The Mating Center (continued 2)

Teleman and Alicia approached with caution, however, keeping their voices lowered and treading softly until they were standing directly under the dwelling's projecting eaves.

The metal entrance panel was massive and overgrown with clinging vines. When Teleman depressed the switch to the right of it a faint, humming sound arose.

They stood in the shadows that clustered thickly at the base of the dwelling's two-story facade until the panel glided completely open, and the main-floor interior came into view. From the entranceway they could see almost the whole of a large, square room with two windows, furnished simply but tastefully with several chairs of natural wood, a center table and plants in copper urns.

Teleman tapped Alicia lightly on the arm. "I'll go first," he said. "We'll speak in whispers. We've got to move cautiously until we're absolutely sure that the place is as deserted as it looks."

"I'm not too worried," Alicia said. "Only an ordinary citizen would live in a dwelling as modest as this."

"Ordinary or not, he could be armed and dangerous," Teleman pointed out. "Particularly if we're taken by surprise."

Alicia nodded. "You're right, of course. Go ahead, darling. What I really meant was, I'm not worried because we're together. If we run into trouble we'll know how to deal with it."

The light which streamed into the room from the two windows dappled the floor in patches, and they took care to stay close to the right-hand wall and well out of the light as they moved from the entranceway to the base of an ascending stairway. The stairway, like the chairs and table, was of natural wood and each of its ten or twelve steps was covered with a thick coating of dust.

Teleman started and grew instantly alert, his eyes narrowing as he stared down intently at the first four steps. There were markings in the dust, faint but unmistakable. Someone had ascended the stairs quite recently, leaving elongated impressions which were completely free of dust. And that someone had not come down!

Teleman drew in his breath sharply. That the elongated impressions had been made by the soles of boots he could not doubt. Ascending boots, for the toes pointed forward and there were no opposite impressions with the toes pointing toward him. Not all of the impressions were clear but there was faint corrugations in the dust even on the one step where, at first glance, he had noticed only the dust.

"What is it?" Alicia whispered. "What are you staring at?"

"There's someone upstairs," he replied, keeping his voice lowered but gripping her wrist tightly to make sure that she would remain completely still. "Footprints in the dust. See them? Don't move, even slightly. I'm going up a few steps, but I'll be very careful."

She nodded, her fingers creeping over his hand and tightening for an instant. "Yes, be careful. If the stairs should creak—"

"They won't. Stay right where you are and don't worry."

Teleman ascended cautiously, testing each step before he passed to the next by resting his weight upon it guardedly, his ears alert for the slightest sound. The wood did not creak and he reached the top step in complete silence.

The stairs ended in a circular corridor bisected by a narrow beam of sunlight which filtered down from a small, diamond-shaped window high in the wall. The footsteps did not end at the top of the stairs, but continued on down the corridor to vanish in total darkness.

Teleman had intended merely to check each of the dust-covered steps to make sure that all of the footprints pointed in one direction. But now, having satisfied himself in that respect, he abandoned all caution.

Returning down the stairs only to ascend again after a moment or two of calm thought would be wasting precious moments. Better, he told himself, to go on immediately and put an end to all uncertainty. He was quite sure that Alicia would understand and not attempt to follow him.

He glanced quickly back down the stairs, saw her slender form crouching in the shadows and waved to her. Without changing her position she returned the gesture, her eyes shining in the half-light.

Reassured, he turned and advanced across the circular corridor, taking care to move stealthily. The corridor terminated in a hallway so narrow that his shoulders grazed both sides of it when his tread became slightly hesitant and he shifted his equilibrium in the darkness.

The hallway was as black as pitch. With no glimmer of light to guide him he continued on, straining his ears as he traversed the narrow passageway and the upstairs room which he was almost sure he would find at the end of it.

Then, quite suddenly, he stopped trying to visualize the room arrangement on the second floor of the dwelling. It ceased to matter, ceased to seem important. He was only aware of the voices.

The voices came drifting toward him out of the darkness, halting his cautious step-by-step advance, causing him to stand utterly motionless, with every nerve alert.

A man's voice and a woman's voice. He heard the woman's voice first, vibrant with emotion, both languid and intense, as if, in some sudden awakening after a dream of rapture, there was a need for words to make happiness and fulfillment as complete as possible.

"We came back because we had to, my dearest one, my beloved," the woman was murmuring. "And you carried me upstairs, just as you did on our bridal night. It all seems so unbelievable even now. We dared to be recklessly romantic, true lovers in the old, half-forgotten way—we dared to be true to ourselves. We had the courage, we dared."

"I know," the man whispered, his voice tender and exultant. "And when we refused to pass our first night together in a mating center. We soared to heights that had to be scaled again. We are too desperately, madly in love to accept a lesser glory. We had to be alone together in this simple, beautiful cottage in the woods. Only here can we pluck the uttermost rose of love, surrender ourselves one to the other in a secret place of our own choosing. Only here can we know how the poet felt when he wrote: 'Love is like a shining river, its banks flower-bright, with secret shrines and bowers which lovers alone may enter and become imperishably entwined. Love is a flowing, a radiance in the night.'"

"I'm glad that we came back last night," the woman murmured. "If we had waited we might have lost a little of our courage and any loss might have made us hesitate to defy the Monitors and risk everlasting disgrace. In a way, I feel like a woman who is not love-privileged, who has been denied the fulfillment of a woman's greatest need."

"A man's greatest need too, my darling," came in quick reply. "Remember that, always. No man can live without love and be creative in the highest sense. He cannot be bold and far-seeing and dare the stars. He needs the embrace of a woman, the undying love of a woman, a mutual sharing in all of love's secret delights or he will shrivel in his inmost being. He will become a mockery and a sham—a walking sepulchre filled with dry bones that rattle in every passing gust. He will become a tyrant and fool, venting his inner frustration and his rage on those weaker than himself—the helpless, the defenseless, the socially maladjusted who in many ways are often superior to himself."

The voices fell silent. But there were sounds in the darkness, a stirring, a moving about and to Teleman, still standing motionless, it was easy to imagine what was taking place in the room at the end of the hallway.

He did not wish to intrude. He would have struck down and perhaps attempted to kill anyone intruding on Alicia and himself, had the situation been reversed.

But now the need for immediate, drastic action forced him to thrust all such considerations aside. The man and woman in the room just beyond were sex-privileged and that fact alone had suggested a daring course of action which he had no right, if only for Alicia's sake, to postpone.

It was a scheme so audacious that the first move had to succeed and the second and the third. Each would be charged with danger, and the stakes would be survival or almost certain death.

The man making love in the room at the end of the hallway was for the moment defenseless, unaware that an intruder had entered his home and was listening to his every spoken word. If there was a weapon in the dwelling it was probably not within his reach. He would have to leap out of bed and cross the room to get his hands on it. It might even be in the room downstairs.

He appeared to be the kind of man Teleman would have been proud to number among his friends. The woman too was exceptional; warm-hearted and courageous. But Teleman could not risk appealing to them directly. Their sympathy and understanding might bridge all gulfs and lead to a lasting friendship. But he would still have to ask too much of them and expose them to too much danger. They would have to agree voluntarily to a plan which would place their own lives in jeopardy.

He had no right to force such a choice upon them, no right to make an appeal which their own generous natures might prevent them from refusing. Unless they were found in the dwelling bound and completely helpless the Monitors would refuse to believe that they had not taken part in a criminal conspiracy to aid two fugitive lawbreakers.

They might still have difficulty in explaining their presence in the dwelling, for the love-privileged were required by law to spend their nights in the mating centers. But recreational leaves were sometimes granted and the man and the woman were highly intelligent, and would know how to speak with eloquence in their own defense. Their lapse was not a serious one, and Teleman was quite sure that they would know how to turn aside the wrath of the Monitors. It took great courage to do what they had done. But they would not be subject to the death penalty, and would escape with no more than a stern admonition.

To mar the happiness of a man and woman so desperately in love even for a day and a night made Teleman sick at heart. But he had no choice. All of the Monitors' rage would be directed against Alicia and himself and he could not let Alicia die....

He moved cautiously forward, dreading what he must do, and was not aware that he had reached the door of the room until he saw the white sheets of a bed gleaming faintly in the darkness.

He stood for a moment in the doorway, unseen, unheard, waging an inner struggle with himself. Should he make some slight sound to warn them, risk that much before he advanced upon the bed to make his presence known in an unmistakable way?

The man would have to be ordered from the bed and threatened with the hand-gun which Teleman had taken from the para-guard. Teleman hoped that he would not have to use the gun as he had used it against the guard to exact instant compliance from the man. But he was prepared for any contingency, no matter how desperate.

SEVEN

Monitor 6Y9 stood staring at the electronic scanner-glass, her gaunt body stooping a little, her face half in shadow. Behind her the high white wall of a Security Observatory towered, totally blank from floor to ceiling and shining with a dull lustre. At her side stood a bearded young man in the somber black garb of an Advisory Specialist, his face almost as gaunt as the woman's and scarcely more masculine in aspect, for the woman was an Amazon in build and strength despite her leanness.

"They have escaped," the gaunt woman murmured. "See there! That blind, stupid pig of a para-guard lying bound and nothing but a stretch of dense woodland beyond with no scanner pickup anywhere."

"No reason to take it so much to heart," the bearded man said, a slight smile on his thin, almost bloodless lips. "You seem to hate them for personal reasons, and that surprises me. I'd advise you to keep how you feel to yourself. If they have committed the grave crime you've charged them with—and attacking that guard was just as grave a crime—they will have to answer for their criminal behavior with their lives. Doesn't that satisfy you? To feel personal animosity toward a lawbreaker is inexcusable in a Monitor. It would be inexcusable in me."

"You are a fool!" the gaunt woman said, turning upon him with a gesture of angry defiance, her dark eyes flashing. "I am not obliged to take your advice, for my authority is superior to yours."

"You might do well to heed it," the young man said. "Your authority is not superior to the Supreme Council of Monitors in full, law-making session. And an Advisory Supervisor, even an Advisory Specialist, can strongly influence the voting."

"And why should you influence the Council in a manner unfavorable to me," the gaunt woman demanded. "Have I not always been your friend? Don't forget, it was I who elevated you to your high station. If you turn against me now you will regret it."

The young man inclined his head. "Perhaps. I do owe a great deal to you. But personal animosity can distort judgment, and further threaten our supremacy. I do not like it. We must act coolly and without bias."

"How can I act coolly when those two accused me of—" The gaunt woman hesitated and tightened her lips, a deep flush creeping up over her cheekbones. "On the travel strip they accused me of secretly harboring criminal impulses as monstrous as their own," she went on in a sudden, uncontrollable burst of rage. "They dared to affront my ears with outrageous and shameful insinuations. They said that I too had experienced the stirring and that I refused to face the truth about myself and that the repression of that baseness in me had made me cruel and vindictive. They said I was envious of what they did openly and without shame, in the full light of day."

"Was it really as bad as all that?" the Advisory Specialist asked, his voice not entirely lacking in sympathy. "Well, I can understand how you must have felt. But at least they only made love openly when the travel strip was deserted for many paces and when you were still in the distance. You told me so yourself."

"I could still see them. The security guard could see them as well."

"It might have been better if you had shut your eyes to what you saw. The rebellion is spreading rapidly and we encounter many such criminal transgressions daily, even on the travel strips. Those two were unusual in many ways, more daring than most of the others, willing to take greater risks. To defy a Monitor as they did, threatening her with physical violence and to leave the strip and take to the woods in a daring bid for freedom, skilfully eluding pursuit, displaying extraordinary intelligence, outwitting us at every turn. Surely you must realize that it has set a dangerous example which others may not be slow in following!"

"That is why they must be caught and brought to justice!" the gaunt woman cried, her fury making her tremble and congesting the whites of her eyes. "The death sentence must be imposed as quickly as possible. They must stand before the Supreme Council, stripped naked, exposed in all of their shame, and they must be forced to make a full confession. Oh, we shall not spare them. I will not spare them. I shall demand that right.

"I shall force them to reveal all of the monstrous details of their nights together in the dark: the criminal moments of unlawful love-making, her wantonness, his amorous abandonment to her every illicit whim. It is the woman who is always the most to blame. She has led him on and destroyed him, for no man can resist a woman skilled in all of the wiles and enticements of the harlot. Yes, yes, yes ... I will use that old, almost forgotten word. I have read the old books and I know what a harlot was and what a harlot did. I will fling the word in her face. Harlot and courtesan, strumpet and destroyer of men!"

"There is another word, a more ribald word, that you had best not say," the young man advised. "You must try to control yourself and exercise calm judgment when you make the charge. Otherwise the Council will accuse you of bias."

"Let them accuse me! I will speak my mind."

"I have advised and warned you," the young man said. "I can do no more. And I'm afraid you're forgetting that they must first be captured. Look at the glass. More para-guards are descending and the scanner beams are moving again. Another stretch of woodland is coming into view. Their capture may not be long delayed. There is consolation in that—it is an encouraging step forward. The pursuit has been resumed."

The gaunt woman swung about to face the glass, her eyes brightening, a rapacious eagerness in her stare.

In the depths of the brightly illumined glass the forest seemed elfin and remote, enveloped in a weaving interplay of light and shade. Five para-guards were descending slowly above a boulder-strewn stretch of forest floor, brightened here and there by red and yellow fungus growths and moss-covered logs that glowed with a faint phosphorescence in the shadowed hollows between the rocks.

One by one the para-guards reached the ground, threw off their cumbersome air-suspension equipment, and checked the firing mechanism of their hand-guns, their faces harsh and grimly purposeful in the downstreaming light. Two of them were equipped with portable scanners and as they moved the instruments about the scene shifted and another stretch of woodland filled the glass. A patch of open sky swept suddenly into view and across it a flying machine darted, looking, in the glass' miniature reproduction of the scene, not unlike an enormous, blue-black hornet.

"They must be taken alive," the gaunt woman breathed. "With success so near I would be a fool not to change my original orders. Even if they resist they must not be attacked with weapons. I will issue new orders immediately."

"I would advise you to give it careful thought," the young man said. "You will be risking the lives of five para-guards. The man is armed now and—"

"Be silent. I shall do as I please. The death of five guards would be a very cheap price to pay for the apprehension alive of such monstrous criminals."

The young man sighed. "Have it your own way, then. But the Council may not take a kindly view of such head-strong behavior. After all, human life has some value."

The gaunt woman's eyes flashed again in anger, but before she could reply the entrance panel on the opposite wall of the Security Observatory glided open, and an armed guard stood framed in the aperture. He stood stiffly at attention, his hand raised in salute, his expression tense, but deferential, as if the news he had to convey would have burst from his lips if he had dared to ignore discipline.

The Monitor regarded him irately for an instant, and although the anger in her eyes was not meant for him it caused him to take a swift step backward.

"What is it?" she demanded. "Don't just stand there. Speak up."

"We followed your instructions and dropped seven para-guards at the opposite end of the forest," he said. "They have captured a man and a woman. They may be the two you seek, though it is hard to believe they could have covered so many miles. They were dragged from a tangle of underbrush, locked criminally in each other's arms. They are not sex-privileged."

The gaunt woman stood very still, her lips paling a little, an indescribable look, of shock and triumph commingled, perhaps, coming into her face.

"Where are they?" she demanded, her voice so choked with emotion that the guard had to strain to catch the words. "What have you done with them?"

"They are here," he said. "I knew that you would want me to bring them here immediately. They are just outside—"

"Bring them in! You try my patience. Bring them in and be quick about it."

The guard swung about and was gone for a moment. When he returned he was accompanied by a man and a woman, both securely gagged and with their hands tied behind them.

The woman was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with exotically beautiful features, her eyes almond-shaped, her skin so fair and delicately textured that it seemed almost transparent. The man was well past his first youth, but still in his prime, with a lithe strength in his build and posture, an absence of excess weight, which made it hard to think of him as a man approaching middle age. He was deeply sun-bronzed, and had the look of a man who has lived most of his life under open skies. There was great strength in his features as well, features too rugged to be thought of as handsome but radiating a strange kind of sensitivity, as if he were both an athlete and poet, man of action and dreamer of dreams.

The woman was shaking her head violently in an attempt to dislodge the gag, her dark eyes flashing with anger, but the man stood very still and straight, regarding his captors with a coldly defiant stare. There was contempt in his gaze as well, a proud disdain which he made no effort to conceal.

The gaunt woman stood staring at them for a moment with a look of bitter, rage-envenomed disappointment on her face. Then, quite suddenly, her eyes clouded over and became almost opaque, like the eyes of a cobra poised to strike.

"I had never thought to encounter such stupidity," she breathed, more to herself than to the uneasily staring guard. "Why were they brought here? They do not in the least resemble the other two. I have never set eyes on them before. They are complete strangers to me and strangers who stand accused of the most revolting of crimes should not be brought into my presence at this time. It is more than I can endure."

The guard's ruddy face changed color, becoming almost pale. "We had their description, nothing more," he said, quickly and defensively. "No likenesses were transmitted, since you yourself could only describe them. We had to make sure. We thought it was just barely possible—"

"Silence, you fool. I have heard enough. Give me your whiplash. I will not need your hand-gun. Just the whiplash."

"You are not going to—" The guard's face was deathly pale now. "No, no, try to understand. I have not merited—"

"You blundering stupid fool! It is not you I am going to chastise. It is these two. I will listen first to what the woman has to say. Then, if she has no shame, if she will not confess her guilt and admit that she has been justly accused, as all criminal offenders must do, I will punish her. Give me the whiplash."

"Yes, of course," the guard said, unbuckling from his waist the flexible metal rod terminating in five catgut thongs which the gaunt woman was now regarding with a fixed, almost hypnotic intensity. Some of the color had crept back into his face and he breathed a long sigh of relief as he handed it to her.

It was the Advisory Specialist's turn to look at her in consternation. He stepped quickly forward and laid a restraining hand on her arm.

"You must be quite mad!" he said, warningly. "The Council will not overlook or forgive the use of a whiplash by a Monitor in a private interrogation. The very word you used—chastise. It is a brutally primitive word, a word out of the old books, a completely unscientific word that should be strictly excluded from the vocabulary of a Monitor. You will bring ruin and disgrace upon both of us. I will not be a party to it."

"Then go!" the gaunt woman cried, almost screaming the words. "I have always suspected you were nothing but a coward. Go, leave me. I can no longer endure the sight of you."

Without a word, his face as pale as the guard's had been, the young man turned and left the Observatory, the entrance panel closing behind him with a dull droning.

Grasping the whiplash firmly, the gaunt woman stepped quickly forward and tore the gag from the dark-eyed girl's mouth.

The girl recoiled a step, and stood for an instant motionless, her shoulders held straight and her eyes still blazing with anger. She did not seem to want to be the first to speak, for she kept her lips tightly compressed and her chin tilted defiantly. So fierce was her pride and uncompromising dignity that for the briefest instant the gaunt woman hesitated, as if some vestige of human feeling, of compassion and respect deep in her nature was urging her to be merciful. Then, as quickly as it had arisen, the impulse vanished, and the enraged Monitor unleashed a torrent of vituperation, her voice trembling with fury.

"Lascivious wanton, lewd temptress, abandoned harlot! How many men have you betrayed? How many men have you aroused unlawfully, tempting them to engage in acts of criminal carnality which all of the lessons of their childhood and early adolescence had given them the strength and wisdom to withstand? And the glandular injections, the wise, sane quieting of desire, its almost complete eradication in high-minded specialists in a hundred fields whose social dedication has made our society what it is—how dared you flaunt your brazen primitiveness openly and destroy what it has taken centuries to create?

"You have committed the most terrible of crimes. You have discovered in your wickedness that here and there, among a few men who are criminals at heart, the old, dangerous impulses are stirring again and perhaps have never been wholly subdued. And because they are stirring in you, because you are an abandoned creature lost to all shame, you have led many such men along pathways of gross sensuality, of unlawful desire. How many? A hundred, a thousand? You do not need to tell me. I can guess. It is always the woman who is most to blame, even when she consorts with men who are themselves criminals, as is this man here."

The girl spoke then, for the first time. She did not raise her voice and the anger which flamed in her eyes did not make her words come in a rush, as the Monitor's words had done. She spoke with dignity and each word was chosen with care and each word fell on the gaunt woman's ears with the force of a stinging rebuke.

"If you had wisdom and warmth and understanding you would have said, quite simply: 'He is a man—you are a woman. No woman can live without love and give to the world the best that is in her, and increase the world's store of radiance and tenderness and beauty. And no man can live without love and be complete in his inmost being, and have the courage of his beliefs and build proud new worlds on the ashes of a world such as this, a world which is dying."

"If our world is dying, you have helped to kill it!" the gaunt woman cried, her face dark with rage. "Do you hear? You have helped with your wantonness. You were caught making love in the forest like—like wild animals."

"No, you are mistaken," the dark-eyed girl said quietly. "We were making love with dignity, tenderness and beauty."

The gaunt woman's rage could no longer be constrained by anything short of violence. The words that came to her lips in reply were never uttered. She could no longer articulate and the words became a low muttering which continued even when she seized the hem of the girl's white garment and ripped it from her shoulders, baring her back from neck to waist.

She raised the whiplash and brought it down with all her strength on the girl's naked back. Three times she raised the punitive weapon and brought it down with relentless violence, her breath wheezing in her throat.

The thongs cut cruelly into the girl's flesh, raising long crimson welts, and sending her staggering forward. She raised her hands to her face and dropped to her knees, but she neither cringed nor cried out. She remained kneeling in an upright position, in an attitude that only great courage could have enabled her to maintain. She was trembling a little, but she continued to hold her shoulders straight and did not even moan when the whiplash descended for the fourth and last time.

The gaunt woman was raising the weapon for another blow when the man hurled himself against her, battering her with his shoulders and elbows until the whiplash went clattering and she collapsed backwards against the electronic scanner-glass, shaking but not shattering it, and sank with a groan to the floor.

She remained sprawled out on the floor for a full minute, clutching at her side, twisting about in pain, and trying several times to rise, her eyes darting in desperate appeal toward the guard. Her lips moved but no sound came from them, for her throat had been bruised so severely that her vocal cords throbbed dully and she could not even take a deep breath, or summon the strength to speak.

The girl's enraged lover came and stood over her, glaring savagely down at her and shaking his head in a vain attempt to dislodge the gag. He was not aware that the guard had caught and correctly interpreted the Monitor's unspoken message and was now standing directly behind him with a small, metallically gleaming hand-gun in his clasp.

The guard raised the weapon slowly and took careful aim, centering its double sights on a small mole in the middle of the enraged man's back.

The report of the weapon was loud in the Observatory, shaking the scanner-glass as violently as the Monitor's heavily collapsing body had done. The impact of its energy charge lifted the enraged man up and hurled him back against the wall. His body struck the wall and rebounded, hurling him forward to the floor.

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. "It has helped 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 circle doesn't have 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.