He was dead before he struck the floor, but his lifeless body continued to move about erratically for a moment, from the impetus of the energy charge, and its slow dissipation throughout every organ and tissue of his body.
The girl screamed and ran to him, and threw herself upon him, cradling his head in her arms, swaying despairingly from side to side.
Getting at last to her feet, the gaunt woman experienced a moment of terrible remorse, of such acute awareness of what had happened and could not be undone that she swayed also and covered her face with her hands.
In that moment she knew that no one, not even a Monitor, could escape a feeling of guilt for an act of cruelty and violence that could have been avoided, that need not have taken place at all.
For a moment a noose of savage tightness seemed to wrap itself around her heart, making it impossible for her to breathe. Then, gradually, the old hardness reasserted itself and she told herself that she was a fool to feel any sympathy for the girl or remorse over the death of her lover.
Were they not both criminals whose rebellion was a threat to the entire structure of society? Was not the stamping out of such an evil the first duty of a Monitor and could that duty ever be shirked?
What was the girl saying? The girl had raised her eyes and was staring at her, but she couldn't seem to catch the words.
Suddenly she did hear them and for an instant the noose feeling returned, the savage constriction around her heart.
"You will pay in your own way in your own time," the girl was saying. "If there is any justice left in the world, you will pay for what you have done. I no longer even hate you. There is a dark horror in the depth of some minds that destroys everything that is radiant and beautiful in life. In your mind there is such a horror. And in the end it will destroy you, for great evil feeds upon evil until there is nothing left at all."
The Monitor had only the vaguest recollection of speaking to the guard, of gesturing and saying: "Take her away. And remove the body of that criminal from this room. When I return I shall expect to find them both gone."
EIGHT
"The glass," Monitor 6Y9 murmured, aloud to herself. "I must go back and look at the glass again. I must see how the pursuit is progressing, the pursuit of the two worst criminals of all. When they spoke to me as they did on the travel trip a strange premonition came upon me. Those two are my real enemies, for there is in them a will to resist such as I have never encountered before. When I met them a voice seemed to whisper deep in my mind: 'It will be their lives or yours—and the security of all of the Monitors, and the Advisors and all of us who rule will hang in the balance until they are captured and brought to justice. There is in them a power, a defiance, so fierce and intractable that it could disrupt all of the binding energies of our world just as an atom can, by exploding, destroy all matter in its path. A single atom, and when two such atoms are joined...."
The gaunt woman stopped walking and looked up at the high white walls of the corridor she had been pacing, back and forth, like a caged tigress.
"No ... no ... no," she murmured. "I cannot go back and look at the scanner-glass until my mind has grown calmer, and my will has been strengthened, and I am more completely myself again. Perhaps the pursuit has failed and they can no longer be traced. Perhaps they have already been surrounded and have escaped from the trap by a stroke of blind luck, or because some strange destiny has set them apart from all others. Perhaps all of the para-guards are lying dead in the forest."
The gaunt woman drew herself up, a look of stern self-reproach coming into her eyes. "Enough of such fears and misgivings.They will be captured.I will find the strength to pursue them relentlessly, night and day, to pursue them until their will to resist has been shattered and they stand broken and defenseless before the Council. If I should need more strength than I possess—and I have great strength—I will draw upon the strength of our world. Wait, wait, let me think. It may help me now to look well upon that strength. The new bio-chemical techniques for changing the structure of the human body, altering its glandular functioning, eradicating the need for love—yes, that great, genius-inspired key, the solution perhaps to all of our problems.
"The experiment in Research Laboratory 79 H! A completely new kind of man—woman later if the experiment is successful, a man without any love impulses at all, but strong and robust, high-minded and socially dedicated. For three centuries we have tried to eradicate the love impulse by rigorously controlled selective mating of the least amorous, until we thought we had succeeded in creating a great and enduring society of completely non-amorous specialists. But we were tragically mistaken and everywhere the old, dangerous ugliness is weakening the very foundations of our world and threatening us all with destruction. And all because our best minds were not sufficiently genius-inspired.
"We knew a great deal about glandular therapy and had even employed it experimentally, in a cautiously limited way, to make the long-range results of selective mating more effective and permanent. But even there we were at fault. We did not proceed boldly enough. We drew back from gland surgery and from combining carefully controlled glandular injection therapy with the newest and most brilliant developments in surgery. We did not have the boldness of vision, the courage and foresight, to create a completely new kind of man—to alter the physical structure of the human body as it has never before been altered in the entire history of our race, except very occasionally by accident and disease.
"A new race of men! Why should we draw back from that, why should we hesitate now when our peril is so great, and we may all go down into everlasting night and darkness?"
The gaunt woman drew herself up. She seemed to draw strength from the vehemence of her own convictions, which she continued to express aloud to herself, as if she were herself a listener and needed to hear her own voice affirming what she knew to be true.
"The experiment in Laboratory 79 H! For six months now we have waited patiently to be told whether it is a success or a failure. We have waited long enough. The Council may condemn me if I go now and demand that the final test be made at once, in my presence. But I shall take that risk. I have the right to demand, I will make my authority felt. The subject has undergone six months of glandular therapy; four of surgery. They might prefer to postpone the final test for another week, but I am quite sure it will not endanger the subject if it is performed at once. I shall be the first to know!"
The gaunt woman stopped pacing and directed her steps toward the end of the corridor, and from there passed quickly down the shorter corridor which branched off from it, and threaded a maze of ten more blank-walled corridors until she came to the closed entrance panel of Laboratory 79 H.
The panel opened with a dull droning when she dialed the code numerals on the combination lock, and she passed quickly into the silent, high-ceilinged compartment and remained for a moment motionless, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light and steeling herself for the stern exercise of her authority which she knew would be required of her, for surgical specialists could be very stubborn.
There were four surgeons in the laboratory, and so absorbed were they in their immediate task that they remained for an instant unaware that the door had opened and closed and that a Monitor stood silently watching them.
It was perhaps just as well that they did not know, for her presence might have unnerved them at a critical moment. In almost the precise center of the laboratory a tall form, swathed in bandages, reposed on a white metal table, and the surgeons were busily engaged in removing the bandages from a pair of legs that seemed abnormally long and from arms that terminated in thick-fingered, hairy hands and were not so much long as abnormally muscular and strong-sinewed.
The shoulders of the man on the table seemed abnormally muscular too, and so broad that they resembled more the shoulders of a giant than those of a man of average weight and stature. The surgeons were whispering to one another as they unwound the bandages, as if the gravity and importance of their task had bound them over to silence or a few words of necessary conversation for so long a period that to raise their voices now, when so critical a moment was at hand, would have seemed like a desecration.
It was the gaunt woman who raised her voice, breaking in upon the whispering with sharp words of command, and causing the surgeons to swing about in consternation.
"You appear to have exceeded your authority," she said. "You were instructed not to remove the bandages or conduct the final test before notifying the Council. I can think of only one explanation and it does not heighten my respect for you. It diminishes it greatly. You so dreaded the possibility of failure that you preferred to conduct the final test in complete secrecy, for a failure that takes place in the absence of witnesses can sometimes be covered up with a fine flow of excuses. Well, there will be no excuses now. I am here to witness everything that takes place and I will report what I have seen to the Council."
The tallest of the four surgeons and the one nearest to the Monitor, a darkly bearded man with eyes so pale that they seemed almost colorless, was the first to recover his composure.
"We were about to conduct the final test," he said. "We were removing the bandages to study the responses of the subject preliminary to the test, which will not take place today. He must be injected with drugs first, so that when he awakens he will not know precisely where he is, and behave accordingly. We wish him to think himself in a mating center or, better still, a temple of love where nothing amorous is forbidden. There were many such temples in the ancient world, as you know, and before we subjected him to glandular surgery we made sure that he would read the ancient books and become familiar with all of the rites and practices which would awaken, even in the kind of man he was originally, amorous impulses of a criminal nature.
"He was, as you also know, a non-sex-privileged man who had experienced the stirring to a moderate extent but had not succumbed to it, and we selected him for that reason. We thought—"
"I do not care what you thought!" the gaunt woman rasped, her impatience making her tremble. "Just tell me what you hoped to accomplish."
"Very well. I will try not to confuse and bewilder you by discussing in detail the surgical aspects of the problem and all of the difficulties which we encountered. Quite simply, our problem was to bring about such a profound physical change in his somatic and glandular functioning that he would experience no amorous emotion at all when he looked upon a woman. We have known for a long time that the pituitary gland exercises a profound influence on the love-impulse. When the gland is very active the love-impulse is inhibited or destroyed completely.
"When the gland is very active the entire structure of the human body changes. The body becomes more massive, particularly the jaw, wrists, hands and ankles. In the past this condition has occasionally been brought about by disease, and the victims of this disease were known as acromegaliacs. When it occurs in childhood it produces a very unusual kind of human being—a pituitary giant. A pituitary giant is robust and virile-looking enough in outer aspect but his amorous impulses are extremely sluggish and in some cases completely absent.
"In this subject we have not only increased the activity of the pituitary gland, we have used many other surgical and glandular injection techniques to alter the functioning of virtually every gland in his body. And we have made some more generalized somatic alterations too, and employed some of the newer chemicals in a very daring kind of body-changing and brain-altering experiment.
"He is truly a new kind of human being. His appearance may do violence to our preconceived ideas of what constitutes good looks in the male, particularly in the eyes of a sex-privileged woman. But if the experiment is a success we shall soon become accustomed to seeing many men of this kind moving about and assuming a dominant role in our society. We shall have solved our greatest problem and removed a threat to our entire way of life."
"And the final test?" the gaunt woman demanded. "You say you were planning to conduct it tomorrow. Could you not conduct it now, in my presence? I have allowed myself to be impressed, despite my better judgment perhaps, by what you have just said. As a ruling Monitor, I could bear witness to your success, if you do succeed, as few others could do. And if you fail my testimony as to your complete honesty of purpose would carry great weight with the Council."
NINE
The tall surgeon stood very still, regarding her for a moment with a level, noncommittal stare. Then, slowly, a look of calculated risk-taking came into his eyes and he turned to the others with a slight shrug. They nodded in assent and he turned back again to face the Monitor.
"I believe we can conduct the test now," he said. "We can inject the illusion-producing drugs now and they take effect almost immediately. We could have wished for more time but—" He shrugged again. "We need not send for the girl. She is here and—"
"The girl?" the gaunt woman cut in sharply.
For answer the tall surgeon turned and walked across the laboratory to a small panel set in the wall. He gripped the projecting knob of the panel and turned it about in his hand and the thin partition of metal glided back into the wall, revealing a glimmering square of radiance.
"You may come out now," the surgeon said. "We have decided to conduct the final test immediately. You have received your instructions and should be prepared to display your great beauty without fear and without shame."
A soft, feminine voice, so strangely beautiful and well-modulated that it seemed almost musical came in reply from deep within the radiance but the Monitor could not catch what was said. She heard only the surgeon's words as he turned, stepping back from the panel aperture and facing her again.
"She has been schooled in every amorous enchantment," he said. "She knows how to dance and sing, and use her body's grace as only the love-privileged can do, when they have been taught far more than the love-privileged are permitted to know. Even when they abandon themselves to love in the mating centers the love-privileged know that what they do must be veiled in secrecy, hidden from the light of day. They know that what they do is really shameful, a necessary evil, and that it would bring a blush to even the virginal cheeks of a woman such as you.
"Only this girl has been schooled in all of the ancient rites, the forbidden mysteries of love. Only this girl can tempt a man to madness without degrading herself in any way. For what she does she does voluntarily, as a great sacrifice, and in the interests of science. If the experiment is successful we will honor her for her courage and even though she is one of the sex-privileged we will think of her as pure. We will think of her as a dedicated specialist, just as selfless in her devotion to all that is best in our society as an engineer or surgeon or skilled industrial worker, and we will know, and be grateful deep in our hearts, that she has helped to save us all."
The gaunt woman's cheeks had flushed scarlet and anger flamed in her eyes. But before she could reprimand the surgeon for speaking so immoderately—was he secretly the girl's lover?—the woman he was defending emerged from the panel aperture and stood with the radiance at her back and her head held high, her eyes darting from the Monitor and the four surgeons to the still form on the table.
The gaunt woman stared at her with a sharp intake of her breath. That a beauty so dazzling should dare to flaunt itself in proud defiance before the eyes of a Monitor who had never given a thought to her own beauty or lack of it, seemed outrageous, too intolerable to be endured.
So great was the girl's beauty that it seemed almost to pass beyond perfection, to envelop her in an aura that was individual and unique, setting her apart from all other women, and igniting a spark of ardent responsiveness in the four surgeons which was plainly visible in their eyes. That the surgeons had looked upon the girl's loveliness before, the Monitor could not doubt, and that very realization increased her anger until she could no longer breathe.
She began violently to tremble, her gaze passing from the girl's lustrous dark eyes and full red lips to her white shoulders and firm young breasts and then downward to the thin gauze garment that did not at all succeed in concealing what seemed the worst affront of all—thighs that seemed fashioned for the caresses of a lover's hands and a darkness in a shadowed hollow that only such a lover, whispering softly in the night, would have felt the slightest impulse to explore, with degradation stamping him for what he was, a passion-aroused beast.
The surgeon turned with quiet dignity and addressed his three associates, his determination to ignore the Monitor's rage clearly evident in the firm tones of his voice.
"Remove all of the bandages, and make the injection before he begins to stir. Remove the bandages first. He has been conscious for several hours now, but perhaps not fully conscious. You will know how to awaken him, but be sure to make the injection before he opens his eyes. It will take effect in twenty or thirty seconds."
For the next five minutes no one in the laboratory spoke. Neither the surgeons, who were too busy carrying out instructions to even exchange glances or the two women who stood facing each other with dagger-points dancing in their eyes.
The girl seemed to sense what the Monitor was thinking and to resent it as a matter of pride. But she remained silent and self-contained and only the tightness of her lips and the dark hostility with which she parried the gaunt women's accusing stare betrayed a vulnerability which her pride could not quite overcome.
What broke the stillness at last was the strangest and most unnerving of all sounds: a groan from the man who had not moved even under the administration of the figures in white hovering over him, a man who had lain as if dead for so long that it seemed impossible that he could stir, and open his eyes and let out his breath explosively after so short an interval of time.
The man on the table sat up. He sat up so quickly that the surgeons withdrew from him in consternation, as if they had not anticipated so instant a response to the gentle massage which they had applied to his chest, and the swiftly following injection.
The Monitor turned pale and took a quick step backward and the girl seemed equally shaken, although she did not remove her eyes from the tall, gaunt figure who sat looking at her with his chest rising and falling and his hairy legs dangling. Only the surgeons retained their composure, recovering quickly from their first shocked recoil and regarding the figure without horror.
The man on the table was both a giant and a monster. His chest was barrel-shaped and ridged with three bands of muscle which completely encircled his body and rose and fell with his breathing. His massive shoulders were ugly and misshapen, the shoulders of a giant whose too rapid growth had brought about the cruelest kind of deformity. His arms, which were matted with coarse black hair, seemed abnormally foreshortened and were less than half the length of his lower limbs, which were very long and only slightly less hairy.
Even more repellent than the giant's ill-shaped body was the almost Neanderthal-like primitiveness of his face. The jaw was massive, the features coarse and the brow sloped as sharply backward as the brow of an ape. But there was nothing apelike in the burning intensity of his deep-sunken eyes, or the intelligence which animated the rest of his features as he fastened his gaze on the girl who still stood silently regarding him, her fingers pressed to her throat.
"Start dancing," the tall surgeon whispered, tapping her gently on the arm. "We'll soon know whether or not he can be stirred in an amorous way. I would have spared you this ordeal if I could, but there is no subterfuge which would enable us to postpone it in the presence of a Monitor. She is envious of your beauty and will not like what you must do. But she will have to watch. The success or failure of this test touches her at too vital a point. She is a Monitor and must become a judge—a cold, impersonal maker of decisions. I am not like that, but—"
"I know," the girl whispered, grasping his hand and pressing it warmly. "If you were love-privileged you might have taken me into your arms and covered my lips with burning kisses. And I should have liked that. I should have liked that very much."
The surgeon tightened his lips and turned away from her, a look of torment on his face. "Dance," he whispered again. "There is no time to be lost. In a few moments the effects of the drug will begin to wear off."
The girl nodded, and walked toward the center of the laboratory. The eyes of the man on the table followed her and when she was standing almost directly in front of him, and less than eight feet from the table, his rigidly erect body seemed to stiffen still more and a look of bewilderment came into his eyes.
The girl began to dance.
Her movements were slow at first, and although no music accompanied the slow turning of her body and the graceful weaving motions of her arms, she seemed to be dancing in response to rhythms sensuous and beguiling and audible to her alone. It was almost as if her inner ear had become attuned, at the very beginning of the dance, to melodies unheard and she was pirouetting about to the accompaniment of measures that, beginning as a series of widely spaced chords, would soon change their tempo and became in an instant tumultuous and wild.
That instant was not long delayed. Faster and faster her movements became and she was suddenly whirling and swaying in utter abandonment, her head thrown back, the veins in her throat pulsing as she whirled.
Faster and faster she moved, until she seemed not so much a living woman as a shape of flame, her thin gauze tunic floating up above her knees and exposing her shapely legs and the milk-white flesh of her thighs.
Then, abruptly, she ceased to whirl, and stood poised on the tips of her toes, like a bird in flight coming miraculously to rest amidst a fluttering tumult of beating wings and spinning, skyward-ascending feathers. Her arms were bent sharply at the elbows and she was clutching at both of her breasts and arching her torso backwards.
For a full minute she remained on her toes, her eyes half-closed, her moist red lips opening and closing; as if, hovering in the air above her, an invisible lover was draining the sweetness of her lips between moments of trancelike rapture.
Then her body was in motion again and as she turned slowly about on her toes she unfastened the hem of her tunic and let it slip from her.
White and unblemished and tormentingly beautiful was her unclad body, and in the splendor of that complete baring of all her charms gross sensuality seemed to turn coward, to flee her presence and to hide its face, so that for an instant she seemed almost virginal, a creature of fire and air untouched by passion.
The moment might have passed and changed her again to a woman of flesh and blood, voluptuous in all of her movements, infinitely demanding and infinitely desirable. But before the illusion could be shattered the man on the table cried out hoarsely and descended to the floor with a slow swaying of his entire body.
He advanced upon her with his arms extended, his cavernous, dark eyes aflame with desire—a desire so fierce in its stark, primitive directness that it was pure animal. He caught her in his arms before she could cry out or leap aside, and crushed her to him.
He lowered his head and kissed her lips hungrily and his arms became iron bands that bruised her flesh cruelly. She screamed and struggled and tried to free herself, but there was no escaping from the terrible, primitive strength of those arms or from the hands that had begun to explore every part of her body.
There was no escape and she felt herself to be sinking down into a dark sea filled with horrible nightmare shapes that could only in the end deprive her of reason and cloak a little the horror that was about to come upon her.
It was not a man's strength which saved her, causing the giant to groan and release his grip upon her, causing him to take a staggering step backwards and sink to the floor with a convulsive grimace. It was an instrument of science, a long, sharp needle, jabbed into the giant's right shoulder by a man of cool presence of mind in a moment when a blow would have been worse than useless.
It was the same man who spoke calmly, in reply to a woman's voice raised in a terrible, accusing anger.
"You have failed and the Council will want to know why!" Monitor 6Y9 was screaming. "You will pay for your failure, never fear. The Council will not forgive stupidity."
"No, I am afraid the Council will call us all to account," the man said in reply. "But we did our best. We tried."
It was horrible. She could hardly breathe and every nerve in her body seemed to be in rebellion, causing her temples to pound, her heart to beat tumultuously.
In all her life the gaunt woman had never known such torment of mind and body. Returning to the Observatory she had staggered twice and almost fallen and even now her knees seemed about to give way beneath her.
She clung to the metal frame supporting the scanner-glass and looked deep into the glass and saw nothing that pleased her. A dark expanse of woodland, nothing more. No para-guards moving between the trees, no flying machines in the narrow stretch of sky overhead, nothing.
And then, quite suddenly, she did see something and straightened in stunned disbelief, the wild beating of her heart subsiding.
The trees had thinned out and a clearing had come into view between the trees. In the center of the clearing was a small white dwelling and the scanners were moving slowly toward it.
TEN
Teleman had no way of knowing that the scanners had picked up his trail again as he stood listening to the whispered conversation of the dwelling's two occupants.
Despite the absolute darkness and Teleman's stillness the woman became suddenly aware that she was not alone with the man at her side. Her startled gasp was unmistakable and the stirring and shifting of position which followed immediately left no possible room for doubt. All of the sounds were sounds of agitation and swiftly mounting alarm, a whispered reply from the man which Teleman could not catch, another gasp from the woman, a rustling of the bedclothes, a creaking of the bed as one of the two lovers, probably the man, either sat bolt upright or propelled himself toward the edge of the bed with a violent lurch.
What prompted the woman to switch on the light at precisely that moment Teleman had no way of knowing. It was an act of folly, for it placed them at a disadvantage. The light streamed down from a lamp directly above the bed, flooding the entire room in an instant and defeating any hope which the pair might have had of using the darkness as a shield.
Both the man and the woman were completely unclothed. The woman had drawn the sheets up to her waist but the way the clinging fabric molded itself to her hips and thighs with every tremulous movement of her slender young body would have convinced even a not too observant man that no night garment, however thin, intervened between the sheets and the undraped loveliness which she was striving, in her modesty, to hide.
And Teleman was not an unobserving man. Though he hated himself for it he could not stop staring, for her firm young breasts, suffused with a tender rosiness, her white and beautiful throat and her even more beautiful face excited him physically. It was the face of a young girl just blossoming into womanhood, a face of such unusual loveliness that his breath caught in his throat and he could only stare in enraptured silence.
Her long, unbound hair, pale auburn with glints of gold, descended to the pillow at her back, fell partly over one white shoulder and nestled in the cleavage between her breasts, each strand a shining glory. Those magnificent breasts were swollen with love, the tips standing out dark and proud, and there was a red mark on her lovely throat that could have been made only by a love bite. Her lips were slightly parted and though her eyes were wide with fright there was about her still an aspect of drowsiness, as if she had just awakened from a dream of love—a sleepy-eyed nymph in a forest glade resting on a bank of snow-white flowers, half-asleep and yet aware in her inmost being of love's rapture and more desirable than any completely awakened woman could ever be.
He stood for a moment entranced, unable to move or speak, and that strange paralysis of all his faculties except one, the wondrous miracle of enraptured sight, almost led to his undoing.
The man leapt from the bed with a cry of rage and advanced upon him. There was no escaping the outraged lover's fury or the first grazing blow of his fist, which sent Teleman reeling backwards. There was no escaping the second blow either, delivered just as quickly or the third, which landed squarely on Teleman's jaw and made him sway dizzily for an instant.
But the man had been aroused too quickly from drowsiness and love's languors to bring all of his strength into play, and Teleman was able to back away and keep his distance until a favorable opportunity presented itself.
For a brief instant the other lowered his guard and gave Teleman an opening and Teleman took full advantage of it. He stopped thinking of his opponent as a man whose anger he could understand, a man he could have liked and respected if circumstances had been less harsh and unrelenting and thought of him only as a threat to Alicia's safety.
He saw him as a danger that had to be removed, as an automaton with flailing fists, soulless, mindless, and no longer a man of flesh-and-blood with a just grievance who had every right to attack him with fury.
His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling backwards.
It was a swift, terrible blow, delivered with such force that it tore the flesh of Teleman's knuckles, and half-paralyzed his arm from wrist to shoulder, producing a temporary numbness. It caught the other on the point of the jaw and took him so completely by surprise that his face, as he collapsed backwards, did not contract in pain, but bore only a look of stunned bewilderment.
His expression may have changed as he lay sprawled out on the floor at Teleman's feet. But his face was turned away and as he neither groaned nor stirred Teleman felt convinced that he had lost consciousness and swung about to face the woman. He was breathing harshly and there was a throbbing fullness at his temples and he could not quite shake off a shock-produced, almost nightmarish feeling of unreality.
The woman had not moved. Her eyes were wider than they had been and the fear in her eyes was no longer overcast with uncertainty. It had sharpened into a more intense fear, a fear verging on stark terror. Her eyes darted from Teleman's distraught face to the slumped form of her lover and then toward the door, as if she dreaded what the darkness might hold even more than she feared the man who had come out of the darkness to put an end to her happiness.
Suddenly she moaned aloud and covered her face with her hands.
The words came then, words which Teleman had not intended to speak. He did not quite understand why he abandoned all caution, and spoke as he did, freely and without restraint, keeping nothing back, baring his inmost thoughts. It may have been her great beauty, which had held him so entranced for a moment that it had placed him at a disadvantage and endangered his life. Or it may have been the overwhelming sympathy which he now felt, seeing her so pitiful and broken and despairing.
"I am a fugitive like yourself," he said. "There is a woman with me, and we are both in great danger. We are not fugitives for a night, as you are, for we have never known the freedom of the mating centers, a freedom which you found incomplete and love-destroying. We are not sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be death.
"We cannot hope to escape the death penalty. We offended one of the Monitors, a frustrated old woman who will never forgive us for telling her the truth about herself. And I fought with a para-guard, disarmed him and left him bound and helpless in the forest a few miles from this dwelling.
"We thought this dwelling deserted and took refuge here because we hoped to find here a few metal utensils or household tools which I could use to construct some kind of hastily improvised mechanical device powerful enough to misdirect and mislead the scanners. My specialty is bridge-building and I have enough technical knowledge to construct such a device if I can get my hands on a coil of wire and a few utensils of pliable metal.
"It was a desperate hope at best, the odds against it overwhelming. Even if I had succeeded the Monitors would have located us in a few days, possibly in a few hours. But it was the only hope we had until—"
The woman had uncovered her eyes and was staring at him with a little of the fear gone from her gaze and he paused in relief, hoping that she would not let her thoughts stray from his words to the limp and still unconscious man on the floor. He was almost sure that the man had not been seriously hurt, but if her thoughts returned to him too quickly, if memory of the struggle came flooding back, nothing that he could say would convince her that he spoke with complete sincerity. The shock would be too great. She would give way again to panic and stark terror and his words would fall on deaf ears.
He went on quickly, keeping his eyes on her face, his words taking on the eloquence of a deeply moved man who speaks only the truth with no attempt at evasion.
"We did not think we would find anyone here. We were quite sure that we would not be taking a great risk, or deliberately walking into danger, for the place, as you know, looks abandoned. But I came upstairs to make sure.
"I was standing in darkness at the end of the hallway when I heard you speaking. I would have gone back downstairs if your words had not given me so great a shock, for to intrude on your privacy at such a moment would have been the act of a man lost to all honor. But your words were strange beyond belief. I had never thought to hear such words from the lips of the sex-privileged.
"You were also in revolt. You had come here to escape from the tyranny of the Monitors, to experience again joys that would not be tolerated in the mating centers. To you love and romance were inseparable parts of one imperishable experience and without tenderness in love, without complete freedom of choice, love becomes a mockery. The deep, undying love of one man and one woman—that was something we too could understand.
"Her name is Alicia, and I love her more than my own life and I would give my life gladly to spare her suffering. As I stood in the hallway listening I thought: 'I cannot let her be taken captive. She will be condemned to death and I will die a thousand deaths before my own life is ended. Even if I am executed first, I will die a thousand deaths just knowing that she will die too, and I will be powerless to save her.'
"I came to a decision then, a decision that was forced upon me. I would take you both captive, bind you and make the Monitors believe that you had fought desperately to resist capture. I would overturn furniture, leave this room in wild disorder. Then you would not be accused of complicity and we would have at least a fighting chance of outwitting the Monitors. We would be safe not for a few hours or a few days, but long enough to make new plans for evading capture.
"We would take refuge in a mating center. We would put on your garments and wear your insignia and carry with us the identifying seals that cannot be counterfeited, for the scanning of seals is so accurate a process that a forged seal would be instantly detected."
She was looking at him steadily now, her breathing rapid and her lips slightly parted but all of the dread had vanished from her eyes. Her expression had softened, and there was a strange mistiness in the depth of her pupils, as if from some secret reservoir of strength she had drawn the will to listen and understand.
He thought he saw sympathy begin to grow in her eyes as he went on. "I did not want to resort to violence. But circumstances sometimes compel us to do hateful things to protect those we love. The choice was a hard one and I am not even sure I could have used violence against a man I would have been proud to call my friend if he had not mistaken me for a criminal intruder and left me no choice."
"No choice?" she whispered, "Yes, I believe you. But if he is hurt badly—"
For answer Teleman turned and went to the man on the floor and bent above him.
Teleman had felled the man with a powerful blow, but it had not been a blow to his skull and could not have resulted in a concussion. And he had not hit his head against the floor in falling. But in the back of Teleman's mind was the fear that the man might still have been hurt severely. That fear diminished the instant he felt the other's pulse and found that it was beating strongly and regularly. It diminished still further when the man stirred and opened his eyes and stared up at Teleman.
A look of bewilderment came into the man's eyes for an instant. Then his right eyelid twitched, his jaw muscles tightened and the look changed to one of slowly dawning recognition.
In a moment the man's eyes were blazing with a fury that Teleman hardly knew how to contend with, for he could not bring himself to resort to violence again, but knew that calm reason, or anything he might say, would be worse than futile. The man had regained his strength and the full use of his limbs, and was struggling violently to free himself from the tight grip of Teleman's hands on his shoulders.
The woman had left the bed and crossed the room so silently that Teleman was not aware that she was at his side until he saw her white arm crossing his in a gesture of caressment and felt the weight of her slender young body pressing against his right shoulder. The woman was running her fingers through the man's hair and gently stroking his face in an effort to calm and reassure him. She seemed unaware of her nakedness. Teleman was unable to tear his eyes away from those magnificent breasts, grazing her husband's chest and nestling in the hollow of his neck as she bent over him.
"It's all right, darling," she whispered. "It's all right. This man is not a Monitor or an agent of the Monitors and he bears us no ill-will. He is not a criminal either, darling. He is not a housebreaker who came here to rob us or who came—and I know you feared this above all—to force his love upon me, to take me by brutal violence, to kill you and make me his woman. That is happening everywhere now, when men who are brutal and cruel and think only of themselves are turned into beasts by the strange, new stirring which has come upon so many.
"Darling, darling, you must try to understand. This man feels as we do. There is a woman with him, and they both feel as we do about love. They are both as desperately, as badly in love as we are, and they are fleeing because they have aroused the anger of a Monitor. That anger that is so implacable, so blind and unmerciful, so full of envy and malice and fear. Some of the Monitors have experienced the stirring. But they are all too greedy for power to allow their supremacy to be swept away, and those who have experienced it shut the glory of it away in a dark corner of their minds and there it continues to glow brightly. But they cannot endure the glow and warmth, because it shames and humiliates them, and makes them more tragically aware of how wretched they are.
"This man and the woman with him had every right to take refuge here. They were being pursued through the forest by para-guards as if they had committed some monstrous crime when all they did was make love as we have so often done with the tenderest of embraces in the night. They have walked in beauty and know the full splendor of love's fulfillment.
"They have more to fear than we. They have taken far greater risks, for they are not love-privileged and if they are caught they will pay for their rebellion with their lives. Will we have the courage to do what this man hesitated to ask of us—allow ourselves to be bound and when the Monitors question us say that we struggled to defend ourselves but were overpowered by this man's criminal strength? Will we have the courage to lie to save them, my darling? Will we have the strength? I do not know. I am myself all too human and when I think of the price that even we would have to pay—I do not know."
The man had ceased to struggle. He lay very still, a strange quietness in his gaze and Teleman rose slowly to his feet, aware of the risk he was taking, but somehow trusting the woman, knowing that, despite the human frailty that had been revealed in the complete baring of her thoughts, she was speaking in his defense, earnestly pleading with her lover to give her strength.
"To allow ourselves to be bound is only a part of what he wants us to do," she went on quickly. "He wants us to give him and the woman with him our garments and our insignia, so that they may take refuge in a mating center and for a short while remain there disguised as a love-privileged man and woman. It will give them the time they need to make new plans. The Monitors will not think of searching for them in a mating center."
The man spoke then, for the first time. "Yes," he said. "Yes ... I understand."
There was a great weariness in his eyes, as if the suffering of all the world's outraged and disinherited rested upon his shoulders alone.
"Will we have the courage, darling? Or is it too much they ask? Without your love to give me courage I would lack the strength of purpose and even with your love I am not sure. Because, darling, your happiness is more important to me than—"
The man silenced her with a quick look of tender understanding and a firm hand on her arm. "You need not tell me," he whispered. "I know. It is very strange how love such as ours can give us the strength not to think only of ourselves. And perhaps we will only be doing what nine lovers out of ten, completely sure of each other, knowing their love to be undying, would not hesitate to do. No, he does not ask too much of us. We will escape with a stern censure, nothing more. It is the least we can do."
He arose to a sitting position on the floor, took firm hold of the woman's shoulders and drew her to him, kissing her hair and lips and eyes, his hands caressing her back, her hips and thighs, without embarrassment. "We will do as he asks," he whispered. "Tell him that our garments and insignia are in the wall cabinet by the window; our identification seals as well. There is some heavy cord in the cellar. Tell him to overturn the furniture to make the Monitors believe that we put up a furious struggle. And he had better gag us."
A brief, warming smile appeared on her woman's lips. "He thought of all that. Oh, darling, this is what I wanted you to say, what I secretly hoped you would say, deep in my heart. But my woman's frailty—"
"I know, I understand. You need not tell me. But tell him that there is no time to waste. He must be a man of great resourcefulness and courage or he would not be here at all. It is difficult to confuse the scanners and they are almost certain to pick up his trail again."
The man got to his feet, his arm encircling the woman's waist and helping her to rise with him, his lips pressed to the small cluster of curls just above her right temple.
Teleman stood very still, his eyes shining, too deeply moved to speak for a moment. He had overheard all of their whispered conversation and they seemed to sense that he had, for neither said a word in explanation or apology.
The man simply extended his hand and Teleman clasped it, the gratefulness in his eyes speaking for him, telling the man and the woman all that needed to be said and making speech unnecessary.
ELEVEN
The explosion came abruptly, shaking the entire room, hurling Teleman to his knees and sending the man and the woman staggering backwards. It did not come from within the room, but from somewhere in the forest outside the house. But close, close ... Teleman could feel its nearness in his bones, the shock waves and the concussion, as the thunder of it roared in his ears, half-deafening him, and a bright burst of accompanying flame danced and flicked on the vibrating panes of the window.
For an instant the panes continued to vibrate and then, abruptly, the glass was shattered and fell in tinkling fragments to the floor. But one of the spinning fragments was hurled with such violence from the window's upper frame that it did not drop to the floor. With the speed and flashing brightness of a tiny, keen-bladed spear, thrown with a deadly accuracy of aim, it went flying through the air to bury itself in the woman's chest, just above the heart.
The woman moaned and raised her hand to the soft flesh of her bosom, then let it fall limply to her side again. The sliver of glass had pierced deeply, but there was only a tiny dot of crimson to mark that mortal wounding and mar the whiteness of her skin. Her eyes, wide with shock and pain, remained unfocused for an instant, then sought the face of her lover. Realization seemed to come to her slowly, tormentingly, as if it carried with it a burden, to one so deeply in love, that could not be accepted at once and must not be too quickly shared.
It was not her own pain which seemed to overwhelm her, but the grief and agony which would come to her lover when she was no longer at his side. There was love and compassion and overwhelming tenderness in her eyes as she swayed, reached out with one hand to steady herself against the wall at her back, and then sank without a murmur to the floor.
The man cried out and threw himself down beside her, taking her into his arms and holding her tightly, whispering to her words of love and pleading with her to tell him how grievously she had been hurt, how deep the wound.
"Darling," she whispered, her fingers moving lightly over his face, her lips white and trembling. "Darling, I—"
She went limp so suddenly that the man seemed unaware that he was no longer holding a living woman in his arms. He continued to whisper to her pleadingly, and even the glaze which had overspread her pupils could not make him accept the tragic and terrible finality of his loss. Only after a long moment did he cover his eyes with his hands and begin to sob.
The echoes of the explosion had died away completely and the room was silent again when Teleman heard footsteps ascending the stairs and moving swiftly toward the room along the upstairs hallway. The relief which he experienced was sudden and overwhelming, but it did not keep him from crossing the room and laying a firm hand on the sobbing man's shoulder.
"There is nothing I can say," he whispered, his voice tremulous with emotion. "Nothing to ease your pain. She was your whole life and when a man's life is at an end ... it will not be forever, but that, too, mocks grief at such a moment. There is nothing that a stranger can say that will be to you more than the words of a stranger. Even someone very close to you, a father or a brother, could not ease your grief in any way. Just know that you have befriended a man and a woman who needed help desperately, a man and a woman who will never cease to be grateful to you. In all this world, I will never have a better friend, or meet a man I would be prouder to claim as a friend. You are no longer a stranger to me."
The man said in a choked voice, "I can feel nothing now except a terrible sense of emptiness, of loss ... the dark gulf that separates me from my beloved. Can it ever be crossed, do you think? Is there any hope at all?"
"I do not know," Teleman said. "It is something that every man must find out for himself. I have no right to speak with assurance, for I am as human as you are and as fallible. I possess no wisdom that you do not possess and false confidence is no comfort at all."
"I am grateful for your honesty," the man said. "Ithashelped me a little. Go now, quickly. I would like to be alone with her. Take the garments and the insignia and go. We will have no further need of them. Fight. Fight for your love as I would have fought for mine, for if you lose her you will have nothing. You will be as despairing and empty as I am. I will always think of you as a friend."
When Teleman turned he saw Alicia standing by the window, her face drained of all color, her eyes on the dead woman and the man who was cradling her in his arms. The man had begun to sob again.
"The explosion!" she whispered, her voice barely audible. "Did it—kill her? I thought it was outside the house. It shook the stairs and I was afraid for you, terribly afraid. I wasn't sure I could climb the stairs. I had no strength at all for a moment—"
"Are you all right now?" Teleman asked, his voice harsh with concern.
"Yes, I am all right. But that woman—"
"She was killed by a flying splinter of glass. The dwelling is probably completely surrounded by para-guards. They must have picked up our trail again and are dropping bombs near the house, perhaps to frighten us and force us to leave. They must want to take us alive or they would have bombed the dwelling itself. They would have no trouble pin-pointing it as a target for demolition bombing.
"Then we'd better stay here as long as we can. You have a hand-gun and you could pick them off as they come through the door from the top of the stairs."
"No, that would only delay our capture by a few minutes. They'll drop fifty guards, if necessary. We'll have to do what they expect us to do, risk capture by trying to get past them in the open. They're probably under orders not to blast us down, unless we give them no alternative. And every circle of armed guards has to be widespread. There'll be some unguarded, foliage-choked pathways leading deep into the forest on the far side of the clearing, pathways as black as pitch. If we can just get to one—"
"But can we?" Alicia cut in. "Suppose they've stationed guards in a tight circle a few yards from the dwelling, with only a few feet between them. Every circledoesn'thave to be widespread, if it's near enough."
"If there was a circle of guards directly outside they would never have dropped a bomb so close to the dwelling," Teleman said, impatiently. "Darling, we're wasting precious seconds. Take off your clothes. Quickly, strip yourself naked."
Alicia's eyes widened in shocked dismay and she stared at him wordlessly, as if she feared that he had suddenly become bereft of his senses.
"It's another string to our bow," he said, quickly. "We're disguising ourselves as a sex-privileged man and woman. The garments are here, and the insignia."
"The garments? You mean—"
For answer Teleman went to a built-in wall cabinet on the opposite side of the window, jerked it open and removed all of its contents: two knee-length tunics of pale blue fabric, two identification disks with corrugated surface markings, and two shining silver insignia, bearing the emblem of the sex-privileged, a nude man and woman locked in an embrace that made them seem almost to blend into a single reclining figure.
"These garments are a gift to us," he said. "Surrendered freely and with nothing asked in return by a man who has become, in just these few moments, a friend I shall never forget. When the gift was made he did not know that the garments would mock his grief and be of no further use to him. Let me never be cynical, and doubt human nature, darling, its capacity for generosity and unfaltering courage in moments of shared danger."
Teleman explained to her swiftly how the garments would be used, and why the mating center plan had a better chance of success than any of the other plans he had thought of as second-choice possibilities.
She was quick to agree and was removing her garments before the second blast came. The room shook again, but this time there was no glass to splinter and it seemed less loud than the first explosion. A dropped bomb falling into a pond and detonating under water perhaps, or a small bomb hurled by hand. Teleman had no intention of letting it unnerve him and he gestured reassuringly as Alicia paused to stare at him with fear in her eyes, a tangle of dropped garments at her feet and her nude body bathed in light from the window—a light so dazzling it made her blink furiously—she had the white-limbed grace of a statue carved in stone.
She was naked for a moment, for Teleman tossed her one of the two garments he had taken from the cabinet, and she caught it deftly, a smile appearing for an instant on her lips, and put it on, loosening the belt at the waist a little and adjusting the bosom-sheaths until they fitted snugly over the twin mounds of her gently swelling breasts. There was a flame-colored sheath lower down, where the garment became more tight-fitting, and this she adjusted carefully too, smoothing out the cloth here and then and twisting her body about until she appeared to be wearing a garment which had been made for her. There was no fold out of place or too tight-fitting, and when she raised her arms the garment seemed to mold itself even more perfectly to her slender torso, its smooth-flowing, silken texture enhancing her body's grace.
Teleman removed his own garment while she was fastening the insignia to her breast and put on the man's tunic, experiencing, despite the grimness of his mood, a slight twinge of amusement at the embarrassment he was quite sure they both felt. How strange were the ways of love, when a man and a woman who had surrendered completely to love could still feel the tug of modesty when the occasion in no way concerned love!
Teleman transferred his hand-gun to the left pocket of the new garment and glanced once more at his benefactor. The man's shoulders were still bowed in grief, and he had not looked up. A last goodbye and a final word of thanks arose to Teleman's lips. But he decided that silence would be better. The man would know and understand, and Teleman could not bring himself to further intrude on his grief.
"Come on," he whispered, taking firm hold of Alicia's hand. "Try not to see anything in the forest that isn't there. Just stay close to me, and remember—flickering shadows can look very much like advancing para-guards."
TWELVE
In the darkness and silence of the dwelling's upper hallway, and the shadowed gloom, no longer pierced by shafts of early morning sunlight, of the main-floor room, it was hard for them to realize that it was still broad daylight outside the house. But the instant they emerged from the dwelling's paneled doorway the brightness of the sky and the almost shadowless clearing made them instantly aware again that only the forest was a gloom enveloped sanctuary.
They stood for an instant motionless in the doorway, dazzled by the brightness and experiencing a sharp stab of apprehension. If a para-guard had been crouching at the edge of the clearing, with steady eyes and a leveled weapon, blasting them both down would have presented no problem. They had to trust to their instincts solely, the feeling that they both had that the house was not yet completely surrounded. Or that if it was, the guards were under orders not to open fire, but to take them by stealth, withholding all violence until they moved around and away from the house and reached the high wall of wind-stirred foliage at the rear of the dwelling, where the forest began again and the shadows clustered thickly.
Teleman pressed Alicia's hand and whispered: "We've got to move very fast and keep moving. They may close in on us the instant we're between the trees, so we'll have to keep our wits about us, and watch out for the slightest stir of movement. If we see a guard I'll know what to do. Trust me."
"I will, darling!" she breathed. "And I'm not too frightened to think clearly."
"All right. Here we go then."
They did not break into a run immediately, but waited until they had moved cautiously around to the back of the dwelling and were facing away from it, with an open space that could be quickly crossed stretching out in front of them. The forest wall was less than eighty feet away and could be reached in a matter of seconds. Teleman's hand had darted to his pocket and he was firmly clasping the stock of the hand-gun.
They exchanged no words, but started across the clearing at once, running swiftly with only a few feet separating them. They were out of breath when they reached the trees, but paused only for the barest instant, their eyes darting toward a patch of weaving darkness where the foliage was dense enough to provide instant shelter but not too close to keep them from tearing a few of the branches apart with their hands and clearing a wide enough space to move about in until they could find a natural path in the underbrush or beat their way through it toward a more open stretch of forest.
They were several feet inside the foliage screen, breathing harshly and keeping their heads lowered to avoid the stinging backlash of whipped-apart branches, when the para-guard came crashing toward them. There was blood on his face and he was cursing savagely and in an instant briefer than a dropped heartbeat there flashed into Teleman's mind an image of the man waiting for them, crouching in the underbrush and prevented by the dense growth from leaping instantly out at them.
The image blurred and vanished and Teleman saw only the man himself, the looming, dangerous bulk of him. The hand-gun was recoiling in his clasp, its roar deafening, in what seemed no more than another split second of time, so quickly that Teleman had no clear recollection of whipping it from his pocket, only of leveling it and firing it at almost pointblank range.
The para-guard screamed and went staggering backwards, his hands clutching at his chest. Light from the expiring energy charge bathed his head and shoulders for an instant in a ghastly, pale green radiance, making him look almost ghostly as he sank to his knees, and fell forward on his face. His arms jerked convulsively for a moment, and then the trembling and twitching ceased and he lay completely still, a crimson gleaming appearing in both sides of his body and spreading outward over the dry leaves of the forest until they resembled leaves but recently fallen, all of their autumn brightness restored.
Alicia swayed and turned deathly pale. Teleman went to her, drew her into his arms and held her tightly, stilling her trembling with a few, calmly spoken words.
"If I hadn't killed him, if I had just wounded him, he might still have had the strength to go on fighting. He might have seized you and used you as a shield, or grabbed me by the legs and dragged me down. He was too near, coming right at us. It was his life or ours."
"Yes, I know," she breathed, her arms tightening about his shoulders with an understanding that went deeper than words. "He was only obeying orders, but they were brutal orders and it would have been madness to take risks with a man so enraged. If we had resisted, he would have killed us without hesitation. He might even have tried to ravish me. Did you see his face?"
"I saw it," Teleman said. "We've got to get through the forest and try to reach one of the travel strips on the other side before another face like that has a chance to wear the kind of smile that means he's won and we're either dead or bound hand and foot. That hand-gun blast may bring a dozen guards down on us before we can get far. But we're not giving up, or stopping to let the possibility weaken what we've got—a strength that comes only to lovers. It's a very special kind of strength and we've got to believe in it. Is that clear?"
"Yes, darling, very clear."
"Then the only important thing right now is to keep moving. Our luck has held so far. And there are seven more charges in this gun. I'll shoot to kill as many times as I have to."
The forest was alive with shadows and almost night-dark where the trees towered in groups of five or six, gigantic oaks with interlacing branches that completely blotted out the sky. Even the few, downstreaming shafts of sunlight had become fewer and more widely scattered and the gloom was so all enveloping that it brought a chill to Alicia's heart.
They were a mile and a half from the thick tangle of underbrush where the guard lay with his body half in shadow and the leaves about him turning dark again when they heard the rustling. It was faint at first, but it came swiftly nearer and for an instant Teleman thought that more para-guards were descending to the forest floor through the rustling canopy of leaves and interlocking branches directly ahead of them.
He stopped advancing abruptly and gripped Alicia's arm, drawing her quickly into the deep shadows which clustered about the base of a moss-grown oak so huge that its bole had the girth of a dozen slenderer trees fused by some strange freak of lightning into a massive whole, its charred surface completely hidden by the bright emerald moss, and circular patches of darker coloration where the moss had shriveled and died.
The rustling had taken on a strange and disturbing loudness, hard to associate with just the swaying of the foliage about the descending boots of para-guards, and the dry leaf crackle of their tread on the forest floor. It was accompanied by clickings and a dull, droning sound, and suddenly, as Teleman stared with a coldness creeping up his spine, light flashed between the trees and a deafening blast echoed and reverberated through the forest, shaking the ground and filling the aisles of the forest with a swirling shower of leaves.
Teleman was hurled back against the oak and Alicia was thrown with such violence to the ground that she lay for an instant motionless, too stunned to cry out or free herself from the tangle of charred creepers and smoke-blackened leaves which had descended upon her face.
Teleman dropped to his knees and dragged himself toward her, his temples pounding, a dull ache in his back. He cleared away the clinging vines with a single sweep of his arm and lifted her up, holding her tightly and gently massaging her cheeks with the back of his hand.
Her eyes opened and she stared up at him, her eyes wide with fright.
"Hurt bad?" he whispered, afraid of what her answer might be and wishing that he did not have to ask the question at all.
She shook her head. "No, I'm all right. Help me to get up. What was it? Another bomb? For a moment I thought—"
"Don't try to talk," Teleman said, his voice sharp with concern. "I think I know what it is, and it's coming toward us fast. We've got to get away from here!"
He helped her to rise and they stood for an instant swaying a little, still too shaken to do more than stare. Teleman was the first to speak decisively, and with all uncertainty driven from his mind by the ground-shaking tread which had come to his ears.
"It's one of the new walking ground-warfare machines," he said, his fingers tightening on Alicia's arm. "All metal, segmented, and equipped with scanners and atomic blast tubes. They weigh several tons and are fifty feet tall. Too heavy to be transported here in a flying machine. It must have been set in pursuit of us right after I killed that guard and has apparently circled around in front of us and is blasting the trees directly ahead in an effort to halt our advance. It is operated by remote control and its scanners have probably flashed back our exact position. We'll have to try to break that circuit in some way. I still think they're trying to capture us alive, but we can't be sure."
"How long have we got, darling?"
"I don't know. It's very near. We'll have to do some circling back ourselves. They'll expect us to flee in the opposite direction, back toward where we were. But if we make that mistake we'll be welcomed by a dozen or more armed guards. We'll have to move sideways, circling back just a little but keeping almost parallel to this tree."
"But what if that—that terrible machine follows us. If it's equipped with scanners isn't it certain to follow us?"
"It's certain to, yes. But if we can find—never mind, we haven't time to talk about it now. It's coming straight toward us. It may still be several hundred feet away, because that was a restricted atomic blast and all we felt were the vibrations at the edge of it. Those charred leaves were blown toward us from a considerable distance."
"But the sounds! I can hear its tread!"
"That rustling sound may have been made by terrified birds and small animals directly in its path. Its tread we can hear now because it is very near and is moving ponderously. But it could still be a considerable distance away. We'll have time to get out of its path if we hurry."
"Do you think it can overtake us, if we run? How fast is it moving?"
"I don't know," Teleman said. "I've never seen one of the machines in action and I just don't know. I don't think it's moving very fast, but it takes enormous strides. It will overtake us in ten or fifteen minutes at the most, unless we can mislead the scanners. Come on, let's get started."
They were just turning when the foliage lighted up again, but this time there was no thunderous detonation. The foliage at the far end of the forest aisle, a hundred feet from the massive oak tree, was merely enveloped for an instant in a blinding glare that spread outward until it filled every shadowed crevice and swaying vine-canopy between the tree and its point of origin. As it spread it became more diffuse and less blinding, until every boulder, plant and fallen log that it touched began to glow with a cold, almost spectral radiance.
The foliage at the far end of the clearing burst into flame as the great, robot-like figure came into view, a metal giant with long, segmented legs and globular body-box, surmounted by a conical head with almost human features.
That the ground-warfare machine looked both intelligent and terrifyingly humanoid in aspect would not have surprised or startled anyone familiar with the psychological subtlety which the Monitors were capable of exercising. It had been built with the terror motif in mind, and if it was an almost unbelievably efficient mechanism of destruction it was equally efficient as a shape which could inspire such fear in the beholder that he would become completely demoralized, particularly if he harbored rebellious impulses or thought of himself as a criminal.
But Teleman and Alicia did not think of themselves as criminals and Alicia had been forewarned by Teleman's description of the machine and had visualized it as both formidable and terrifyingly robot-like.
That the actual machine surpassed in hideousness the mental image she had formed of it was not a sufficiently shock-producing circumstance to make her succumb to panic, and after the first moment of shock her strength of will carried her past the danger point and enabled her to look upon the machine simply as a very dangerous weapon of warfare that threatened her life and the life of the man she loved, but in no way menaced her sanity.
It was Teleman who for a moment experienced the most acute fear, not for himself but for the safety of the woman at his side. He gripped her wrist tightly and urged her forward, moving away from the tree with such rapid strides that she had to run to keep up with him.
For ten minutes they fled through the forest in silence, climbing over logs and lichen-encrusted boulders, and sinking ankle-deep at times in soggy patches where damp leaves in heavy layers and the moisture in the soil made walking difficult and running impossible. They had put a mile between themselves and the towering ground-warfare machine when they were brought up short by a pool of still, dark water.
THIRTEEN
The gaunt woman was staring into the scanner-glass, and gripping the metal frame so tightly that her knuckles had a mottled look.
"At last!" she breathed, leaning sharply forward. "Those machines have never proved their worth until now. What a fool I was to oppose the project on the grounds of economy. Only two machines when we could have had twenty. But never mind, the two are doing very well."
"Are they?" said a quiet voice at her side. "I would not be too sure. The man is clever as well as courageous. And the woman knows how to keep fear at arm's length, always. You have met your match in that pair."
The woman swung about, an angry flushing suffusing her face and accentuating the boniness of her cheekbones. The flush was of short duration, for fear and anger seldom walk hand in hand, and pallor is very likely to accompany fear.
The Chief Monitor smiled thinly, his eyes also intent on the glass. "I'm afraid that you have merited a reprimand," he said. "From what I have heard your conduct this morning was inexcusable. Without first securing permission from the Council you witnessed a surgical experiment which turned out very badly. Your own rash haste may have been responsible for the failure. The surgeons were not yet ready to conduct the final test but you frightened them into complying with your demand. I do not like what happened. I do not like it at all."
The Chief Monitor was not only soft-spoken. He was so mild-mannered and non-aggressive in aspect that it seemed incredible that he could have risen to a position of authority so great that he could have reversed a century of enlightened human progress with a single spoken word. He had pale brown hair and pale eyes, and he did not look at all like a man accustomed to issuing commands. But then, quite suddenly, the brown eyes would flash with an ice-crystal brilliance and hardness and in such moments his supremacy was not difficult to understand.
His eyes were ice-crystal cold now.
"I have often wondered," the Chief Monitor said, speaking with a candor that sharply increased the gaunt woman's fear, "How I would feel if I had experienced the stirring. Would I rebel as courageously as that pair?"