Teleman had no way of knowing that the scanners had picked up his
trail again as he stood listening to the whispered conversation of the
dwelling's two occupants.
Despite the absolute darkness and Teleman's stillness the woman became
suddenly aware that she was not alone with the man at her side. Her
startled gasp was unmistakable and the stirring and shifting of
position which followed immediately left no possible room for doubt.
All of the sounds were sounds of agitation and swiftly mounting alarm,
a whispered reply from the man which Teleman could not catch, another
gasp from the woman, a rustling of the bedclothes, a creaking of the
bed as one of the two lovers, probably the man, either sat bolt upright
or propelled himself toward the edge of the bed with a violent lurch.
What prompted the woman to switch on the light at precisely that moment
Teleman had no way of knowing. It was an act of folly, for it placed
them at a disadvantage. The light streamed down from a lamp directly
above the bed, flooding the entire room in an instant and defeating
any hope which the pair might have had of using the darkness as a
shield.
Both the man and the woman were completely unclothed. The woman had
drawn the sheets up to her waist but the way the clinging fabric molded
itself to her hips and thighs with every tremulous movement of her
slender young body would have convinced even a not too observant man
that no night garment, however thin, intervened between the sheets and
the undraped loveliness which she was striving, in her modesty, to hide.
And Teleman was not an unobserving man. Though he hated himself for it
he could not stop staring, for her firm young breasts, suffused with
a tender rosiness, her white and beautiful throat and her even more
beautiful face excited him physically. It was the face of a young girl
just blossoming into womanhood, a face of such unusual loveliness that
his breath caught in his throat and he could only stare in enraptured
silence.
Her long, unbound hair, pale auburn with glints of gold, descended to
the pillow at her back, fell partly over one white shoulder and nestled
in the cleavage between her breasts, each strand a shining glory.
Those magnificent breasts were swollen with love, the tips standing
out dark and proud, and there was a red mark on her lovely throat
that could have been made only by a love bite. Her lips were slightly
parted and though her eyes were wide with fright there was about her
still an aspect of drowsiness, as if she had just awakened from a dream
of love--a sleepy-eyed nymph in a forest glade resting on a bank of
snow-white flowers, half-asleep and yet aware in her inmost being of
love's rapture and more desirable than any completely awakened woman
could ever be.
He stood for a moment entranced, unable to move or speak, and that
strange paralysis of all his faculties except one, the wondrous
miracle of enraptured sight, almost led to his undoing.
The man leapt from the bed with a cry of rage and advanced upon him.
There was no escaping the outraged lover's fury or the first grazing
blow of his fist, which sent Teleman reeling backwards. There was no
escaping the second blow either, delivered just as quickly or the
third, which landed squarely on Teleman's jaw and made him sway dizzily
for an instant.
But the man had been aroused too quickly from drowsiness and love's
languors to bring all of his strength into play, and Teleman was able
to back away and keep his distance until a favorable opportunity
presented itself.
For a brief instant the other lowered his guard and gave Teleman an
opening and Teleman took full advantage of it. He stopped thinking of
his opponent as a man whose anger he could understand, a man he could
have liked and respected if circumstances had been less harsh and
unrelenting and thought of him only as a threat to Alicia's safety.
He saw him as a danger that had to be removed, as an automaton
with flailing fists, soulless, mindless, and no longer a man of
flesh-and-blood with a just grievance who had every right to attack him
with fury.
His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly
moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the
appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling
backwards.
It was a swift, terrible blow, delivered with such force that it tore
the flesh of Teleman's knuckles, and half-paralyzed his arm from wrist
to shoulder, producing a temporary numbness. It caught the other on the
point of the jaw and took him so completely by surprise that his face,
as he collapsed backwards, did not contract in pain, but bore only a
look of stunned bewilderment.
His expression may have changed as he lay sprawled out on the floor at
Teleman's feet. But his face was turned away and as he neither groaned
nor stirred Teleman felt convinced that he had lost consciousness and
swung about to face the woman. He was breathing harshly and there was
a throbbing fullness at his temples and he could not quite shake off a
shock-produced, almost nightmarish feeling of unreality.
The woman had not moved. Her eyes were wider than they had been and
the fear in her eyes was no longer overcast with uncertainty. It had
sharpened into a more intense fear, a fear verging on stark terror. Her
eyes darted from Teleman's distraught face to the slumped form of her
lover and then toward the door, as if she dreaded what the darkness
might hold even more than she feared the man who had come out of the
darkness to put an end to her happiness.
Suddenly she moaned aloud and covered her face with her hands.
The words came then, words which Teleman had not intended to speak.
He did not quite understand why he abandoned all caution, and spoke
as he did, freely and without restraint, keeping nothing back, baring
his inmost thoughts. It may have been her great beauty, which had held
him so entranced for a moment that it had placed him at a disadvantage
and endangered his life. Or it may have been the overwhelming sympathy
which he now felt, seeing her so pitiful and broken and despairing.
"I am a fugitive like yourself," he said. "There is a woman with me,
and we are both in great danger. We are not fugitives for a night, as
you are, for we have never known the freedom of the mating centers,
a freedom which you found incomplete and love-destroying. We are not
sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken
by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe
reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be
death.
"We cannot hope to escape the death penalty. We offended one of the
Monitors, a frustrated old woman who will never forgive us for telling
her the truth about herself. And I fought with a para-guard, disarmed
him and left him bound and helpless in the forest a few miles from this
dwelling.
"We thought this dwelling deserted and took refuge here because we
hoped to find here a few metal utensils or household tools which I
could use to construct some kind of hastily improvised mechanical
device powerful enough to misdirect and mislead the scanners. My
specialty is bridge-building and I have enough technical knowledge to
construct such a device if I can get my hands on a coil of wire and a
few utensils of pliable metal.
"It was a desperate hope at best, the odds against it overwhelming.
Even if I had succeeded the Monitors would have located us in a few
days, possibly in a few hours. But it was the only hope we had until--"
The woman had uncovered her eyes and was staring at him with a little
of the fear gone from her gaze and he paused in relief, hoping that she
would not let her thoughts stray from his words to the limp and still
unconscious man on the floor. He was almost sure that the man had not
been seriously hurt, but if her thoughts returned to him too quickly,
if memory of the struggle came flooding back, nothing that he could say
would convince her that he spoke with complete sincerity. The shock
would be too great. She would give way again to panic and stark terror
and his words would fall on deaf ears.
He went on quickly, keeping his eyes on her face, his words taking on
the eloquence of a deeply moved man who speaks only the truth with no
attempt at evasion.
"We did not think we would find anyone here. We were quite sure that we
would not be taking a great risk, or deliberately walking into danger,
for the place, as you know, looks abandoned. But I came upstairs to
make sure.
"I was standing in darkness at the end of the hallway when I heard you
speaking. I would have gone back downstairs if your words had not given
me so great a shock, for to intrude on your privacy at such a moment
would have been the act of a man lost to all honor. But your words were
strange beyond belief. I had never thought to hear such words from the
lips of the sex-privileged.
"You were also in revolt. You had come here to escape from the tyranny
of the Monitors, to experience again joys that would not be tolerated
in the mating centers. To you love and romance were inseparable
parts of one imperishable experience and without tenderness in love,
without complete freedom of choice, love becomes a mockery. The deep,
undying love of one man and one woman--that was something we too could
understand.
"Her name is Alicia, and I love her more than my own life and I would
give my life gladly to spare her suffering. As I stood in the hallway
listening I thought: 'I cannot let her be taken captive. She will be
condemned to death and I will die a thousand deaths before my own life
is ended. Even if I am executed first, I will die a thousand deaths
just knowing that she will die too, and I will be powerless to save
her.'
"I came to a decision then, a decision that was forced upon me. I would
take you both captive, bind you and make the Monitors believe that you
had fought desperately to resist capture. I would overturn furniture,
leave this room in wild disorder. Then you would not be accused of
complicity and we would have at least a fighting chance of outwitting
the Monitors. We would be safe not for a few hours or a few days, but
long enough to make new plans for evading capture.
"We would take refuge in a mating center. We would put on your garments
and wear your insignia and carry with us the identifying seals that
cannot be counterfeited, for the scanning of seals is so accurate a
process that a forged seal would be instantly detected."
She was looking at him steadily now, her breathing rapid and her lips
slightly parted but all of the dread had vanished from her eyes. Her
expression had softened, and there was a strange mistiness in the depth
of her pupils, as if from some secret reservoir of strength she had
drawn the will to listen and understand.
He thought he saw sympathy begin to grow in her eyes as he went on. "I
did not want to resort to violence. But circumstances sometimes compel
us to do hateful things to protect those we love. The choice was a hard
one and I am not even sure I could have used violence against a man I
would have been proud to call my friend if he had not mistaken me for a
criminal intruder and left me no choice."
"No choice?" she whispered, "Yes, I believe you. But if he is hurt
badly--"
For answer Teleman turned and went to the man on the floor and bent
above him.
Teleman had felled the man with a powerful blow, but it had not been
a blow to his skull and could not have resulted in a concussion. And
he had not hit his head against the floor in falling. But in the back
of Teleman's mind was the fear that the man might still have been hurt
severely. That fear diminished the instant he felt the other's pulse
and found that it was beating strongly and regularly. It diminished
still further when the man stirred and opened his eyes and stared up at
Teleman.
A look of bewilderment came into the man's eyes for an instant. Then
his right eyelid twitched, his jaw muscles tightened and the look
changed to one of slowly dawning recognition.
In a moment the man's eyes were blazing with a fury that Teleman hardly
knew how to contend with, for he could not bring himself to resort to
violence again, but knew that calm reason, or anything he might say,
would be worse than futile. The man had regained his strength and the
full use of his limbs, and was struggling violently to free himself
from the tight grip of Teleman's hands on his shoulders.
The woman had left the bed and crossed the room so silently that
Teleman was not aware that she was at his side until he saw her white
arm crossing his in a gesture of caressment and felt the weight of
her slender young body pressing against his right shoulder. The woman
was running her fingers through the man's hair and gently stroking
his face in an effort to calm and reassure him. She seemed unaware of
her nakedness. Teleman was unable to tear his eyes away from those
magnificent breasts, grazing her husband's chest and nestling in the
hollow of his neck as she bent over him.
"It's all right, darling," she whispered. "It's all right. This man is
not a Monitor or an agent of the Monitors and he bears us no ill-will.
He is not a criminal either, darling. He is not a housebreaker who came
here to rob us or who came--and I know you feared this above all--to
force his love upon me, to take me by brutal violence, to kill you and
make me his woman. That is happening everywhere now, when men who are
brutal and cruel and think only of themselves are turned into beasts by
the strange, new stirring which has come upon so many.
"Darling, darling, you must try to understand. This man feels as we do.
There is a woman with him, and they both feel as we do about love.
They are both as desperately, as badly in love as we are, and they are
fleeing because they have aroused the anger of a Monitor. That anger
that is so implacable, so blind and unmerciful, so full of envy and
malice and fear. Some of the Monitors have experienced the stirring.
But they are all too greedy for power to allow their supremacy to be
swept away, and those who have experienced it shut the glory of it
away in a dark corner of their minds and there it continues to glow
brightly. But they cannot endure the glow and warmth, because it shames
and humiliates them, and makes them more tragically aware of how
wretched they are.
"This man and the woman with him had every right to take refuge here.
They were being pursued through the forest by para-guards as if they
had committed some monstrous crime when all they did was make love as
we have so often done with the tenderest of embraces in the night. They
have walked in beauty and know the full splendor of love's fulfillment.
"They have more to fear than we. They have taken far greater risks,
for they are not love-privileged and if they are caught they will pay
for their rebellion with their lives. Will we have the courage to do
what this man hesitated to ask of us--allow ourselves to be bound and
when the Monitors question us say that we struggled to defend ourselves
but were overpowered by this man's criminal strength? Will we have the
courage to lie to save them, my darling? Will we have the strength? I
do not know. I am myself all too human and when I think of the price
that even we would have to pay--I do not know."
The man had ceased to struggle. He lay very still, a strange quietness
in his gaze and Teleman rose slowly to his feet, aware of the risk he
was taking, but somehow trusting the woman, knowing that, despite the
human frailty that had been revealed in the complete baring of her
thoughts, she was speaking in his defense, earnestly pleading with her
lover to give her strength.
"To allow ourselves to be bound is only a part of what he wants us
to do," she went on quickly. "He wants us to give him and the woman
with him our garments and our insignia, so that they may take refuge
in a mating center and for a short while remain there disguised as a
love-privileged man and woman. It will give them the time they need to
make new plans. The Monitors will not think of searching for them in a
mating center."
The man spoke then, for the first time. "Yes," he said. "Yes ... I
understand."
There was a great weariness in his eyes, as if the suffering of all the
world's outraged and disinherited rested upon his shoulders alone.
"Will we have the courage, darling? Or is it too much they ask? Without
your love to give me courage I would lack the strength of purpose and
even with your love I am not sure. Because, darling, your happiness is
more important to me than--"
The man silenced her with a quick look of tender understanding and a
firm hand on her arm. "You need not tell me," he whispered. "I know. It
is very strange how love such as ours can give us the strength not to
think only of ourselves. And perhaps we will only be doing what nine
lovers out of ten, completely sure of each other, knowing their love to
be undying, would not hesitate to do. No, he does not ask too much of
us. We will escape with a stern censure, nothing more. It is the least
we can do."
He arose to a sitting position on the floor, took firm hold of the
woman's shoulders and drew her to him, kissing her hair and lips and
eyes, his hands caressing her back, her hips and thighs, without
embarrassment. "We will do as he asks," he whispered. "Tell him that
our garments and insignia are in the wall cabinet by the window; our
identification seals as well. There is some heavy cord in the cellar.
Tell him to overturn the furniture to make the Monitors believe that we
put up a furious struggle. And he had better gag us."
A brief, warming smile appeared on her woman's lips. "He thought of all
that. Oh, darling, this is what I wanted you to say, what I secretly
hoped you would say, deep in my heart. But my woman's frailty--"
"I know, I understand. You need not tell me. But tell him that there is
no time to waste. He must be a man of great resourcefulness and courage
or he would not be here at all. It is difficult to confuse the scanners
and they are almost certain to pick up his trail again."
The man got to his feet, his arm encircling the woman's waist and
helping her to rise with him, his lips pressed to the small cluster of
curls just above her right temple.
Teleman stood very still, his eyes shining, too deeply moved to speak
for a moment. He had overheard all of their whispered conversation
and they seemed to sense that he had, for neither said a word in
explanation or apology.
The man simply extended his hand and Teleman clasped it, the
gratefulness in his eyes speaking for him, telling the man and the
woman all that needed to be said and making speech unnecessary.