Part 5

"Sure it's a good camera. The best. But why in hell does that interest you now? A kid's box camera would do the job just as well. You're a funny guy, Jim. Does nothing excite you?"

For reply the tweedy man glanced significantly at his tall companion, his eyes lingering for an instant on the black gauze brassiere, and then passing downward to her shapely legs.

"Blondes, brunettes and redheads," he said, rather tritely.

"Oh, come off it. No guy could see a flying saucer--actually see one at close range--and not bust his seams with awe. Yeah, that's what I said. _Awe._ A fancy word, but I'm not ashamed to use it. Boy! Brother! It's so big it fills half the sky."

"I see what you mean," the tweedy man said. "But I never allow myself to get too excited. It doesn't pay."

"Do you have to take photographs?" the tall girl said. "It makes me terribly nervous. Suppose they don't want to be photographed?"

"I thought of that. But it's the chance of a lifetime. I'm not passing it up."

"Oh, lover!" came from the foredeck. "Oh, darling, sweet, I never imagined--don't stop now."

"Oh, Gawd!" the tall girl said. "Do we have to put up with that?"

"It's a crazy world," the tweedy man said. "That's why I'm such a skeptic. A flying saucer? Maybe. But I'm not convinced by any means. It could be a Naval Observatory plane, some new fancy kind that's disk-shaped and very large. Or maybe the Russians have come up with a low-flying satellite. Anything is possible. I'll admit that if I was convinced I would get excited."

"I'm frightened," the short brunette said. "I'm so scared I can't think straight."

"I guess we all are," the tweedy man admitted. "I take back what I said. I guess we all are. But if we just sit tight it will be gone in two or three minutes."

"I've got thirty-two exposures on this roll," the man with the camera said. "I'll get it from every angle. There won't be any argument about it this time. They'll be banner headlines and every paper in the country will give the pictures a front-page spread. I'll be in _Life_. Both the pictures and the guy who took them. The best kind of publicity for a writer. He made it on the flying-saucer circuit."

"I agree with Ellen," the tweedy man said. "I don't think you should be taking pictures. And it's not really a joking matter."

"I'm not joking. Believe me, I'm not. I'm just being a little light-headed. Can you blame me for that? You get keyed up and you think of the craziest things. Like in the poem. Two lines. 'His life was scarlet but his books were read.' To a writer that's important. Just to be read. Starting tomorrow, I'll have fifty million readers."

"You're over stimulated," the tall girl said. "Calm down. The right place for over stimulation is where it can be appreciated. There's a time and place for everything, Freddy boy, as you should know. If that flying saucer was a woman, I bet you wouldn't be half as excited."

"That's where you're wrong. But if flying saucers really exist, do you realize what that means? The whole universe could cave in on us. Anything is possible, as Jim said. Only he was thinking of Russian satellites. I'm thinking visitors from space who may bear us no love, who may want to see the whole planet go _pouf_."

On the gleaming waters of the lake four frightened people and two who were too preoccupied to be frightened, lived out the last five minutes of their lives with the unique individuality which sets every man born into the world apart from all other men, every woman apart from all other women.

They were no different from a million other people as people go: thoughtful, whimsical, light-hearted, unselfish and self-seeking, generous and tight-fisted, courageous and cowardly, aggressive and self-effacing as changing circumstances dictated. Each was a world in himself or herself--each a universe, a spiral nebula.

And in a blazing split second of time six universes were blotted out.

It happened so quickly there was no pain, no shock even. From the hull of the Martian mother ship a shaft of blinding incandescence lanced down, white, flaring, terrible. A dull concussion shook the bed of the lake, ran in earthquake-like waves to both shorelines, toppled a few trees, and traveled on with an electrically generated surcharge to the brushwood-covered summits of adjacent hills and set the brush aflame.

Where the shaft struck the water geysered. Elsewhere it was churned into whitecaps and miniature whirlpools. A dozen gigantic catfish were killed instantly and rose slowly to the surface to float, white-bellied, near the shore.

When the incandescence vanished, both the boat and its occupants were gone.

"Let us hope we encounter no more men with cameras before we have made certain that the Plan will succeed." Tragor said.

He had returned to the tele-communication screen and was standing at Sull's side, watching the image of the man who, more than any other member of his race, had become the trigger mechanism that would make or break the Plan....

David Loring had not turned, but now the door was slowly opening behind him and someone was coming into the room. On the bright and flickering screen Loring's image seemed a little larger than life size, the planes of his face a little sharper than when he had first stepped into the room. Even his shadow on the floor seemed to lengthen as Tragor stared, and Tragor found himself wondering--the thought, of course, was absurd--if that shadow might not continue to lengthen, slowly and relentlessly, until it filled the world and brought the Martian Plan crashing down in ruin.

Had they taken too great a risk? Was it not highly dangerous to use a man as a guinea pig? No, no--not a guinea pig. Only Earthmen used guinea pigs in laboratory experiments. Had he lived too long on Earth, two years that seemed like a lifetime. It was outrageous the way Earth terms sprang naturally to his lips, both outrageous and disturbing. He must try not to think in such terms. Loring was a guinea pig only in the sense that he could be destroyed if he failed. But Martians did not really use men as guinea pigs. They used them as pawns.

FIVE

The woman who had come into the room stood silently staring at him for a moment, her lips slightly parted, her young breasts taut and pressing tightly against the silken constriction of a dress that did full justice to their voluptuous roundness. The dress was pale blue, with a plunging neckline, and its semi-transparency seemed to accentuate her beauty beyond the scope of Nature's design. Absolute nudity could hardly have enhanced her loveliness at that moment, for she seemed more than unclothed to the inner eye, wrapped in a splendor so revealing that for an instant Loring could scarcely breathe.

Her femininity was so extreme as to seem unbelievable. She was all woman, her very stillness a male-stirring miracle. It excited him instantly and overwhelmingly, so that all of his thoughts became centered on her, and he forgot that he was in love with another woman. He forgot even that there were strict physical limits to any one man's capacity to experience desire.

He felt himself to be not one man but ten thousand, each from a different age, each bursting with an uncontrollable urge to clasp and hold, and satisfy to satiety the most primal and compulsive of human needs.

The wonder of her, and the strangeness, the voluptuous softness and sweetness enticed him away from reality and then drew him back to the throbbing, pulsating core of Nature's supreme reality, and held him captive there, caught up in a web of time-obliterating instinct which reason and all of Man's higher faculties had made the opposite of blind.

She seemed both a wanton and a wanton's opposite: a virginal and tender creature, shy and withdrawn. Her very breathing seemed to whisper: "I could be to you mistress and wife, dear companion and seductive enchantress, mature woman and girl-child, first love of the boy you once were and still are in dreams of youth which will never fade. I could be your lady in ermine, a goddess of fertility rites, a Paleolithic woman with great breasts swelling, and a Grecian Venus rising slender-limbed from the foam."

Even as he heard the whisper deep in his mind, the whisper of a voice that was hers, surely, though it seemed to float through his consciousness like a feather blown about at random by the slow rise and fall of her breathing--even as he heard the voice her physical attributes seemed to change.

She became a woman of woodland enchantment, a slender nymph darting in and out between the trees of an autumn-colored forest, her skin berry-stained. She became a woman pirouetting on a stage, clad like a Russian ballet dancer. She became a dancer in flowing robes, moving in slow, sensual rhythm under the spell of a weaving baton. The baton rose and fell, gleamed and swayed and the music became tumultuous, and then, abruptly, the baton ceased to move and there was only silence and darkness on the stage.

Then, all at once, he saw her again as she really was, standing with slightly parted lips within reach of his arms, so unbelievably near that he could have clasped her and drawn her to him by taking a single step forward. The fantasies conjured up by the voice--were they hallucinatory or merely mind-beguiling?--became shadowy and unreal, and her actual physical presence was all that concerned him.

In daring dreams Loring had, like most men, imagined what it would be like to make instant and completely uninhibited love to a woman without preamble and with no need to rely on past acquaintanceship, however brief, or to summon to his aid any of the social devices by which ardor without limit, can be excused or palliated in the eyes of the world.

It was primitive, perhaps, but he had often imagined himself walking between the huts of a South Sea Island village, seeing in a doorway a brown native girl who set his pulses to pounding and wasting not a second's time in gathering her into his arms and carrying her inside the hut. The girl would have to be willing, of course, even eager. Even in his most audacious dreams Loring was not a brute.

Making love that impetuously was certainly frowned upon by society, even if a man wasn't a brute, and very difficult to achieve in reality, because almost all women preferred the slower, more graceful and romantic approach. The whispering of at least a few sweet nothings into a woman's ear could work wonders and it helped to have known her for at least ten or fifteen minutes.

In sober fact, Loring had never quite been able to reconcile himself to an amatory pattern that was taken for granted in the Village. You went to a party and met a girl you liked and slept with her the same night. He liked to tell himself he couldn't be shocked and yet, almost invariably, he was shocked. Some vestigial Puritan remnant deep in his nature, perhaps. He was glad that it hadn't happened that way between Janice and himself.

And yet, strangely enough, he experienced no such inhibiting emotional reaction when he looked deep into the eyes of the woman standing before him. He felt completely freed from all conventional restraints, untouched by scruples of any kind. Her eyes both mocked and challenged him, with an almost animal sensuality, as if even his few seconds of hesitation were wholly inexcusable and were becoming intolerable in her sight.

She was unsurpassably young and vibrant, a temptress with sultry eyes and heaving bosom. Her lips were full, red and curving, her hair silvery blonde, her skin fair and smooth, unmarred by the tiniest blemish.

She gave a little cry when he seized her. At the touch of his hands on her back and thighs a spasmed aliveness took possession of her and she writhed in his clasp with an ardor that drove the blood in torrents from his heart. Her lips were fire, her kisses a burning that dissolved the barrier of flesh where their tongues met in molten sweetness.

Her body molded itself to his, pressing against the hard muscles of his chest and thighs. His own passion equaled hers for an instant and then surpassed it, and in the fierce, unrelenting masculinity of his embrace she became suddenly passive, content to surrender completely to his guidance. But in that very surrender there was a continuing wild responsiveness, a fervor that matched his own, as if she had been caught up in a wilderness of desire where bright bursts of lightning forked down and the trees were sheathed in flame.

He had lifted her up and was carrying her toward the bed, the passion seething within him making him oblivious of his surroundings and blotting from his mind all thought of Janice, when his hand on the throbbing warm flesh of her thigh, just above the knee, encountered a startling coldness. An obstruction and a coldness--something solid and very hard which sent a shock through his arm when he touched it.

For an instant his fingers tingled and he felt a sudden, very acute stab of pain, as if he had touched an open electric circuit. It was followed by a burning sensation, and a distinct mental shock, a feeling of blank bewilderment verging on horror. Suddenly the room became very real again, and he remembered that it was Janice's room, Janice's bed. A sickening sense of guilt and self-reproach swept over him. But only for the space of a dropped heartbeat. The obstruction beneath his hand was too mysteriously strange for even guilt to obliterate as an immediate, impossible-to-ignore threat to his sanity.

The object was metallic and unmistakably disk-like. Beneath his exploring fingers its configuration dispelled all uncertainty as to its shape and it had the smoothness, the coldness, and the general feel of a metal object. It was about three inches in diameter and seemed to be embedded in the flesh of her thigh. There were no wires or prongs projecting from it. The shock had come from the disk itself, but there was no further shock as his fingers rested upon it.

He found himself tugging at it, without quite knowing why he felt such a compulsive need to find out all that he could about it except that it filled him with alarm and foreboding.

The woman in his arms was still clinging to him, her arms tight about his shoulders, her body moving with the slow, voluptuous amorousness that kisses could distract but for an instant. She seemed unaware that he had found the metal disk, so entranced was she by the soaring breathlessness of a moment from which the mechanical was by necessity barred and kept at bay by love's physical rapture in a temple of love's own choosing. She was breathing heavily now, her eyes glazed, a deep flush suffusing her face and throat.

But Loring's pulses were no longer pounding. Her kisses were feverish and had to be returned, but he returned them now without enthusiasm, a cold fear constricting the muscles of his heart. A dozen frightening questions clamored in his mind for answers that did not satisfy him, and did nothing to lessen his dread.

Was the disk a surgical device of some sort? If it was, what was its purpose and function? A metal plate inserted in a man's skull could protect his brain from damage, if natural suturing failed. But why should a metal device be embedded in the flesh of a woman's thigh, just above her right knee? What possible purpose could it serve?

Had some unusual and tragic accident left her partially paralyzed? Was the metal disk a surgical device designed to restore the circulation or correct the impaired muscular flexibility of an injured limb? An electrical device? It seemed probable, since touching it had given him a shock. But the rest of it was hard to accept. The shock had been more than physical. Momentarily it had done something to his mind, chilling him to the core, and making him remember something that he had once read--that a man in the grip of stark fear can lose all sexual drive.

But why had his discovery of the disk so profoundly alarmed him? Why had he experienced such sharply mounting apprehension? It was merely an electrically charged metal appliance, small, flat and circular and--yes, not unlike a hearing aid. Could it be a hearing aid? He would have liked to believe so, but it seemed unlikely. No woman, however vain, would wear a hearing aid on her right thigh.

Her hands were moving back and forth across his back, and she was moaning a little and pressing her lips against his throat. He knew that he could not maintain the pretense of desire much longer, that she would begin to suspect he was responding like an automaton, with the desperate clumsiness of a man whom heated kisses and the most fervent of body movements could no longer arouse.

He felt detached, remote in some vital part of himself, with a cold objectivity growing in his mind which he could neither explain nor understand. There was a pain in his heart also, an agony of indecision. He was backed up against the bed now, his arms still tight about her, but love's culmination would now be a mockery and something deep in his nature rebelled at carrying pretense that far.

It was incredible, it stunned him, because he was susceptible beyond the average--so overwhelmingly so that there were times when the mere touch of a beautiful woman's hand on his arm could set him to trembling.

And now he was clasping a woman who was almost savage in her direct approach to passion, a woman utterly without inhibitions, primitive as few women would have dared to be. But a woman of flesh and blood notwithstanding, with an eagerness to love and be loved that was as human as his own demanding need of her had been.

_That was as human_.... The thought was insidious at first, a small, gnawing doubt in an obscure recess of his mind, emerging fearfully crawling out into the light like some tiny rodent with razor-sharp teeth.

Hadn't her great beauty seemed from the first almost unendurably tormenting, as if no woman had a right to be quite so beautiful and to drive a man to such a wild, uncontrollable frenzy of desire? Hadn't he felt for an instant that she could have very easily destroyed him, simply by withholding her favors and refusing to let him touch her? And the fierceness of his desire, his feeling that all of his ancestors lived in him and desired her with a deep, racial urgency, a Dawn Man's primitiveness--hadn't that been a little different from the strong virile desire which a perfectly normal, civilized man of ardent temperament would feel even in the presence of an extraordinarily beautiful woman?

He was completely human, all too human, and it was useless to pretend that he hadn't found the going a little rugged at times since he'd set himself the difficult task of staying loyal to just one woman. It had been tough, but he had proved to himself that he could do it. Not once, but a dozen times. And yet, when he had taken this strange woman into his arms something dark and terrible had stirred in his blood, and blotted out every loyalty.

Why? What did it mean? The metal disk on her thigh, her great beauty, the strangeness of her. The strangeness.... There was something in the Song of Songs about that. "The magic and wonder of a strange woman."

According to Biblical legend there were two women in Eden. There was Eve, who was Adam's lawful wife. And there was Lilith, the enchantress, the dark sorceress, a creature of fire and dust who was not human and who gave birth to demons. But Lilith was beautiful beyond imagination--more maddeningly desirable than a human woman could ever be.

She was clothed in garments of flesh, but she was not flesh. She was the eternally seductive female that Man cannot do without, lest his manhood wither on the vine. He must pursue and clasp her, in wild dreams of madness and desire, or his Earthbound lovemaking will be futile and absurd and living women will turn from him to seek a more accomplished lover elsewhere.

The sorceress came bearing gifts--the greatest of all gifts, a wealthy fruitage that was hers alone to share. "Love me at your peril," she whispered, "but love me well, or you will be less than a man and you will live to regret it. Why should you fear the kind of love I bring you? All life is uncertain; all men dwell in the shadow of the grave. But there is one supreme fulfillment, one joy that, once experienced, can never be taken from you. I am Lilith, all woman, all soft yielding flesh, and I have come to you alone, in a secret place, and in the joining of our bodies there is rapture unspeakable."

They were not the words of the woman in his arms. That Loring knew. But still they found an echo in his thoughts, as though the woman he was clasping could see deep into his mind and knew that from myths and dreams and legends Man had built an imperishable inner world that no reality, however harsh, could wholly shatter and destroy.

And what if modern science could illuminate and transform that world without altering its strangeness and its dangerous beauty, making it in every respect real? What if modern science, with the technical knowledge of intellectual giants and the lightning at its fingertips could create a Lilith? A woman of more than human beauty but still in every way a woman. A woman not fashioned of fire and dust but of living, breathing flesh, laboratory-created, perfect, flawless, in every aspect of her being.

Only a fool would think it impossible. Had not modern science achieved as great a miracle when it had released the wild stallions at the Atom's core? Why not ... why not? Modern science or--a technology alien to Earth?

Both were possible. There could be intelligent life on Mars, on Venus. What was it H.G. Wells had said? Great cool minds watching us, plotting our destruction....

The woman in Loring's arms spoke then, for the first time. She was no longer clinging to him, no longer moving her limbs in amorous abandonment and tugging at his hands in an effort to draw them to the warm cavern between her taut young breasts.

"Yes," she said.

Loring's temples began to pound. He stared at her wordlessly, looking deep into her eyes, unable to believe what he saw there. A calmness, a quiet depth of understanding--even a measure of pity. "Those were not all your thoughts," she said. "Some of them were mine."

"Who are you?" Loring breathed.

"Lilith," she said. "As you have thought of what such a woman could be to you if you believed in her as a scientific reality. Lilith, in that sense. Your dark enchantress--if my hair were not silvery blonde and my eyes were not blue. Laboratory created. Yes, that's true. And the disk gives me life and warmth and fire. I am a telepath. I can read your thoughts. But you were not supposed to know that. And you were not supposed to discover the disk. You stirred me beyond reason and I became careless. Your too eager hands...."

She sighed and the pity in her eyes seemed to deepen, widening her pupils in an unfathomable way.

"The harm is done now. There is nothing I can do. If I hadn't told you you would have tugged at the disk and I would have gone limp in your arms. Then your curiosity would have become insatiable. Fear alone would have made it insatiable. I know exactly what you would have done."

"What--would I have done?"

"You would have ceased to be a lover. You would have become ruthlessly scientific and clinical. You would have stretched me out on the bed and removed all of my clothes. You would have examined me from head to foot, not sparing even the pores of my skin. Without a magnifying glass you would be handicapped, not quite as well equipped as one of those thorough little men whose task it is to peer at beetles under glass or butterflies pinned to a board, or a human body stretched out naked and helpless on a mortuary slab. But you would have seen enough to disillusion you. No woman can be peered at quite that relentlessly. Even a body like mine is not perfect. There are a few flaws."