Catherine took one unsteady step towards me and then came forward with a
rush. She hurled herself into my arms, pressed herself against me, held
me tight.
It was like being attacked by a bulldozer.
Phillip stayed my back against her headlong rush or I would have been
thrown back out through the door, across the verandah, and into the
middle of the yard. The strength of her crushed my chest and wrenched my
spine. Her lips crushed mine. I began to black out from the physical
hunger of a woman who did not know the extent of her new-found body. All
that Catherine remembered was that once she held me to the end of her
strength and yearned for more. To hold me that way now meant--death.
Her body was the same slenderness, but the warm softness was gone. It
was a flesh-warm waist of flexible steel. I was being held by a statue
of bronze, animated by some monster servo-mechanism. This was no woman.
Phillip and Marian pried her away from me before she broke my back.
Phillip led her away, whispering softly in her ear. Marian carried me to
the divan and let me down on my face gently. Her hands were gentle as
she pressed the air back into my lungs and soothed away the awful wrench
in my spine. Gradually I came alive again, but there was pain left that
made me gasp at every breath.
Then the physical hurt went away, leaving only the mental pain; the
horror of knowing that the girl that I loved could never hold me in her
arms. I shuddered. All that I wanted out of this life was marriage with
Catherine, and now that I had found her again, I had to face the fact
that the first embrace would kill me.
I cursed my fate just as any invalid has cursed the malady that makes
him a responsibility and a burden to his partner instead of a joy and
helpmeet. Like the helpless, I didn't want it; I hadn't asked for it;
nor had I earned it. Yet all I could do was to rail against the
unfairness of the unwarranted punishment.
Without knowing that I was asking, I cried out, "But why?" in a
plaintive voice.
In a gentle tone, Marian replied: "Steve, you cannot blame yourself.
Catherine was lost to you before you met her at her apartment that
evening. What she thought to be a callous on her small toe was really
the initial infection of Mekstrom's Disease. We're all psi-sensitive to
Mekstrom's Disease, Steve. So when you cracked up and Dad and Phil went
on the dead run to help, they caught a perception of it. Naturally we
had to help her."