Toward morning reality began to close in upon Ivy with a cold, numbing
flow. She sat examining the things around her, the wall, the table, the
ceiling. As the morning came on a soft rose crept into the sky. She
went to the plastic window and stood watching the dawn.
This thing was going to happen.
The impossibility was fading now as the sun rose and the huts across
the way stepped out of darkness. That old, that horrible thing, that
dry, wrinkled thing....
She was too much afraid, and revolted, to cry. What followed now was an
animal fear, an animal desperation, and for the first time she felt an
urgent, vital energy gathering within her. She had to get out, she had
to get away. This thing was unbelievable and could not happen at all,
not ever, because she would not let it happen. She moved back from the
window and began to pace her cage.
And the anger was replaced by a dissolving helplessness. She had no
plan. She searched, thought desperately, pleaded with herself, but she
had no plan. When they came all she could do would be fight, which
would not be enough, and the thing would happen.
Eventually, because carrying this load in her mind was much too great,
she tried at last to accept it. If she could just endure. She would
have to shut off her mind, like a radio is shut off, and live inside
herself, in silence.
She knew that would not work either.
By mid-morning it became obvious that the man was in no hurry, or was
busy. He did not come after breakfast, and she waited out the morning.
She was just beginning to begin to hope when two of the older men, the
guards, came into the hut.
It was evidently a formal thing, this breeding. They took her clothes,
gave her a single, pale yellow garment which reached not quite to her
knees. She put it on. The two old men were dressed differently today,
in soft pastel robes which were flowing and ridiculous around their
spindly legs. She gathered that today there would be a celebration.
One of the old men gave her the needle as she stood dressing, before
she had a chance to struggle. She was lain for the last time upon the
floor, to wait for the evening.
And then, to her great amazement, a calm possession took over her. All
the school girl fear and disgust and revulsion fell away for a moment,
and she examined the situation critically.
What the hell, she said to herself, startled but at the same time
pleased at the feel of strength in her.
What was this after all? This was sex, really, so what? It was going to
happen? Well, let it happen. It happened to other women, and it had not
killed them. Now it was going to happen to her, and she would certainly
live through it, and since none of it was her fault, there was merely
a physical thing that took place, like in the old days when girls were
married against their will, so she guessed she could bear it.
She was shocked at herself. But she felt her sanity, which had slowly
begun to slip away, return with a rush. Her youth did not return with
it. She would have preferred to have her initiation take place in some
other manner, certainly, with someone more suitable, and she knew that
afterwards she might regret it all very much.
But she had a whole afternoon to pass lying flat on her back and
thinking, and she passed the afternoon in growing up quickly, as
countless women had done before her, helpless and alone, captured in
wax by barbarian soldiers.
* * * * *
"I said this is Hilton, by God! Me. Web. Lieutenant Hilton!"
It was a little while, understandably, before Dundon got hold of the
idea of the aliens. And then--also with great understanding--Web
decided not to tell him the full story. Not over the phone. In person
it would be bad enough, but over the phone it was too great an effort,
and anyway, he was not really sure that he was himself. He told Dundon
where he was.
"Chicago? Chicago? Chica--"
"That's right, chief. Chicago. You got it. I'm in the Statler Hotel.
Incidentally, I need quite a buck to pay my way out. And if you will
come here right away I will tell you what's up."
Dundon was still asking him about Chicago.
"At the Statler," Web insisted, "under my own name. Bring money. And
bring an escort. Watch out for old men with sharp noses. What? We've
been invaded. Yes, by little old men with sharp--look, chief, never
mind, come out here and I'll tell you the whole thing."
With that he hung up.
At the thought of how Dundon must look, he grew cheerful for the first
time since the whole business had begun. For a risingly happy moment he
began to feel for once like his old gay carefree self.
I am going to wait, he said happily to himself, until the whole damn
army gets here.
I am not going to move a foot. I will sleep and eat until the cows come
home, I will load up on scotch and I will lock my door, because, by
heck, I deserve it.
Because he had had little experience with hotel rooms, especially rooms
of such a lavish nature, he did not think of room service. He strode
through the door gaily whistling, and was halfway to the elevator when
the orange flash cut him down.
* * * * *
Kunklin and Prule joined to rake in twelve more Faktors, and to
dissolve Web once again.
"This is quite hard on the boy, really," Prule observed reproachfully.
Kunklin was unmoved. "He doesn't feel a thing. He will never know about
it."
Prule agreed, but he was a sensitive man, and he sighed. And then he
said:
"They found him with remarkable celerity, don't you think?"
"Tracing a Galactic--an unequipped Galactic--is not difficult. The wave
length, of course."
"Yes, but they had no idea he was coming to this place."
"They certainly did. They expected him at the center of
operations--which this town must obviously be--sooner or later. When
their men did not return from the desert, or the town, they must have
grown apprehensive."
"Well, anyway, we don't need this poor fellow anymore. Why don't we let
him go, and mop up ourselves."
Kunklin grinned righteously.
"I'm a great believer in letting these people help themselves," he
said. "It seems more sporting that way. He's doing fine so far. I think
we ought to leave him in just to see how far he can go. Really, he does
deserve to be in at the end."
"I suppose. But you know, we almost didn't finish that last recording
in time."
It was a sobering thought.
"We'll have to follow him more closely," Kunklin said, beginning the
work of assembly. "But after all, we're very near the end. I expect we
will be going home--"
He broke off in mid-sentence as a tall, unusually symmetrical young
woman walked leggily around the corner of the hall. Kunklin was
invisible behind the warp shield, but although she could not see him he
could clearly see her, and his eyebrows rose happily.
"Um," he began, "it begins to come home to me now why this planet is so
well-visited. First this Earthman's father, then the Faktors--"
Prule cut him off. Kunklin was a first rate repairman, but he was
also a first rate lecher, a trait he had carried to several harrowing
extremes on other humanoid worlds, to Prule's almost Quakerian sorrow.
Prule soberly pressed him back to work, to the messy job of assembling
Web Hilton from the molecular recording.
And when Kunklin's head was down and busy, Prule's eyes quickly
followed the pneumatic young lady as she walked down the carpeted hall.
* * * * *
And now Web was walking down a street in the black night, walking
slowly, without purpose or direction or intelligence. He was aware of
walking for quite some while, numbly, vacantly, as if he was rising
from a long dark tunnel, before he reached the end and came suddenly
alive.
He stopped in the center of the sidewalk.
It had happened again.
Bewildered, he looked around him. There was nothing about the street,
about the long low rows of squat black houses, which was familiar. He
had no reason of his own to come here; he was not even sure he was
still in Chicago.
He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyes. A feeling of
great emptiness, of being utterly alone in an impossible world, swept
through him. This time his memory went as far as the call to Dundon, no
farther. He had begun to walk from the room, and it was as if he had
walked off a cliff into nothing, into a cloud, and he had emerged from
the other side still walking, only now he was walking on an unknown
street. What happened in between was not in his mind. After a moment he
did not try to remember, because there was not even an association. In
that area his mind was totally empty.
He gathered himself quickly. There was a great drive inside him
which all the years up to now had not really touched, but now he was
beginning to feel himself move. He was confused. He was alone. But
he was also becoming deeply angry. He was going to find out what had
happened, was happening, and he would do it if it meant searching to
the end of his life.
He walked quickly to the nearest corner.
The street he was on was Wingate Street.
Which was, he recalled instantly, the address of Albert Bosco.
So he had been directed here. The blank in his mind was not amnesia.
Someone had guided his movements to Wingate Street, had picked him up
out of the hotel like you pick up a toy train that has gone off the
track.
His anger rose.