Part 7

"It must be a bitter blow to you, Tragor," the voice which had awakened him went on relentlessly. "Frankly, I couldn't live with myself if I had to tear up a Plan I had worked on for a third of a lifetime. But no matter. Coordinator Kraii insists on seeing you immediately. It's a command."

Even before he opened his eyes Tragor knew it was Sull's voice he heard. Sull was standing there quietly looking at him. Sull the fox, bland of voice and gesture, but with cruel, shrewd eyes that saw too much.

Sull was looking at him derisively, his lidded eyes gleaming with triumph. Yes, the crafty wretch did look remarkably like a fox--that cunning little animal of Earth that scurried in and out of burrows on the new planet, waiting for just the right moment to bite and draw blood.

But with an effort Tragor controlled himself. "Thank you, Sull," he said. His voice was satirically polite, edged with contempt. But Sull managed to look guileless, as if anger verging on violence between two similarly dedicated Martians would have been unthinkable.

Tragor knew that the interview with the Chief Coordinator was going to be unpleasant. Mortally dangerous and unpleasant. He was sure of that. He might not even return from it alive.

He went to his dressing compartment first, and put on his most resplendent uniform, carefully assembling on his chest the many decorations he had earned by risking his life in a hundred Martian conflicts. He arranged the medals painstakingly, with just the right indifference to precise spacing, so that the most important ones were half obscured by the overall glitter of the rest. It was just the kind of negligence which a truly modest Martian might be expected to display. Then he inspected himself in a mirror and was satisfied with what he saw.

Kraii was waiting for him in the central coordinating compartment, his huge taloned hands, blue-veined, in ominous repose on his knees. Kraii was at his dangerous worst when he appeared to be completely relaxed. He sat before a black metal document stand which shone with an ebon lustre in the cold light which streamed down from above.

"Sit down, Tragor," he said.

Tragor sat down and waited for the Coordinator to question him. The chair he was sitting in was narrow and straight. His own face was in light, but the Coordinator's face was partially shadowed. He could see enough to know that the Coordinator's jaw was very firmly set. Coordinator Kraii had the rose-tinted complexion of a quite young Martian, but his eyes were bleak with half a century of hard living. An irreverent, almost outrageous thought flashed across Tragor's mind as he returned Kraii's noncommittal stare. How many Martian women had Kraii known, and what had they done to the iron assurance he was supposed to possess?

If he had been very successful with women a little of the edge might have been taken off his rumored ruthlessness. But if he had not fared too well in his amorous conquests frustration might have made him potentially malignant. It was not a possibility which could be lightly dismissed.

Kraii was speaking now and his voice had a harsh edge to it.

"As you know, Tragor, a leader in an undertaking as momentous as this must do his duty as he sees it. He must not spare the guilty if he is to be faithful to his trust. I like you, Tragor. I have always liked you. But that is not the point at issue. You were the chief architect of our Great Plan for the conquest of Earth and you have failed."

"But surely--"

"No, wait. Do not interrupt me, Tragor. You have failed tragically. Now I am going to ask you to be very frank. I want you to tell me in your own words just why you were so sure the Plan would succeed, and why I had to discover for myself, indirectly, that you had made a serious, perhaps fatal, blunder."

Tragor's mouth had gone very dry. He tried to swallow, but there was a tight constriction in his throat.

"I may have made a few mistakes," he heard himself saying. "But everyone makes mistakes. There is still hope...."

"I could enter into a long discussion with you, Tragor," Kraii said. "I could take the tragedy of your failure from the beginning and carry it forward step by step. But nothing would be gained by that. I want you to summarize, very briefly, the whole intent and purpose of the plan. I want you to hear _you_ explain it. I am familiar with it, of course, or I would not be where I am. But I want to hear about it again from its chief architect."

The full, ghastly truth dawned on Tragor then--the awful certainty that he was on trial for his life. He might never leave the compartment with the blood warm in his veins. He might never see another sunrise, on Mars or on Earth, never experience again all the joys of the flesh; never feast and dine and dance and hold a beautiful woman in a fierce and ardent embrace. He saw himself crying out in agony, his flesh blackened by the fiery blast of a hand-gun, blood streaming from a horrible, gaping wound in his chest. He knew that he must talk fast and talk convincingly, if he hoped to go on living. And he knew that he had to keep it brief.

"The success of the Plan--" he began, and stopped, frightened by the look on the Chief Coordinator's face.

"Yes, Tragor. Go on."

"It was not a complicated plan. But it was a brilliant one, carefully thought out, and I was sure it would succeed. We would take captive five hundred men and five hundred women and study them with every laboratory technique available to us. We would use them as models--to discover as much as we could about the human race. Then we would free them, with all knowledge of what had happened to them blotted from their minds."

"Yes, I know. Go on, Tragor."

"We would use our new knowledge to fashion men and women miraculously perfect in body and mind--living, breathing androids who could be controlled by us with a disk-like mechanism embedded in their flesh. They could be controlled by us at will, robbed of all volition and made almost mindless if we decided to send a charge of energy pulsing through the disks. Their very thoughts and desires could be controlled, regulated."

"Perfect men and women, yes," Kraii said thoughtfully. "But more than that, of course."

"Far more than that. Android women so beautiful it would be impossible for Earthmen to resist them, so beautiful they would enslave all men instantly with their white and clinging arms, their rose-tinted breasts, the swelling voluptuousness of--"

"You forget yourself, Tragor. No description is necessary. There is no need for _you_ to become erotically stirred by an android, an artificial robot-woman created in our own laboratories. You know what they are."

"Yes, of course. I do know. But Earthmen do not. Our plan was to make Earthmen slaves of love and obedient to our bidding, to forge about them chains of love they would be powerless to break. Only Earthmen in high places, naturally, for we were not concerned with the rest. Only the rulers, the powerful who are in a position to control the destinies of nations and surrender Earth without a struggle. Our androids would command them to obey us, and they would have no choice. Men so enslaved would be completely at our mercy."

"And women too."

"And women too. The male androids have everything an Earthwoman could desire in a man. They are physically handsome beyond belief, irresistible in their wooing."

"But the Great Plan went wrong. Why, Tragor?"

"We--we selected as experimental test subjects one man and one woman. The man is an artist, a painter. Sensitive and imaginative; so much so that if a beautiful woman so much as lays her hand on his arm he begins to tremble. He has to struggle with himself to exercise control. If ever a subject seemed ideal for our purpose--"

"But you did not succeed with him. Why, Tragor?"

"I do not know. I really do not know. He resisted twice. The first time he was almost at the point of capitulation but he resisted in time. The second time we controlled the android woman by means of the disk embedded in her thigh. We made her almost mindless, a creature given over entirely to sensual delights. We made her a body solely--a body that could twist and writhe--and drive a man to madness."

"And still he resisted."

"Not--not exactly. But his ardor cooled instantly when deep in his unconscious mind something warned him that he was holding an android in his arms. We could not hope to succeed with the Plan if such a warning signal were to be flashed to the men and women in high places we intend to enslave."

"And the woman? I have been told she also resisted when she saw the android man in her bedroom."

"That is true. They both resisted. So far we are at a dead end. So far we have created more than a hundred android women and half that number of android men. But we cannot release them on Earth until we are sure that the Plan will succeed. It would expose us to the deadliest kind of danger. It is bad enough that Earth has the hydrogen bomb and could destroy our ships if we resorted to open warfare. Even the Great Plan itself could fail."

Tragor could have bitten his tongue out when the words had left his lips, for it brought a sudden dangerous tightening to the Coordinator's face.

"And so you think the Plan will fail."

"No, no, I did not say that. I would like--"

"What would you like, Tragor?"

"One more chance. One more chance with both the man and the woman. I want to take them to Mars."

Kraii stared at Tragor for an instant as if unable to believe what he had heard. But he controlled himself with an effort and spoke in a calm tone.

"Why?" he asked.

"We have taken both the man and the woman captive. The woman remained in his room when he went to her apartment, expecting him to return. We captured him first and then we captured her. She is very beautiful, almost as beautiful as the android woman. Perhaps that is why he was able to resist the android woman the first time."

A totally irrelevant thought crept into Tragor's mind. She is very beautiful, with red-gold hair. The woman I took captive this morning has hair of almost the same color. But she loves the man and I am not loved. Would it matter so much if Kraii killed me? Why should I be afraid to die? Why should I care?

"Well, Tragor," the Coordinator said, impatiently. "I am waiting to hear why you want to take them to Mars."

"I have a plan."

"Another plan? It would seem that your brain is cobwebbery with plans, Tragor."

"It is all part of the same Great Plan. We must make the Earthman and the Earthwoman slaves of love, we must break down all of their resistance. I believe I can accomplish that on Mars."

"How, Tragor? This is most interesting."

"When men and women have been subjected to a great and almost unendurable strain, when they expect every moment to be their last, when they have to struggle desperately to stay alive--amorous impulses often overwhelm them. Love becomes to them a refuge and a solace, a temptation impossible to resist. They have a saying for it on Earth. 'Let us drink, love and be merry, for tomorrow we die.'"

"I see. But the temptation would have to be very great, the love offering exceptional."

"Have we not Temples of Love on Mars? What if we should fill those temples with android men and android women? Expose both the Earthman and Earthwoman first to danger: see that they walk in the shadow of death. Frighten and terrify them, make them struggle desperately to survive. Drive them to the brink of despair by confronting them with unknown dangers on a planet alien to them. Then imprison them in a Temple of Love. It would not be a prison to them. It would be a garden of delight after such terrible experiences. They would be sure to succumb. They would yield themselves to all pleasure with no thought for each other."

As Tragor contemplated the images his own mind was conjuring up his eyes began to shine. "Imagine what it would be like. A man and a woman surrounded by a thousand temptations, every bursting fruit that voluptuousness can give birth to! On Earth there is no such paradise. But on Mars...."

For the first time the look of cold condemnation went out of the Chief Coordinator's eyes. He arose slowly, nodding, looking at Tragor with an unmistakable glint of admiration in his gaze. He raised his arm, and Tragor felt a great wave of relief and warm gratefulness flooding over him, for he knew that it was a gesture of benign dismissal and not a sentence of death.

"Very well, Tragor," the Chief Coordinator said. "You have my permission to take them both to Mars."

It was only when Tragor had left the Central Coordinating Compartment and was proceeding down the cold-lighted passageway which branched off from it that everything that he had been saying to Kraii rebounded on himself. He too had just been in great and terrible danger, fighting desperately to stay alive. And now he felt himself in need of love's solace. He had never needed a woman more, never needed the touch of a woman's hand and a woman's warm and eager lips with quite so compulsive an urgency.

If only she would....

Five minutes later he was standing before the locked door of his sleeping compartment, raising his voice in passionate pleading, calling out to the woman within to give him--at least, pity.

"Let me in," he begged. "I promise that I will not touch you if you do not wish to be touched. Just let me stand near you, and look at you. That is all I ask."

There was silence for a moment beyond the locked door. Then he heard her say: "You killed my husband. Even if you were not so repulsive to me I would hate you. Do you hear? I would hate you with my dying breath and if necessary, I shall die. I will find a way. Go away, or I will beat my head against the wall until I can no longer hear your loathsome voice. Go away. I will never let you in and if you try to force your love upon me--"

"No," he pleaded. "I want you to love me willingly."

"That is strange talk for a Martian. I will tell you something. One of the women who was taken captive may soon find herself with child. Did you know that? Didn't those brutish lovers tell you? Lovers! What a mockery, what an insult to the very name of love! If I found myself with child by a Martian I would strangle--oh, no, no. I did not mean to say that. I could never be that cruel, no matter how great my loathing. But if that happened to me, I would make doubly sure to kill myself before such a cruel choice was forced upon me."

It seemed to Tragor that he could endure no more. His triumph of a moment before had the taste of ashes. He had argued persuasively with the most formidable Martian on Earth, and--for that matter--on Mars. He had argued and won. His life had been spared. But now it seemed unimportant to him, of no consequence whatever. Only the woman beyond the locked door was important to him. She was more than important. She had become his whole life. Without her he felt drained and empty--a hollow shell of a male.

He sank to his knees and covered his face with his taloned hands. If only she would pity him and open the door a crack and let him see her!

Just the sight of her would enable him to endure the loneliness and emptiness of space when he took the two captive lovers to Mars on the mother ship. Just the sight of her beautiful white body and her face so torn with grief and torment that he could scarcely bear to meet the accusing fury in her eyes.

SEVEN

On Earth a man named Peter Summers and his wife Ruth--two people out of Earth's teeming millions, but chosen with care because of their exceptional courage and comeliness of form--went about their daily affairs with no memory of what had happened to them on board a Martian ship a short month previously.

Summers was a writer of mystery novels and his wife an artist whose paintings had been widely acclaimed by critics. They were quite ordinary people in some respects, brilliantly exceptional in others. They had both been used as models by Tragor in constructing experimental android men and android women, but those particular androids had been discarded as not quite what the Plan called for. The android who resembled Summers and the lithe-limbed, sultry-eyed robot-woman who was almost an exact duplicate of Summers' wife had not been destroyed, however. They had been kept immobilized in a laboratory on Mars, the disks on their thighs turned off.

Summers and his wife had not been harmed. They had been released at the completion of what had been one of the earliest of the android-constructing experiments, with all knowledge of what had happened to them on board the Martian ship blotted from their minds.

They were no longer of any interest to Tragor. However, the two androids who resembled them had now become of vital interest to Tragor, for the writer, Peter Summers, was a strong-willed, imaginative and sensitive man and greatly resembled the crucial figure in the entire Plan: David Loring. Not physically, but in the subtle and complex configuration of his mind, and that configuration had been duplicated in the robot-man fashioned in Summers' image. And Ruth Summers bore a quite striking resemblance, even physically, to the woman whom Loring loved.

The man and the woman awoke and stared about them. The man was not Peter Summers. The woman was not Ruth, his wife. But the man resembled Peter Summers in all respects. He had the same physical build, the same eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Not only were his facial contours the same, his body was a twin-duplicate of Peter Summers' body. He moved in the same way, with the same gestures and mannerisms, and his voice would not have seemed in any way strange to his wife or to any of the people who knew him well.

The woman looked exactly like his wife. Her face and body would have deceived anyone who knew his wife, knew precisely how she gestured and talked. Even the tiny mole on her right shoulder was the same, and the way her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners when she smiled.

In fact, the resemblance was almost too perfect, for there is something obscurely and indefinably artificial about a duplication that is flawlessly exact, unassailable in all of its parts. The living organism changes constantly, is never quite the same from moment to moment. In a duplication such elusive changes are hard to capture and preserve. Even when the effort has been made and can be looked upon as successful, a faint aura of artificiality remains.

The man's first words were simple and direct. He asked: "Where are we?"

"I do not know," the woman replied.

"How did we get here?"

"I do not know."

The man looked down over himself. He was attired as Peter Summers had been aboard the space ship. There was no recognition or surprise in his eyes. Simply acceptance, as if he'd known he would be attired in precisely that way and would only have been surprised if he had found himself naked or clothed in garments strange to him.

He looked at the woman and saw that she was also attired in garments familiar to him. There was no need for him to recognize the garments in a strict sense, for a knowledge of what they would be like had been deeply grooved into his mind. His garments were as much a part of him as his slightly heightened breathing and the calluses on his palms. And so were the garments of the woman facing him with slightly widened eyes.

"I can remember so little," the man who resembled Summers said. "Everything here is strange. I am quite sure that we have never been in this place before. Do you also feel as if you have never been here before?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, I do. It is very strange."

"It is a very large room."

"Very large. There is something frightening about it. All of those instruments...."

"They are not navigational instruments. I am quite sure of that. We are no longer on board the ship."

"Were we ever?"

"Yes, I am sure we were once. On board a large ship traveling through space."

"I seem to remember now, too. Some of it is coming back. Slowly, almost painfully. I'm afraid to think about it, to even try to remember. We were far more frightened than we are now. Something terrible happened to us."

"We'd better just relax, take it easy and let it come back in a natural way."

The woman shuddered. "Sometimes not knowing is worse than remembering, worse than any positive knowledge can be. When a memory is crouching like some great beast in the darkness of your mind it is safer to remember. Safer to see the hideous shape clearly, to at least try to force it out into the open."

"Not always, Ruth."

"Ruth. Yes, I am Ruth. You are Peter. You are my husband. The instant you spoke my name it came back to me. Oh, darling, I love you so much. I have always loved you."

"I know, Ruth. And I have always loved you. But beyond that everything is obscure, and in some strange way incomplete. It's as though there are many things which I should recall and understand but which have been--left out."

"Left out? What do you mean?"

"It's hard to explain. But there's a kind of gulf, an emptiness, a falling away when I try to remember what happened to us. The memory doesn't seem to be there at all. I can remember the ship, and how frightened we were. We were traveling through space toward a distant star. There were others. How many I do not know or even what they looked like. It may come back. We must wait and see."

"Wait? What good will waiting do, Peter? We can't just stand here trying to remember or refusing to remember. We don't know where we are. We have no idea where we are, or why we were brought here. Were we brought here against our will? Or did we come voluntarily? Shall we wait for something to happen, or try to make it happen? What shall we do, Peter? Beat on the walls with our bare hands? Shout and create a disturbance? Some of these instruments look fragile. Perhaps if we smashed one--"

The man who resembled Summers shook his head. "No, Ruth. That would be too dangerous a way of bringing down the thunder."

The man turned as he spoke, and looked more steadily and carefully at his surroundings. The woman stared with him, standing very still, a growing wonder in her eyes.

The instruments which towered on all sides of them differed greatly in size and configuration. Some were metallic and complex, as intricate in construction as the time-regulating mechanism of a great watch, set on a pedestal and reflecting the downstreaming radiance in all of its parts. Others resembled more translucent globes, resting level with the floor, fragile in design and filled with a swirling blue mist. But that globelike aspect was only partial, for they were pierced by metal rods which projected sharply from their surfaces in hedgehog fashion and obscured or distorted their roundness in various ways.

There were also several flat, boxlike structures with a fine mesh covering and one huge box which was heavily screened in front and bore a chilling resemblance to a cage. The screening was enveloped in radiance, so that the mesh was only evanescently visible through the glow and it was impossible to see beyond it. Yet for an instant there was a deepening of the glow and the man who resembled Summers thought he could detect a faint stir of movement behind the mesh, as if some monstrous shape had been imprisoned within; a shape which was self-luminous and very restless in its pacing.

The enormous room was illuminated by globular overhead lamps which cast stationary shadows on its glass-smooth floor and turned the walls into light-mirroring surfaces which deflected the radiance without diminishing it.