Four
Less than thirty feet separated him from the para-guard. He covered two-thirds of the distance without haste, moving stealthily, his muscles tensing in preparation for a leap. Ten feet from the guard he abandoned all caution, not caring if the man heard him and turned. He preferred to grapple with a slightly alerted opponent. It was the surest way of measuring an antagonist, of estimating the quickness of his reflexes with hair-trigger accuracy. It was also the surest way of getting just the right grip on him from the start.
A twig snapped beneath Teleman’s no longer cautious tread and the para-guard swung about with a hoarse cry. He was still turning when Teleman flung himself upon him. Teleman’s left arm whipped around the guard’s waist and tightened. He drew back his right arm and sent his fist crashing against a meaty jaw. He swung the man around and went staggering with him across the forest aisle, hitting him again and again with all his strength, jabbing at his stomach, his nose, landing solid blows on both sides of his face. He had the advantage of surprise and refused to relinquish it, putting a savage fury into each blow, giving the other no chance to regain his breath.
But it was far from a one-sided struggle. The guard was armed and that knowledge alone can speed the recovery of a man caught off guard and forced on the defensive. He also outweighed Teleman by thirty pounds, had a longer reach, and a thick-muscled strength which no city-bred man could hope to equal.
He got in a jarring right hand blow to Teleman’s jaw before he broke free, loosening the lighter man’s grip by kneeing him in the stomach and shattering it completely by twisting his torso sideways with a violent lurch. Teleman went staggering backwards, blood bubbling from his mouth and running down his chin. He wiped the blood away with the back of his hand, shook his head to clear it and kept his distance for an instant, his eyes on the para-guard’s right hand.
The guard’s bony-knuckled hand was darting toward the weapon at his hip when Teleman moved in close again. He lashed out with both fists, directing one blow at the guard’s battered, bleeding nose and splaying his fingers to spread the blood over the man’s rage-inflamed eyes. The other blow caught the guard on the wrist and was aimed with such accuracy that the weapon remained where it was.
He gave the thick-muscled brute no time to absorb punishment and go on the offensive again. He lashed him twice across the face with the edge of his hand, stamped on his foot and, because more than his own life was at stake, abandoned all scruples, and kneed him in the groin with such vigor that he groaned, bent almost double and went reeling backwards.
Teleman darted after him, whipped the hand-gun from its sheath on his hip, reversed it, and brought the weapon down sharply on a very thick skull. The guard slumped to his knees, shivered once convulsively and fell forward on his face. He lay still.
Teleman stood staring down at him for an instant, breathing harshly, black nausea clawing at his stomach. Then the wave of giddiness passed and he bent, unbuttoned the slumped man’s uniform at the throat and slipped his hand down over the cold flesh directly over a heart that still appeared to be beating steadily, with no break in its rhythm.
Teleman waited for a moment to make sure, swayed a little, straightened, shook his head for the second time, and walked unsteadily back to the log.
Alicia arose from the log, ran to him and locked her hands behind his neck. She drew his head down and kissed him so passionately on the mouth that it increased his unsteadiness and almost stopped his breathing.
He was still clasping the hand-gun which he had taken from the guard and he tapped her gently on the shoulder with it, and ran the long steel muzzle gently up and down her spine, hoping that the firm, bizarre caressment and the cold feel of it would calm her and enable them both to recover a little from shock and strain and torment, and decide what they still must do to save themselves.
“If I’d been armed I could have taken him completely by surprise and knocked him unconscious without a struggle,” he whispered. “I’ve managed to knock him unconscious, all right, with his own weapon. But I had to be as brutal as he was. It went against the grain somehow.”
“But you had no choice,” she breathed in vehement protest. “Darling, you had no choice at all. It was your life or his. And he’s not dead, is he?”
Teleman shook his head. “I’m pretty sure he’ll recover. But I couldn’t just give him a light, friendly little tap on the skull. I had to make sure he wouldn’t just blink his eyes and come at me again.”
“You made sure. You did very well, darling. I’m proud of you.”
Teleman sighed. “You’ve no reason to be,” he said. “There must be a better way of solving human problems than going at it tooth and claw like beasts of the jungle. You’d have a right to feel proud of a man who could think out a way. I’m afraid it’s beyond me.”
“But we have to resist tyranny,” she said. “We have to fight with every weapon we can seize hold of—with our naked fists when there’s no other weapon. That’s simple common sense, human nature being what it is.”
“I’ve heard that argument before,” Teleman said. “I’m not sure that it completely convinces me. But I haven’t got what it takes to think out a better answer. Someday a man will be born who will have such a great, calm, wise mind that it won’t even seem like a problem to him. He’ll know the answer, and other answers as well, to other life-destroying and beauty-destroying and peace-destroying problems. Answers must be found or Man will go down into everlasting night and darkness.”
“The man you speak of. He’d have to be... a very great scientific specialist.”
“He will not turn his back on science. You can be sure of that. Without science there can be no truly great and enlarged world view, no perfect society, no Utopia worth building. But he will be more than a scientist and more than a specialist. He will know how to create a completely new kind of human being.”
“And love? Will he leave that out?”
“No, I am sure that he will not. It will be the cornerstone and the arch, and the gateway to all splendor. He will remove all the blindfolds, free all the captives who are imprisoned now by a cruel, needless hatred of beauty.”
Teleman turned and stared at the slumped and unstirring para-guard, his lips tightening in grim apprehension. “We’re cutting down our chances by standing here talking,” he said. “I’ve never talked to a woman before with such a complete baring of my inmost thoughts. It made me forget for a moment where we are, and what has happened, and how great the danger is. We may not be alive a week from now to talk again in this way, with complete trust and understanding. It’s a strange, new, intoxicating kind of fulfillment. If we were not in love and you were not so very beautiful—”
She nodded, her eyes shining. “I know,” she said. “I forgot the danger too. We’d better bind him before we go on. I could tear a strip of cloth from my dress.”
He shook his head, bent and quickly unlaced one of his medium-length civilian boots. “There are no laces on his boots,” he said. “They’re the kind you pull right on. But this will do to bind his wrists together. I’ll cut the other lace in half and make it do double duty—half a lace for each of my boots. Seven or eight threaded eyelets will keep a boot on securely enough.”
Despite the grimness of their mood, a faint smile flickered across Alicia’s lips. “All right. But don’t blame me if your boots fall off. A girl can only offer. I could as easily—”
“You’d be just as beautiful if you were in tatters,” Teleman said, grateful for the way the banter in her voice had relieved his tension, and matching it with a levity that wasn’t entirely forced. “Just as beautiful, give or take a few inches of added glamour. But I like you the way you are.”
“You’d see more of me!”
“If you’d said that when I first met you and there was a para-guard to bind I’d have begged you to go ahead and rip your dress to shreds. I’d tell you I needed eight or ten strips of cloth at least.”
“You mean you’re becoming jaded, lover?”
“Not exactly. But you can’t improve on a snow-white lily in all of its natural glory. Not when you’ve once seen the lily.”
“That just goes to show how blind you still are in some respects. If a woman’s attire is unusual and exciting, it’s more exciting when she takes the dress off. Of course some women wear black to conceal all of their charms because that’s exciting too in a different way. I read that in one of the old books. But it must be true, because all of our experience confirms it.”
Teleman reached out and took firm hold of her hand again. “We’ve got to keep moving,” he warned. “They’ll be dropping another para-guard any moment now.”
“I know,” she breathed. “They’ll surround the forest. We’ll be completely at their mercy, with all escape cut off.”
“This stretch of woodland extends for miles,” Teleman said, his fingers tightening on her hand. “If we can find an isolated dwelling we’ll have at least a fighting chance. There are certain ways of making scanner readings come out wrong. There are neutralizing techniques. With all of the household equipment of a dwelling to work with I may be able to confuse them completely. They’ll have to search every square foot of the forest to get to us, and an exhaustive search takes time. With fifteen or twenty hours of grace, I may be able to work out some plan of escape that will get us to a crowded center undetected. We’ll see!”
“But even if we lose ourselves in a crowded center they’ll find us in the end,” Alicia protested. “I want desperately to believe we’ll have at least a fighting chance. But I’m too much of a realist—”
“Just don’t think about it, darling,” Teleman whispered. “Not right now. Trust me and believe in miracles. Just enough, anyway, to stay right where you are while I bind our friend.”
The forest grew increasingly dense as they continued on, the foliage-filtered sunlight suffusing the darker recesses with an eerie, emerald glow. The droning of the flying machine had diminished and they heard it only as a faint, far-off echo.
They moved swiftly but cautiously, picking their way between tumbled masses of fallen foliage, huge, brightly-colored mushroom growths, and boulders overgrown with moss. They were five or six miles from the bound para-guard when they emerged quite suddenly into an acre-wide clearing and saw a small, stone-walled dwelling glimmering in bright sunlight.