"Yes," she whispered. "And I was going to marry you and live honestly
with you--"
"Heck of a marriage with the wife in the Medical Center for Mekstrom's
Disease and our first child--"
"Steve, you poor fool, don't you understand? If our child came as
predicted, the first thing I'd do would be to have the child inoculate
the father? Then we'd be--"
"Um," I grunted. "I hadn't thought of that." This was a flat lie. I'd
considered it a-plenty since my jailing here. Present the Medical Center
with a child, a Mekstrom, and a Carrier, and good old pappy would be no
longer needed.
"Well, after I found out all about you, Steve, that's what I had in
mind. But now--"
"Now what?" I urged her gently. I had a hunch that she was leading up to
something, but ducking shy about it until she managed to find out how I
thought. It would have been all zero if we'd been in a clear area, but
as it was I led her gently on.
"But now I've failed," she said with a slight wail.
"What do they do with failures?" I asked harshly. "Siberia? Or a gunny
sack weighted down with an anvil? Or do they drum you out of the corps?"
"I don't know."
I eyed her closely. I was forced to admit that no matter how Catherine
thought, she was a mighty attractive dish from the physical standpoint.
And regardless of the trouble she'd put me through, I could not overlook
the fact that I had been deep enough in love to plan elopement and
marriage. I'd held her slender body close, and either her response had
been honestly warm or Catherine was an actress of very rare physical
ability. Scholar Phelps could hardly have picked a warmer temptress in
the first place; putting her onto me now was a stroke of near-genius.
I got up from the edge of my bunk and faced her through my bars. She
came close, too, and we looked into each other's faces over a cross-rail
of the heavy fence.
I managed a wistful grin at her. "You're not really a failure yet, are
you, kid?"
"I don't quite know how to--to--" she replied.
I looked around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my
idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone
decides that I'm too expensive to keep."
"I know," she breathed.
Taking the bit in my teeth, I said, "Catherine even though--well, heck.
I'd like to help you."
"You mean that?" she asked in almost an eager voice.
"It's not impossible to forget that we were eloping when all this
started."
"It all seems so long ago," she said with a thick voice. "And I wish we
were back there--no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom's Disease had never
happened--I wish--"
"Stop wishing and think," I told her half-humorously. "If there were no
Mekstrom's Disease, the chances are that we'd never have met in the
first place."
"That's the cruel part of it all," she cried. And I mean _cried_.
I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. "So here we are," I said
unhappily. "I can't help you now, Catherine."
She put her hands through the bars and held my face between them. She
looked searching into my eyes, as if straining to force her blocked
telepath sense through the deadness of the area. She leaned against the
steel but the barrier was very effective; our lips met through the cold
metal. It was a very unsatisfactory kiss because we had to purse our
lips like a pair of piccolo players to make them meet. It was like
making love through a keyhole.
This unsatisfactory lovemaking did not last long. Unsteadily, Catherine
said, "I want you, Steve."
Inwardly I grinned, and then with the same feeling as if I'd laughed out
loud at a funeral, I said, "Through these steel bars?"
She brought out a little cylindrical key. Then went to a brass wall
plate beside the outer door, inserted the key, and turned. The sliding
door to my cell opened on noiseless machined slides.
Then with a careful look at me, Catherine slipped a little shutter over
the glass bull's eye in the door. Her hand reached up to a hidden toggle
above the door and as she snapped it, a thick cover surged out above the
speaker, television lens, and microphone grille, curved down and shut
off the tell-tales with a cushioned sound. Apparently the top management
of the joint used these cells for other things than mere containment of
unruly prisoners. I almost grinned; the society that Scholar Phelps
proposed was not the kind that flourished in an atmosphere of trust, or
privacy--except for the top brass.
Catherine turned from her switch plate and came across the floor with
her face lifted and her lips parted.
"Hold me, Steve."
My hand came forward in a short jab that caught her dead center in the
plexus below the ribs. Her breath caught in one strangled gasp and her
eyes went glassy. She swayed stiffly in half-paralysis. My other hand
came up, closing as it rose, until it became a fist that connected in a
shoulder-jarring wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and
her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly.
From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully
through a flaccid wet tube.
I jumped outside of the cell barrier because I was certain that they had
some means of closing the cell from a master control center. I don't
know much about penology, but that's the way I'd do it. I was
half-surprised that I'd been able to get away with this much.
Catherine stirred and moaned, and I stopped long enough to take the key
out of the wall plate. The cell door closed on its silent slides.
I had hardly been able to more than run the zipper up my shirt when the
door opened and I had to dance like a fool to get behind it. The door
admitted a flood of bright light from the corridor, and Dr. James
Thorndyke. The cell door must have been bugged.
Thorndyke came in behind a large automatic clutched in one nervous fist.
He strained his eyes at the gloom that was not cut by the ribbon of
light.
And then I cut him down with a solid slice of my right hand to the base
of his neck. I remembered to jump off the ground as the blow went home;
there was a sickening crunch of bone and muscle as Thorndyke caved
forward to the floor. He dropped the gun, luckily, as his body began to
twitch and kick spasmodically as the life drained out of him.
I re-swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile as I reached down to pick up
his gun. Then the room got hot and unbearably small and I felt a frantic
urge to leave, to close the door upon that sight.