top of his head.

He did not die standing up. The needlelike sliver of metal severed a cerebral nerve that controlled the functioning of his muscles and his entire body went flaccid, so that he slumped to the deck without uttering a sound, but with a conclusive shudder that would have been pitiful to watch if Tragor had been capable of compassion or remorse.

But Tragor felt only dark, terrible, anger, ebbing away a little now that he had found a target for his ire and had laid that target low.

He turned and walked to where the slender woman was lying. He was more shaken than he would have cared to admit even to himself. He had never experienced a rage quite so uncontrollable and he knew that it did him no credit. Jealousy? No, that was insane. How could he be jealous of a brutish, warrior-caste Martian?

The brute had held her tightly in his arms, kissed her savagely, dared to embrace her in a more intimate way. But he had not possessed her. And she had not responded in any way to his brutal lovemaking. She had struggled instead, had shown unmistakably that she would have preferred death to a night in the dark with so primitive a lover.

But that was all over now. He had avenged and protected her and with him it would be different.

It would be very different. He would destroy the beast image very quickly by his tenderness and solicitude, and his virile, forthright lovemaking. There was no brutishness in him but she would find him very firm, accomplished, determined to make her realize that Martians were completely human in every way that mattered--with minds and hearts that worshipped at the shrine of love, and with bodies which were lithe-limbed and well formed. Anatomically there was no actual structural difference between Earthmen and Martians that went beyond skin coloration and the more superficial aspects of posture, muscular co-ordination in the higher cerebral centers, and the distribution of body fat. Martians walked with a slightly stooped posture, but they could stand straight enough when the need arose. In addition to the difference in skin coloration their facial contours were at variance with the human form, and their hands terminated in nails so sharp and long that Earthmen thought of them as claws.

They were clawlike, but only because the nails contained a network of tiny blood vessels and could not be cut without causing a Martian to writhe in pain. Why did it so seldom occur to Earthmen that their own bodies were primitive to an equal degree and that the heritage of the jungle had left its mark on them? Why were they so slow to realize that only the great beauty of their women could overcome such flaws?

Martians were human--as that term was used on Earth. To think of them as merely _humanoid_ did Earthmen and Earthwomen no credit, for it was a reflection on their intelligence. And in one respect at least both races possessed a splendor which no primitiveness could dim. In both Martians and Earthmen the great organ of love was the same.

Tragor remained for an instant deep in thought, his eyes on the slender woman for whom he had killed--and he would kill again, if necessary, to make her completely his own. Then he bent and slipped one arm about her slim waist, and gently raised her to a sitting position on the deck. For an instant she seemed scarcely aware that she was no longer alone with her grief. Her failure to struggle or offer any resistance at all surprised him. She had surrendered limply to his guiding strength, allowing him to lift her up and change the position of her body without crying out or pleading with him not to touch her.

It was a good omen, even though it seemed strange and unnatural under the circumstances. Then, quite suddenly, he realized that she wasn't looking at him at all. She was staring dazedly beyond him, at the blank expanse of metal surrounding the slowly closing hull section. Her eyes were very wide, the pupils slightly dilated, and her lips were parted, as if she lacked the will or desire to bring her thoughts to a focus, and exercise control over the muscles of her face.

She appeared to be in a state of shock. Well that was understandable, he told himself. He should have anticipated such a frustrating development and made allowances for it. He could wait. She would find him an impetuous lover but not an inconsiderate one. He would know how to be gentle with her.

He would wait patiently and--it suddenly seemed to him that he could no longer breathe. Her closeness, the pulsating of the veins in her soft, white throat, the swelling firmness of her breasts, bursting like honey mounds from the constraining tightness of her dress made it impossible for him to wait.

It was all like a terrible dream that is both rapturously intoxicating--sweet beyond anything the waking mind can experience--and laden with the blackest kind of guilt. He had not wanted to be cruelly importunate with this woman whom he desired so ardently--this woman whom he had already begun to worship.

But now he had no choice. Restraint had become impossible.

His arms went out and around her. She was not the first human woman he had ever made love to, but in that instant of fierce passion no other woman existed for him. There were no memories to distract him and provide comparisons, for all past amorous conquests dwindled to a pin point glimmering in his mind, and then vanished completely.

He was only aware of _her_. Aware of her hair, which his taloned hands caressed lightly and the soft flesh of her shoulders which he also caressed, and the tender swell of her bosom which drew his eyes, and her mouth, which he wanted to smother with kisses. He wanted to envelop her completely, and in every pore of her being, to make of his body a palpitating web of love which would bind and imprison her and make her his captive and a slave of love through long months and years of amorous dalliance.