"Wait till you smell them. Then guess. I'll tell you this much. It's
a smell hundreds and hundreds of years old. They found about it in the
old books."
"Is a lambtchot a Beast?"
"I won't tell you. You've got to wait," she laughed, as she helped him
sit down and spread his tasting dishes before him. He wanted to go
back over the dinner first, sampling all the pretty things he had
eaten, and savoring them this time with his now-living lips and tongue.
When Luci had found the Music Wire and had thrown its sphere up into
the force-field, he reminded her of the new smells. She took out the
long glass records and set the first one into a transmitter.
"Now sniff!"
A queer frightening, exciting smell came over the room. It seemed like
nothing-in this world, nor like anything from the Up-and-Out. Yet it
was familiar. His mouth watered. His pulse beat a little faster; he
scanned his Heart box. (Faster, sure enough.) But that smell, what
was it? In mock perplexity, he grabbed her hands, looked into her
eyes, and growled:
"Tell me, darling! Tell me, Or I'll eat you up!"
"That's just right!"
"What?"
"You're right. It should make you want to eat me. It's meat."
"Meat. Who?"
"Not a person," said she, knowledgeably, "a beast. A beast which
people used to eat. A lamb was a small sheep--you've seen sheep out in
the Wild, haven't you?--and a chop is part of its middle--here!" She
pointed at her chest.
Martel did not hear her. All his boxes had swung over toward _Alarm_,
some to _Danger_. He fought against the roar of his own mind, forcing
his body into excess excitement. How easy it was to be a Scanner when
you really stood outside your own body, haberman-fashion, and looked
back into it with your eyes alone. Then you could manage the body,
rule it coldy even in the enduring agony of Space. But to realize that
you _were_ a body, that this thing was ruling you, that the mind could
kick the flesh and send it roaring off into panic! That was bad.
He tried to remember the days before he had gone into the Haberman
Device, before he had been cut apart for the Up-and-Out. Had he always
been subject to the rush of his emotions from his mind to his body,
from his body back to his mind, confounding him so that he couldn't
Scan? But he hadn't been a Scanner then.
He knew what had hit him. Amid the roar of his own pulse, he knew. In
the nightmare of the Up-and-Out, that smell had forced its way through
to him, while their ship burned off Venus and the habermans fought the
collapsing metal with their bare hands. He had scanned then: all were
in Danger. Chestboxes went up to _Overload_ and dropped to _Dead_ all
around him as he had moved from man to man, shoving the drifting
corpses out of his way as he fought to scan each man in turn, to clamp
vises on unnoticed broken legs, to snap the Sleeping Valve on men whose
instruments showed they were hopelessly near overload. With men trying
to work and cursing him for a Scanner while he, professional zeal
aroused, fought to do his job and keep them alive in the Great Pain of
Space, he had smelled that smell. It had fought its way along his
rebuilt nerves, past the Haberman cuts, past all the safeguards of
physical and mental discipline. In the wildest hour of tragedy, he had
smelled aloud. He remembered it was like a bad cranching, connected
with the fury and nightmare all around him. He had even stopped his
work to scan himself, fearful that the First Effect might come,
breaking past all Haberman cuts and ruining him with the Pain of Space.
But he had come through. His own instruments stayed and stayed at
_Danger_, without nearing _Overload_. He had done his job, and won a
commendation for it. He had even forgotten the burning ship.
All except the smell.
And here the smell was all over again--the smell of meat-with-fire....
Luci looked at him with wifely concern. She obviously thought he had
cranched too much, and was about to haberman back. She tried to be
cheerful: "You'd better rest, honey."