Thirteen
The gaunt woman was staring into the scanner-glass, and gripping the metal frame so tightly that her knuckles had a mottled look.
“At last!” she breathed, leaning sharply forward. “Those machines have never proved their worth until now. What a fool I was to oppose the project on the grounds of economy. Only two machines when we could have had twenty. But never mind, the two are doing very well.”
“Are they?” said a quiet voice at her side. “I would not be too sure. The man is clever as well as courageous. And the woman knows how to keep fear at arm’s length, always. You have met your match in that pair.”
The woman swung about, an angry flushing suffusing her face and accentuating the boniness of her cheekbones. The flush was of short duration, for fear and anger seldom walk hand in hand, and pallor is very likely to accompany fear.
The Chief Monitor smiled thinly, his eyes also intent on the glass. “I’m afraid that you have merited a reprimand,” he said. “From what I have heard your conduct this morning was inexcusable. Without first securing permission from the Council you witnessed a surgical experiment which turned out very badly. Your own rash haste may have been responsible for the failure. The surgeons were not yet ready to conduct the final test but you frightened them into complying with your demand. I do not like what happened. I do not like it at all.”
The Chief Monitor was not only soft-spoken. He was so mild-mannered and non-aggressive in aspect that it seemed incredible that he could have risen to a position of authority so great that he could have reversed a century of enlightened human progress with a single spoken word. He had pale brown hair and pale eyes, and he did not look at all like a man accustomed to issuing commands. But then, quite suddenly, the brown eyes would flash with an ice-crystal brilliance and hardness and in such moments his supremacy was not difficult to understand.
His eyes were ice-crystal cold now.
“I have often wondered,” the Chief Monitor said, speaking with a candor that sharply increased the gaunt woman’s fear, “How I would feel if I had experienced the stirring. Would I rebel as courageously as that pair?”
The gaunt woman knew how dangerous it was to share the inmost thoughts of a man so powerful, but she could do nothing to turn the conversation into safer channels and was afraid to oppose him even slightly.
“I see I startle you,” the Chief Monitor went on calmly, the slight smile still on his lips. “But should we not all examine ourselves critically from time to time, and ask ourselves the really great and important questions. We all are what we are, and only a fool is afraid to face the truth about himself.”
The gaunt woman remained silent, her pallor so pronounced now that it resembled the pallor of a corpse.
“The truth will come out,” the Chief Monitor said, and sighed and turned from the glass. At the door he paused to deliver a few parting words of advice.
“Personal animosity in a Monitor is an unforgivable offense,” he said. “Without a full and honest confession it could, in special circumstances, justify the death penalty.”
When the door glided shut the gaunt woman stood for a moment as if turned to stone. Then some of the animation returned to her eyes and she returned to the glass and watched a towering ground-warfare robot joined by a second robot beside an oak tree of massive dimensions. She saw the two machines turn and start walking away from the oak tree, their conical heads turned toward a more distant part of the forest, the revolving disks of their eyes flashing with electro-magnetic, spectroscopic rays.
She watched them move forward through the forest, saw the forest vista changing. The canopy of foliage overhead changed shape and color. Now it became less dense, now more luxuriant. They skirted areas of quagmire, where the forest floor was strewn with wet leaves, carefully seeking firm footage, guided by their spectroscopic vision which could pierce beneath the surface layers of earth with rays of invisible spectrum wave-length.
Suddenly one of the metal giants halted and a flash of blinding light darted from one of the three atomic blast tubes projecting from its globular body-box. The roar of the limited atomic blast was not audible in the scanner-glass, but its violence shook the forest, sending five gigantic trees toppling and tearing a yawning gap in the canopy of foliage overhead, through which the sunlight streamed in wavering banners.
The first robot had gone on ahead, the scanner-glass which projected vertically from its conical head vibrating as it transmitted to the scanner-glass a continuous sequence of images. Suddenly it halted, as the other robot had done, in obedience to a transmitted message from a flying machine hovering directly overhead and waited until its companion came abreast of it again. Then both robots resumed their ponderous and slow advance, carefully testing each foot of ground before they rested their weight upon it.
The gaunt woman drew in her breath sharply. “In a moment now—only a moment more!” she whispered aloud to herself. “They must be very close to them by this time. They have traveled a considerable distance. The moment I have waited for so long is here at last. If I am brought to judgment, even if I am condemned to death, this moment of triumph will be worth all the humiliation, all the harsh injustice I may be forced to endure. I will go to my death with my head held high, knowing that I alone had the strength of will to root out and destroy an evil that the others attacked half-heartedly or found excuses for. These two are the worst offenders, the most brazen in their defiance of the law. If I succeed in destroying them—and I will—I will set an example that the others will have to follow. They will have no choice, for a martyr in a stern and just cause has many followers when the noose is drawn tight.”
The two towering robots had halted again. They were standing very still, their conical heads turning slowly from right to left. Their spectroscopic eyes cast dull circles of radiance on the ground in front of them and their aspect was somehow vaguely disturbing, hard to explain. They seemed bewildered and confused, if human emotions can have any counterpart in a robot of metal and glass and whirring internal gadgetry.
Suddenly one of the metal giants turned and retraced his steps for a few yards, his conical head still turning slowly back and forth, in a manner that would have seemed comical to a less tense onlooker. The gaunt woman’s throat felt constricted and she strained fearfully forward, her eyes glued to the glass.
The second robot joined the first in his backward exploration of ground already traversed. They stood with their heads close together, as if trying to decide what should be done next. But that, of course, was absurd and the gaunt woman was completely aware of how preposterous it was. A machine could not think for itself, a machine could not feel.
Her conviction was well-founded and the two metal monsters had put their heads together quite accidentally while avoiding a near collision. The avoidance of the collision had been directed from the flying machine by remote control and there was actually nothing human in the behavior of the robots at all.
The gaunt woman knew all that, but the knowledge could not prevent a knot of cold horror from contracting about her heart. The two metal monsters were at a standstill. Unmistakably they had reached a dead end and could search no further. They no longer knew where to look, or even what they were looking for.
The scanners which projected from their conical heads ceased suddenly to vibrate, and the instant the vibrations stopped the scanner-glass went dark.
A voice spoke out of the blackness. “I regret to report that the ground-warfare machines can no longer function. Their scanning screens have lost track of the two fugitives. The pickup mechanism has gone dead.”
For an instant the gaunt woman could not swallow, could not even breathe. Her throat felt parched and constricted and there was a horrible tightness in her chest.
Suddenly all the tightness was gone and a scream, terrible, prolonged, welled up in her throat and issued from her lips. It stopped once abruptly and then went on and on, and only ceased when she seized a metal chair and smashed the scanner-glass to fragments, and collapsed in a heap at it base.
The forest was enveloped in weaving shafts of light. The light stabbed downward, moved between the trees, cascaded across brightly gleaming fungus growths and the boles of century-old trees and logs which forest mold and weevil beetles had turned into vegetable skeletons.
The forest was clamorous with voices. Para-guards moved between the trees, searching with flashlights that sent tunnels of radiance boring into the depths of shadowed crevices and deep caves and even between the tangled roots of titan oaks half-torn from their moorings by freakish bolts of lightning.
A hundred feet from the edge of the forest a guard more venturesome than his fellows descended into the depths of such a tangle, the bole of the oak looming enormous above, and found himself in the strangest of gnomelike dwellings, with winding corridors bathed in a pale blue light and his raised voice echoing from every corridor. It was a house of enchantment, a house underground and easy to people with all manner of elfish creatures.
But the two fugitive lovers had not taken refuge there. The beam of the guard’s flashlight shone on emptiness and desolation and no trace of hidden lovers.
There was no way of tracing them, of ferreting them out. Cunning could not do it, or any kind of subterfuge. Voices offering Monitor truce, Monitor pardon, beguiling and deceptive, could not flush the two lovers from cover.
Where were they? No one knew, no one dared to boast that he thought he knew, for para-guards and their more cautious commanders lived in mortal fear of the Monitors, even though they served them dutifully and claimed the rewards which were a security guard’s due: the right to creep at nightfall into the mating center compartment of a sex-privileged woman and take her by force if she resisted his advances.
There were a few para-guards who refused to conform to that pattern of behavior, but their forbearance was not admired by the majority of their fellows.
Through the dark the tracer beams moved, the flashlights flickered, but no one knew what had become of the fugitive lovers. And the penalties could be dire, for the Monitors did not readily forgive failure.
Everywhere the search continued, through every aisle of the forest, in every recess between the rocks, in every hidden nook and cranny.
But not quite everywhere. Deep in the forest gloom a pool of still black water mirrored the moonlight and in the pool two naked lovers clung breast to breast, thigh to thigh, waiting in stillness for the night to pass.
In the darkness of that strangest of nights the man whispered: “I never thought we would spend our bridal night in this way. I never thought we would leave our clothes on the bank, concealed and neatly folded, and shiver the whole night through. But at least we are completely safe, completely secure. The scanner beams are deflected when they pass too close to water and the water itself absorbs some of the rays. If they should find this pool by accident we will know what to do.”
“Why are you telling me all this again, darling, when you have spoken about it before?”
“It helps me to talk. Remember—if we hear footsteps we will move closer to the bank and hide ourselves in the reeds. We will be safe as long as we hold tightly to each other and stay here until the sun rises again.”
“Oh, darling, I love you so much, even when you worry needlessly about me, and seem to feel that if we find ourselves in danger again I will not know what to do. I will know exactly what to do. I will know exactly what to do. Can’t we talk about more important things?”
“Are all women like that, Alicia? I mean, do they get upset and angry when a man is practical and puts first things first and does all that he can to safeguard and protect them? I know so little about women, because I have never before been in love, and all of the women I have met—”
“Never mind the women you have met. All women in love are difficult at times, my darling, and you must try to know exactly what to do. Can’t we talk about more important things?”
“Darling, I do love you. You must believe me.”
“Kiss me then. Kiss me passionately. I have waited so long for this moment, when we would be completely alone together in the night. But it has come at a strange time. I am not even sure that I can respond now as a woman should. The water is so cold.”
“We can climb out on the bank if you wish. It will be taking a risk that I should prefer not to take, for your life is more important to me, more precious, than even that moment of complete fulfillment which seems to lovers not minute-long but eternal. But if that alone will please you....”
“Darling, what a way for a lover to talk! Do you no longer desire me?”
“You know better than that.”
“Then prove it to me, now!”
He was the first to ascend the bank, drawing her up after him. They stood for a moment at arm’s length, hands clinging, each feasting on the sight of the naked body of the other. The moonlight gleamed on Alicia’s white flesh, and shining droplets of water trembled on the tips of her jutting breasts. Bending down, he clamped his lips to hers, his tongue searching. She responded with ardor, and clung to him so fiercely that they both toppled backwards on the soft grass of the bank.
Their love-making was so passionate that their lips remained constantly joined, and all of the tender explorations which accompany love were accomplished with the artful movements of hands that clasped and unclasped and darted with an eagerness that could not be restrained, to the most secret citadels of Aphrodite, and the pleasure gardens of Eros enshrined.
When the pulsing warm moment came when two become one the night seemed to hold its breath and only the woman’s wild cry of ecstasy broke the stillness of the sleeping forest.