That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's
building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment.
Win--short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her
_that_--opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had
died away.
The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as
though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display artist
with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a pale
aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it was
drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral of
silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back. Her
nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity, was
graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe nails were
lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of her blue eyes
were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.
Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under
the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.
"How, oh squaw of rainbow brilliance," said Brave, holding up a hand in
grave salute. "I leave this warrior in your keeping, whilst I shuffle
down to the recroom and squander a few bucks on the pinball machines."
"How, oh mountain that walks. Will you have a slug of Scotch first?"
"The noble red man, pampering his internal workin's, drinks only rum
this week. No thanks, Win. The gambling fever's got me. See you."
Alan closed the door behind him and took Win into his arms. He kissed
her, gently at first, then hard, their lips parted, warm on each
other as their bodies warmed, his hands strong and taut on her back;
he smoothed his fingers down the hollow of her spine, ran them up
into her soft hair. She said against his mouth, "You demolish that
toilsomely-wrought thatch, boy, and I'll demolish you." He laughed and
pushed her away and lit a cigarette, stray flecks of mauve from her
hair glittering on his fingers.
She went to the low cocktail table and picked up an already filled
glass. He took it from her. "Here's atomic dust in yer eye,
Winniefred," he toasted, and drank long and thirstily.
"Whoa, Nellie. Haven't you drunk anything today?"
"Only the dregs of woe," he said lightly, and then his lean face
changed and his eyes looked into a remote place which they did not
like. At once she touched his arm.
"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched
tailor-fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?"
"I wish I knew."
"Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you
ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache around
the place as you after you've missed your lunch."
"No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding
right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in
the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now."
* * * * *
Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's
accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes, Brave's
indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's discovery
of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up ending the
almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he should have
been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he listened to his own
words a dreadful idea was born and grew and expanded throughout his
intellect until suddenly he knew that here was his answer, that no
other could be rationally accepted. He sat silently for minutes, while
Win watched him, and gradually the color swept out of his face and he
began to shiver.
She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink,
and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave him
another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald stud of
the drawer.
"What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection between
these events. What is it?"
He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I know. I
know what we have to fight."
"Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from--"
"My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare
like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the
other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a score
of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire. It's
no secret, everyone has it. Right?"
"Sure, darling. Even I want to see--well, Mars, anyway."
"But here are these disks, too good, too damned good by far, possibly
capable of doing just that; and the government and most of us have
thought they were only for earth travel. Why? Who would want to build
ships for interplanetary, or even for all I know interstellar-space
flight, and keep it hidden from the rest of mankind?"
"Russia?" she suggested humbly.
"Oh, nuts. You might as well say Switzerland. No, it's here at home, on
Project Star, and it's a handful or more than a handful of our own top
men.
"Now the other angle: there are men here who apparently can't be hurt
by ordinary means, who don't feel pain, who can resist the force of
such a weapon as a thousand-pound cutlass-edged juggernaut, and who
only stare quietly when their hands are melted off like butter in a
flame."
"Yes?"
"Put the two together, Win. Remember that after I'd seen one evidence
of this lack of pain, I was ambushed. Someone thought I ought to die
before I spread the word around. Who?"
"Well, who?"
He drank again and lit a cigarette. The lighter shook in his hand.
"There's only one answer I can see," he said. "Correct me if I'm crazy,
baby. There are mutants among us. We've been anticipating them in
fiction for decades. Now they're here, and they want to reach the stars
before we do, they want to pass unnoticed until they're ready to--to
take over, or whatever their purpose is."
"Mutants, Alan?"
"The natural progression from Homo Sapiens. Homo superior. The
supermen."
* * * * *
She slid a pointer across its bar two notches and pressed the emerald
button and the table delivered a dry Martini, which she sipped as she
regarded him steadily. At last she said, "Is that the sole possibility,
sweetheart? Isn't it a pretty wild explanation to accept on the
evidence of a couple of queer accidents?"
"I don't think so," he said gruffly. "No, blast it, I don't think it's
too wild. It's perfectly possible, and it fits the facts."
"Your Homo superior must be about as fallible as poor old sapiens then,
because he's let his secrets out with a vengeance. I'd think that
anyone smarter than we are would at least simulate pain after his hand
was burnt off."
"That was a slip-up, yes. But he didn't know anyone was watching."
"Homo superior must have a low opinion of our intelligence, or he
wouldn't have let those blueprints get into our hands."
"The progression of the disks' manufacture has come to the point where
he couldn't help it, I suppose. And maybe by now it doesn't matter.
Don's had those fuel tank charts for three months, because it was
necessary that he work on aspects of construction so close to the tanks
that it was impossible to falsify them. But he only saw the instrument
panel plans this morning. As I said, maybe it doesn't matter now. If
the disks are near enough ready to be taking test flights, maybe the
mutants are going to step out in the open."
"Then why would they shoot at you?"
"Hell, I don't know. Perhaps they'll publish the purpose of the disks
without mentioning their own roles, as secret designers and builders
and as creatures that can't be hurt. They could say 'security reasons'
and get away with a lot."
"It's an explanation, all right," said Win. "I don't swallow it, boy,
but it does fit the facts. So do all sorts of other weird theories."
"Such as?"
"Ah, you don't want my ideas. They're as mad as your own." She leaned
over the arm of the couch and touched several glowing spots on its
outer surface; at once the illumination of the room cooled and faded.
The forest green walls, complimentary to her own coloring and to the
clothing she wore, appeared to recede and become the dark depths of
a woodland on a moonless night; the furniture seemed to change into
moss-grown stumps and great misshapen rocks. Overhead, the ceiling
turned dusky blue under the play of hidden tint-beams, and miniature
galaxies twinkled and gleamed across its surface, their varying
incandescence giving the illusion of tridimensional infinity.
Alan set down his glass and looked over at her. She was a shape of
nocturnal secrecy, sinuous darkness against which her nails and
eye-lashes burned with phosphorescent sapphire. Her use of the luminous
lacquer was an artful bit of technique. It made her into a fantastic
mystery which cried out to be solved. Although Alan had seen the
trick before, he could never resist it. It was unbelievable that the
sober girl in a shapeless smock who sweated in the metallurgy lab was
also this Cleopatra, this shadowy temptress; Troy's exquisite Helen,
yearning for love, her strong enchantments designed to make her both
conqueror and conquest.
* * * * *
Forgetting the half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, forgetting
the supermen and everything else but his physical craving, he threw
himself down on the wide couch beside her. His hands touched the live
softness of the halter and slid to her back. The sweet strong muscles
glided under his fingers as she lifted her arms to take his face
between her hands. Then his hands went down from flesh to fabric and he
felt her long body pressing tight against him, close as his own skin.
He opened his eyes and saw the glowing purple of her lashes and in the
thick gloom the dimmed luster of her teeth between the parted lips. He
kissed her and closed his eyes again. He touched her throat, where the
blood throbbed close to the surface in a fast steady rhythm; he found
other pulses and held his fingertips on them until his own caught their
beat and merged with it and the separate throbbings were one.
It was dark, then very dark, the dark of a sunless sea lapping all
about them, and slowly it grew lighter and he was sitting up to run his
fingers through his unmanageable hair and remember that some time ago
he had been holding a cigarette.
"Hey," he said, "what happened to my Rocketeer?"
Win stretched out a lazy arm and brought the lights up once more. "Sure
you didn't put it out?"
"I swear I didn't. My God, here it is," he said, picking it off the
couch where it had been smashed and its tobacco scattered. "What did I
stub that out on?"
"Probably the couch. It doesn't matter, it's resistant."
He looked carefully but could find no place where a cigarette's fire
might have been crushed. He shrugged. "So long as I didn't burn you,
baby."
"You didn't." She had the automatic table mix them two cocktails.
"There's Brave back from the recroom," she said.
"Ears like a fennec," he said admiringly. "I didn't hear anything."
"Watch it, brother. I know what a fennec's ears look like." She went to
open the door for the big Indian. "How'd you do, Brave?"
"Gambled away a dollar and seventy-five cents in a reckless passion.
Are you ready to go home, sheikh?"
"Yes, I am. I have a theory I want to talk about."
"You argue him out of it, Brave," said Win. "He's been working too
hard. He thinks supermen are after him."
Brave looked at Alan and his fine face grew hard and set.
"Supermen ..." he said. "Mutants. Alan, is that it?"
"I think that's it."
"It fits the picture, all right."
"It explains every instance we've observed."
"I believe you're on the right track," nodded Brave. "When did you find
it?"
"While I was telling Win about it. Let's go home and thrash it out,
son. She's a disturbing influence."
Brave eyed Win up and down with a leer that on anyone else would have
been particularly lewd and lascivious. From the faithful Brave it
was merely what he meant it to be--a piece of mild buffoonery. "You
understate the case, my liege. Yon woman has a plump and supple look;
she wriggles too much, such minxes are dangerous. Let's drag tail."
"Okay, boys. Go knock your steel-plated skulls together. But remember
that I think you're barking up an impossible tree at an invisible
possum what ain't thar." She swung the door open for them and stood
aside, one arm upraised with the hand on the jamb.
Alan kissed her a light farewell, and Brave patted her on the head and
said, "Ketch-um sleep, squaw, you look bushed." Then, as Alan turned
away, his glance was caught by a mark on Win's arm. It was a round
blemish, an angry-looking red welt to the edges of which still clung
infinitesimal flakes of gray ash smudged into the skin. He turned away
and walked down the corridor with Brave at his side, and he thought
ferociously of every possibility he could imagine, but his mind always
came back to the same answer.
It was a burn, just such a small wound as would result, say, from a
cigarette being pressed out against the arm by an oblivious lover.
And it should have been shockingly painful.
But Win had not felt it at all....