"My reasons for choosing you are different from Jokan's reasons. Let me
explain." He tottered toward me weakly on his spindly legs. I towered
over him as he squinted up into my face.
"There are many reasons why I cannot allow your refusal," he said. "One
great reason that ties you with destiny."
I tried to escape then, feeling that he was right. I knew that a series
of unimaginable events were twisting me into cosmic circumstances.
Circumstances too gigantic to even excite amazement or disbelief,
only stunned passivity. I wasn't able to execute an about face or the
lifting of one leg that might possibly have sent me beyond the range of
the little man's potentiality.
I had forgotten the silver sphere which bobbed beside him as a
monstrous toy might. It began to glow and expand into a great bulb
of incandescence, and it caught me immediately and paralyzed me, and
sucked me into realms of cosmology beyond the wildest imaginings of all
the Einsteins. I actually felt the sensation of melting. Of melting and
flowing as an integral part of space-time, for want of a better phrase.
I was an atomic drop of liquid poured into a river without beginning,
end or embankments. Perfection was an empty, archaic word to me. I had
never thought it could be intellectually employed, and I was especially
careful not to apply it to that shifting abstract--woman. I was looking
at it now. A perfect woman. A creation molded from centuries of
perfection; a creation of symmetric loveliness that was literally and
figuratively out of this world.
My last day on Earth was ended. I had opened my eyes. I saw first that
some miracle of science had reconstructed the burned away half of my
right arm. Then I noticed the woman. I was sitting bolt upright in an
instant on the smooth metal table. The little man with his strange
"Buck Rogers" dress was looking quietly at me. And she was looking at
me, too, out of slitted lids that veiled all the women of the ages in
subtly yet violently burning eyes.
She lifted a jeweled hand. Her sensual lips trembled a little before
they parted, and strong white teeth gleamed provocatively between the
red lines.
I started, and gripped hard at the edges of the table. Was this the
way a woman scientist studied coldly and objectively a prospective
laboratory subject? I looked questioningly at the little wizened man
who had kidnaped me from my own world. His blank face showed me
nothing.
Then, when she spoke....
I don't want to take unnecessary time at this point or any other to
explain or describe this woman, Jokan. I doubt if you could visualize
her anyway, even if I occupied this entire narrative describing her,
because she was too strangely lovely. She was perfection, as I've said,
and that's all. Her voice was music, and I involuntarily started toward
her as she spoke.
* * * * *
"Withdraw the brain recorder, Draken," she said softly, not taking
those icy eyes from mine. The little man, Draken, complied. She pointed
to a great three-dimensional chart extending across the laboratory.
It was made up of shifting convolutions and numerical graphs and
complicated combinations of shadings corresponding to brain patterns.
"That is your brain, Ivan," she said. Her voice was cold, completely
frozen, and yet--"We know all about you." I felt a little
disappointment along with the relief. She turned toward Draken.
"You made a great mistake, Draken. Bringing in an Intellectual was a
foolish thing to do."
Draken objected. "But you said you wanted a good physical specimen.
This man is. You defined your requested specimen in no greater detail."
"But you should know that an intellectual can cause difficulties. This
man would be considered a god among the women. Perhaps even among
the men. Mohln is at a point where such an element as this could
precipitate disaster, create perhaps a germ of dissatisfaction with our
great order. Or is that, by chance, what you intend?"