Part 6

Loring drew in his breath sharply. She had drawn away from him and was sitting on the edge of the bed, a faint, enigmatic smile on her lips. Then the smile vanished and her eyes clouded over.

"I am sorry. It is all very serious--and I am deeply troubled. I did not intend to speak with bitterness or levity. But sometimes levity helps when you are inwardly greatly disturbed."

"Good God, if I really believed--" Loring's mouth had gone dry and he had difficulty in getting the words out. "You don't actually expect me to believe--"

"How much proof do you need? If I hadn't the ability to anticipate some of your thoughts would you know as much as you do about me? Telepathy at that level of complexity would only be possible between a human and a not entirely human mind. Surely you must realize that. The faculty is more highly developed in me than it is in you, but it is strong enough in you to be stimulated artificially when our minds are in contact."

"Then you must have wanted me to know."

"Up to a point. Your erotic ardor might have been less intense if you had thought me completely human. There would have been less mystery to stir you and make you my slave."

"Your _slave_! You must be quite mad."

"Oh, no, I'm not. You may think the shoe was on the other foot, but it wasn't, not for a moment. You have a term for it. Love slave. Don't misunderstand me. That is not a reflection on your masculinity, on the relationship that exists between a man and a woman in biological sense. No truly feminine woman wants to dominate a man in a love relationship, and no really masculine man would stand for it. But I am not talking about the purely physical relationship. In an ultimate sense it is the woman who enslaves the man, by her beauty. If that beauty is great enough he becomes her slave night and day. He thinks of nothing else, desires nothing else."

It was a subject that Loring had always felt so strongly about that for an instant he forgot his fear, his growing bewilderment and even the threat implicit in her reference to him as a slave.

"Slave is too harsh a term for that kind of entanglement," he said. "The world calls such a man a romantic fool or a fool for love. But I've never had any objection to being that kind of a fool. What else in life is one-tenth as important? There's nothing else that you can be completely sure of; that no one can take away from you once you've experienced it. Even the memory is better than a Long Island estate or seven Cadillacs and almost anything else I can think of that I wouldn't pass up if it were offered me. A poet once put it better than I could: 'Who gets more than the lovers, in the dust, in the cool tombs?'"

"I wasn't thinking about tombs," she said. "But it could be very serious for you."

"Why? Because I wouldn't object too strenuously to being what you foolishly call a love slave?"

"Yes. Because, you see, that's why you were chosen. Because you feel that way. And that's why Janice Reece was chosen."

Loring started, his lips tightening, his face becoming pale beneath his summer tan. "Chosen? What do you mean? Are you talking about what happened here this morning, when Janice woke up? The man in her room?"

"You shouldn't have to ask that. Why do you suppose you found me here? I'm surprised you didn't have more curiosity right at the start. You couldn't think of anything, see anything, but the cut of my dress and the way it clung to me, and I'll be very blunt--the bed on the other side of the room."

She looked at him steadily, almost angrily, but he had the feeling she wasn't angry because of what he had done. She was angry in a more impersonal way, as if she were cursing fate for bringing about a tragedy which should never have taken place.

"They wanted you to make violent love to me and you did," she said. "At least, you started to. And your lovemaking was very wonderful. It would have stirred a woman of ice. If my response was all that they could have desired, it wasn't a pretense. I want you to know that. When you took me into your arms I could have--well, never mind. It's over now, and you're in very great danger. I wish there was something I could do."

"There is," Loring said, trying to keep his voice steady, but not quite succeeding. "You can stop talking in insane riddles. You say you're not entirely human. But I can't accept that. I've the kind of mind that just can't adjust to a thing like that. Speculating about it and telling yourself that it's not impossible, not beyond the scope of what modern science could accomplish, isn't quite the same thing as out-and-out acceptance. You look too human, act too human, you're warm and alive. You're right here with me, and I took you in my arms and kissed your eyes and lips and hair. I can't believe--"

"You must believe," she said, "because it is true. I am completely human in a physical way, with warm human blood in my veins, and a heart that beats steadily; and I can be stirred to passion like any young girl by the caresses of a lover. Even my mind is human, although there may be certain differences. If you could see my brain it would not startle you. No medical student would be puzzled or disturbed by it. It is no larger or in any way different from the brain of a quite ordinary woman."

She paused and moistened her lips, still looking at him steadily. "I have warm blood in my veins and I can be as yielding and generous as any man could desire. But I'm unlike any other woman. I was never born."

He started to speak, but she silenced him with a gesture. "Don't look so startled. Have I not prepared your mind for such a revelation? Does it not follow the pattern of your thoughts a moment ago, when our thoughts merged? I was never born. I was laboratory-created. But I was not created by _human_ science. Human science has soared miraculously and a tiny, furry creature with bulging eyes has descended from the trees and become a big-brained biped who has exploded the energies at the core of matter, explored the universe through a great, stationary eye for millions of light years and may yet succeed in disrupting a sun, and hurling a blinding incandescence through space as a symbol of what Man alone can accomplish."

She nodded, her eyes beginning to shine. "Yes, human science can accomplish miracles, but it has not yet succeeded in reproducing the human form in all of its complexity--brain, heart, arteries, bone structure, the pulse of life itself--within a transparent incubator bright with nutrient fluids, weaving filaments of flame, stabbing needles of nuclear energy...."

She stopped, her breath quickening, and lowered her eyes. "I have told you too much," she went on with a slight tremor in her voice, as if she were forcing herself to remain calm, but knew that she was treading on dangerous ground. "There are some things I can't tell you. They would destroy me instantly if I told you more than a small part of what I know. I am in danger because you discovered the disk which controls my breathing, my pulse rate, and my ability to move about at will. But you are in much greater danger. You are in danger because you were able to resist me. They may feel that their plans are in jeopardy."

"Their plans--"

"Let me talk. Let me say what has to be said now, before I think about it too much and fear make a coward of me. If you who are a fool for love--I am only repeating what you told me and what they believe about you--if _even you_ could resist me, more hard-headed, practical men who think of love only as a diversion, and often hate themselves when they succumb to it, men who sit in high places and rule the Earth with a humorless kind of harshness, may not succumb at all."

She had raised her eyes and was looking at him steadily again, with an unexpected warmth and sympathy in her gaze. "It is not a mistake to think of love as the most important thing in life. I agree with you. It is. There is a greatness in living that only love can make complete and glorious. Even though I am not completely human I know that without desire, without the need to give and receive love, my brain and heart would shrivel. But not all women feel that way. And not all men. There are some men who so despise love that they think of it as shameful, the physical act of love as a degradation."

"I know," Loring said. "And they are tragically crippled men."

"You are not crippled," she said. "That is why you were chosen. They had to make a test first, a carefully controlled exploratory--" She hesitated, an evanescent smile hovering for the barest instant on her lips and then vanishing, leaving her eyes even more deeply troubled.--"The technical term for it, in human laboratory experiments is, I believe, 'test run.' They had to make a test run with just one man and one woman before my great beauty could be transformed into a weapon for the conquest of Earth."

Loring stared at her wordlessly, stunned, unbelieving. He would have liked to trust his reason completely, to dismiss what she had said as the meaningless ranting of a madwoman. But somehow he couldn't quite ignore the look of desperate appeal in her eyes, her aspect of absolute sanity. He had turned deathly pale.

"You must believe me," she went on quickly. "I am risking destruction by telling you this. They have a plan for world conquest which is audacious beyond anything the human mind could have conceived, audacious and terrible, with every detail coldly thought out, weighed, decided upon. I will become not one woman, but many. I am the first, but there will be others. A thousand women with my lips and hair and eyes, and my white and beautiful limbs that almost brought you to your knees in adoration. A thousand women like me will be laboratory-created.

"A thousand women and a thousand men. Your Janice saw the man when she awoke this morning. There are men who only have to look once at a woman and she begins to tremble. Her breathing quickens and she knows only the insensate joy of immediate and complete surrender."

Her lips were trembling slightly and she cast an apprehensive glance toward the door, then went on quickly. "Your Janice is a very strong-willed young woman. When she saw the stranger in her room she was startled and frightened at first. That was only to be expected. She had just awakened and it was only natural for her to experience nothing but fear for a moment. Then she lost her fear but she was not instantly and overwhelmingly drawn to him. She should have been, but she wasn't. She was very strongly attracted to him, but she did not lose control."

Loring moistened his lips. "She told me," he said. "She told me exactly how she felt. But what happened when he left the apartment made me jealous beyond reason."

"That was a hypnotic illusion, deliberately introduced into her mind. I will tell you a strange thing. When her breath did not quicken with passion, anger overcame him. He did not step forward and embrace her simply because he could not. _We must not make the first advance._ Deep in our minds they have implanted a command: If you do not succeed instantly, do nothing. Your presence alone must stir the chosen ones to an ardor they are powerless to resist. We cannot judge the strength of that ardor otherwise.

"Do you understand? She did not respond with instant, overwhelming ardor and he could do nothing. He stood there as if paralyzed, staring at her. He is as human as I am in that respect. In that moment of repudiation--and it was a repudiation even though his physical nearness stirred her--he experienced great bitterness and anger. But he had to pretend that he was not angered. So he advanced to the bed, kissed her lightly on the forehead and left the apartment.

"Then I think _they_ lost their heads for a moment. It is what I have been told. They introduced into her mind an erotic fantasy, so powerful, so compelling, that she was powerless to resist. They know that to the human mind an erotic trance, dreamlike and unreal, can be more compulsively irresistible than any waking moment of rapture and abandonment, enforced by fervent kisses and caressing hands. In dreams of desire, the human mind is completely set free. All inhibitions are dissolved. But such dreams cannot last. They do not permanently enslave, because the dreamer is bound by no physical chains."

"But--"

"Listen carefully. You must listen. That erotic fantasy accomplished nothing, proved nothing. They realized that almost at once. They were defeated and discouraged. Your Janice had disappointed them and she had been one of the chosen two--a fool for love. Now you have disappointed them. Your ardor cooled too quickly. You remembered how completely, how desperately you loved her and you ceased to desire me. Do not tell me otherwise. I know better. Your discovery of the disk may have helped to cool your ardor, but she was the real reason. She is all beauty and all grace in your sight. She is the mistress of your heart and will always remain so."

A sardonic smile appeared for an instant on her lips. "I should be angry, as he was angry. But I am not. I do not know why, but there is something about you."

She sighed and looked away quickly. "Perhaps some impulse, some pattern of behavior they implanted in me went wrong. Perhaps I myself distorted it. I feel for you a strange liking--"

Suddenly she laughed, a little wildly and was instantly sober again. "We must not talk about such things. The danger is too great. Even now they may be--"

"Tell me," Loring said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears. "Who are _they_? I must know."

She started to speak and then, all at once, her body stiffened and a look of horror came into her eyes. She clutched at her right thigh and half rose from the bed, her lips livid, and her mouth twisting strangely, as if she had been gripped by a spasm of sudden, almost unendurable pain.

She staggered and almost fell and then in that instant she seemed to age. Her face took on a waxy pallor and hollows appeared in her cheeks, so that the bones of her face became faintly visible. Her skin sagged a little, losing much of its firmness and even the fresh look of youth. Her great beauty remained. Nothing could efface it, for the very structure of her face was beautiful, its every lineament a miracle of loveliness. That beauty was marred now, but only by stark fear and the deceptive aging which great shock imparts at times to even the very young.

That she had had a very great shock, Loring knew the moment she began to scream.

She staggered and almost fell and then she was swaying back against the wooden bedstead, clutching it with both hands in an effort to steady and support herself. The next instant she was on the bed, doubled over, her body straining forward, her breath coming in choking gasps.

One leg was crumpled under her, the other thrust out straight, and on the smooth, unblemished flesh of her thigh Loring saw a circle of flame take shape and grow to the size of a half-dollar. As the circle grew its brightness increased, until it blazed with light and fire, enveloping both limbs in a blinding radiance.

Loring had to look away quickly, and when he looked back the woman was no longer moving. She was sprawled out on the black satin bedspread, her head thrown back, her hair a tumbled mass that lay in shining strands across her white breasts and unmoving shoulders.

She had torn open the front of her dress and there was a bleeding gash on the smooth flesh of her throat in an effort to relieve her torment.

Loring went to the bed and stood over her, feeling a tightness in his chest. His breathing was ragged, and his heart had begun a furious pounding.

He thought for an instant that she was dead. Then he saw that a faint flush suffused her cheeks and that her eyes were not expressionless. Her eyes were wide open and she was staring up at him. There was awareness in them, but it was not the awareness of recognition. It was as if she knew that a man was standing by the bed looking down at her, but did not know who that man was or why he had drawn near to her.

He reached out and put his hand on her bare shoulder. Her skin was warm, almost hot to his touch. She stirred slightly and a questioning look came into her eyes. Shaken as he was, that almost imperceptible moving of her body in response to his touch made him feel almost as he would have felt if he had deliberately caressed her and she had shivered with pleasure and shown him unmistakably that she was not displeased.

Nothing had been further from his mind, but now he found himself wondering what would happen if he touched her again, and this time more boldly.

He reached down and gently cupped one of her breasts, taking care to let his fingers encircle its smooth roundness without suggesting that he was engaged in anything more than a medical examination. He told himself that he felt that way about it--a purely clinical test.

Something terrible had happened to her. He had to find out just how terrible as quickly as possible. Any kind of response would tell him whether her reason had been shattered completely and could not be restored, or whether she was merely in a state of shock and could be aroused by guiding her firmly along pathways of passion, taking care to think of himself only as a concerned and solicitous physician.

That and nothing more. But he was not prepared for the violence of her response and the sudden, almost convulsive tightening of her arms about him. He had not expected her to come so instantly alive again, with lips so demanding that he found himself struggling to breathe, smothered by the insatiable frenzy of her kisses. Her mouth melted into his, her tongue became a darting shape of fire, fluttering, pulsating within the cavern of his mouth. She was a moth with fiery wings fluttering, a wild temptress.

Her hands moved up and down and across his back, and her mouth unlocked itself and fastened on his ear, nibbling first at the lobe and then whispering softly into the chambered recess words of love sweet beyond endurance, dripping with the honey of forbidden ecstasies, unimagined delights.

"No," he whispered, but found himself surrendering to her guidance and then, suddenly, he was guiding her, anticipating her every desire, responding to every writhing of her body, every straining of her lips with a passion now as great as her own and now surpassing it, for he was not a man who needed to be instructed in the refinements and subtleties of love.

What sobered him he never knew. But something did. One moment he was in a golden paradise with no memory of how he had come to be there and no desire to depart and the next he saw a woman with glazed eyes arising from his side, and movements so blind and purposeless that they chilled him and made his blood run cold. He saw her arise from the bed and step swayingly to the floor and move away from him across the room, her shoulders held rigid, her arms pressed stiffly to her side.

He called out to her and she turned and stared at him for a moment, the veins in her white throat pulsing, her moist red lips slightly parted. Her cheeks were still flushed and her bosom rose and fell with her breathing, rose and fell with a slow trembling and she seemed aroused still and if he had pleaded with her he was sure she would have come running back to him. But he did not plead, because there was no recognition in her eyes.

Her eyes were cold, empty, drained now of all expression. But it was not only her eyes that chilled him. It was the jerkiness of her movements, the stiffness, the rigidity. He had never seen a woman move in that way before.

The woman who stood facing him was not dead and yet she was moving. Not as a living man or woman would move, but as an automaton would move if it were clothed in garments of flesh, and knew more about life than an automaton should know and had perhaps even held converse with the dead.

She did not wait for him to call out to her again, but turned and continued on until she stood before the door. She remained for an instant motionless, staring at the white panels on both sides of the door and then raised her head and stared up at the ceiling, as if the room was totally unfamiliar to her and she was puzzled and disturbed to find herself imprisoned within it.

Then slowly, jerkily, her hand went out and fastened on the knob of the door and it turned in her clasp. She opened the door and went out into the hall and closed it very firmly behind her.

The instant the door closed Loring started to get up from the bed. He quickly discovered that he could scarcely move at all. His limbs seemed weighted and when he tried to raise his arms agonizing stabs of pain darted through them.

He sank back against the pillows, feeling alarmingly light-headed, his vision beginning to swim. The room seemed to waver and recede, the floor to tilt, the furniture take on grotesque and unfamiliar contours. The chairs elongated, the mirror above the mantel misted and seemed to melt, the pictures on the wall changed color. Blues became yellows, yellows blues, the purples deepened, the reds and greens faded out. Landscapes changed their pattern, hills dissolved, rivers widened or broke up into dozens of small streams that snaked in all directions over a gray and desolate plain.

The walls seemed to converge and increase in height and then to sweep away from him like the sides of a towering wave receding from a crippled ship, caught in a gigantic storm-wind and whirled helplessly about.

He saw the door opening as in a glass darkly, the knob a glowing ember amidst a weaving wilderness where nothing else glowed except the faint outlines of dissolving shadow-shapes.

There was someone in the room with him now, but he could not see the intruder clearly, only the looming massiveness of his shoulders and his flickering shadow on the walls.

He could hear the slow, heavy shuffling of the shadow-caster's feet, however, and his labored breathing, and a more distant sound as of glass shattering as the intruder drew near to him.

He struggled to rise but could not and fell back with a groan, his shoulders jerking as he tried desperately to move his arms and propel himself backwards against the wall at the head of the bed.

The intruder's bulk seemed to grow larger, to hover so ominously above him that if he had been some monster of hideous legend with drooling fangs and fire-ensheathed limbs he could hardly have inspired more terror or seemed more on the verge of leaping toward him, sinking cruel talons in his flesh and tearing him limb from limb.

Then, quite suddenly, his vision cleared and he saw that the intruder was just such a monster!

With a convulsive contraction of his entire body Loring managed somehow to retreat further, to hurl himself backwards against the wall. But he might as well have remained where he was. The intruder's arm went out and up, and something white and glowing flowed from the shadowy end of his arm and hovered above Loring like an air-suspended shroud.

He had no way of knowing that it was not a shroud but a net, quivering as it unfolded--a floating web that remained hovering above him for an instant and then slowly descended, enmeshing and imprisoning his limbs.

"You must come with us," a cold voice said. "We must study you further. We are not content with what has happened here."

SIX

"Tragor, Coordinator Kraii wishes to see you at once."

Tragor awoke with a start from a dream transcending in splendor anything his waking mind could have imagined. In his dream Tragor had been surrounded by the wisest and boldest of his people. He was standing on the heights looking down on a planet ripe for plunder.

The green hills and valleys of the planet Earth stretched out beneath him, with its golden harvests, winding waterways and populous cities stretching away for miles.