A Woman a Day

  Boldly, he walked up to where Halla sat upon a stump and Dannto stood by, holding her hand.

  “Mrs. Dannto has had a shock,” said Leif. “She shouldn’t continue the hunt. I’m not really interested in this shooting, and since I’m her doctor, I’ll take her back to the Metatron’s. Would you care to come along, Sandalphon? If not, you really won’t be needed.”

  Dannto obviously wanted to be with his wife. The doctor, however, had loudly stated before a dozen high officials that he didn’t have to go with her. That was malice aforethought; Leif knew that the Urielite would consider it a matter of face to continue the hunt. He would be afraid the others might think he’d been too unnerved by the surprise attack.

  So, as Barker had guessed he would, Dannto bellowed that he, personally, wanted to kill every Gemman now hiding in the Canadian woods. The others standing round nodded their heads and slapped him on the shoulder and said by Sigmen they’d be glad to give him first shot.

  Nevertheless, the Archurielite’s mouth formed a pout of disappointment when he saw Leif hand his wife into a Hill runabout.

  He waddled clumsily over at the last moment and kissed her pale cheek and said he’d bring her one or two heads.

  Halla shuddered and didn’t reply.

  “Take good care of her, doctor,” said Dannto as the Hill rose into the air.

  Leif’s reply didn’t seem to erase the lines from Dannto’s forehead.

  ‘‘ Abba, she’ll get taken care of as never before.”

  Chapter 19

  He CONDUCTED HER to the Sandalphon’s suite and dismissed the maid who was cleaning it. Though she was undoubtedly bound to report it to the Uzzites, he did not care. His lamech and his surgeon’s license gave him more freedom than the average Jack.

  Halla closed the door and inserted in the lock a frequency-key.

  “My aunts will QB Dannto that I’m all right,” she said.

  Her every movement and word stroked soft and warm fingers over his skin. Suddenly, his breath caught, and he felt a tightening within his chest. His hands and the back of his neck trembled.

  She turned from the door and walked across the room towards a bureau. Whether consciously or unconsciously, her hips swayed just a trifle more than they normally did. Leif knew, for he’d watched her often enough that day. There was no doubt about it. From the moment she had glanced at him to say she wanted to be alone, the air had become charged. If the sudden feeling grew more intense, he would, he was sure, explode. He was fighting an internal pressure; something was building up in him; it had been there for a long time, latent, waiting to be started by the glance, the movement.

  “Halla!” he said, low and husky, almost unable to speak.

  She stopped, her back turned partly to him, her spine stiffening, the abrupt rigidity raising the full breasts. A small toss of the head sent light rippling down the long red hair.

  “Halla, do I have to say anything?”

  She whirled so fast she almost lost her balance. It was a movement that would at another time have made him grin. Now it was the spark that crackled through him and set him moving in strides towards her, arms outstretched, a thundering in his head, moving forward, knowing with all his body that nothing, nothing at all in this world, nothing could stop them now.

  He was dimly aware that as he pressed her back, back, she cried out, “Leif, Leif, don’t ever let that Dannto touch me! I love you, and only you!”

  Later, like conscience knocking, knuckles tapped the door to the suite. Halla sat upright, eyes wide, mouth a scarlet O, unconsciously pulling the sheet up to her neck. Leif put his finger to his lips and tiptoed to a closet. Reaching it, he turned and made signs for her to answer. Then he pulled out his automatic.

  He could, he reasoned, brazen his way out. It was his right as a lamechian doctor to examine a woman without a gapt being present. On the other hand, it would be better if it weren’t known he’d been locked up so long with her. What he did depended upon the knocker’s identity.

  Halla called, “Who is it?”

  The reply was the muffled voice of a man. Halla repeated her question. Slightly louder, the words were still too low. Halla rose and put on her dressing gown and went through two rooms to the door. Leif followed her and stood behind her. This time they both heard.

  “Halla, this is Jake Candleman. Let me in.”

  The two raised their eyebrows. Leif nodded at her to do so. Then he went back into the closet. Halla, after asking the Uzzite to wait until she was back in bed, turned off some of the lights and crawled under the sheets.

  As he’d purposefully left the closet door half-open, Leif could see between its inner edge and the wall. Candleman came into view, long body bent forwards as if there were a weak spot in its middle, narrow face hard and cragged as a cliff. He strode up to the bed and stopped, looked keenly around, and then, to the consternation of both watchers, sank to his knees by her side. “Halla! Halla!” he crooned. “Forgive me, Halla!”

  She shrank away from his reaching hands.

  “What do you mean? Forgive you for what?”

  “You know what, Halla, dear. Don’t tease, like you used to do. I can’t stand it. I won’t. You know you can’t trifle with me. You know.”

  Her voice trembled as much as his. She said, “Are you crazy? I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  He clutched one of her hands before she could get it away.

  “Don’t tell me that! That’s what you used to say when I asked you where I could meet you again. You made a madman out of me. I couldn’t touch you again, and yet I couldn’t stand not to. I told you I’d kill you, and I almost did. Halla, darling, tell me you forgive me. I’ll never do anything like that again. I almost died myself when they said you’d been killed at once in that wreck. When I found out you were only slightly hurt, I raged and smashed the furniture in my apartment and swore I’d see you were dead for sure the next time.

  “And yet, I was glad because you’d not been killed. I couldn’t stand the thought. No more Halla. No Halla, no Halla, no Halla. My brain repeated over and over again, no Halla, no Halla.”

  The woman looked stupefied. Leif hoped she’d catch on to what was happening. Otherwise, she’d give herself away.

  Candleman tried to pull her to him; she bent away, turning her face sideways.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he cried. “You’re not so pure. You gave yourself to me once, remember? You betrayed your husband, a Sandalphon. I dishonored him and all he stands for. But I thought it worth it. Halla, there never was anybody like you. You and I...”

  Leif could not believe the man’s incoherent babbling. Candleman’s voice, always so dead, rose and plunged; his face, usually hard and expressionless as a closed fist, twisted and writhed like a deaf-mute’s fingers.

  Leif saw now that it had been Candleman who had gotten the original Halla into a taxi, perhaps for one last rendezvous, and then had arranged the ‘accident.’ No wonder the man had been so suspicious about the minor injuries reported by Leif. He must have thought that Halla had reported him. Or else he’d wanted to get into her hospital room to finish her off. The chances were that he’d not been too scared of her talking, for she’d implicate herself. Moreover, he was a lamechian; he could do no wrong.

  His main reason for trying to kill her was revenge. That was evident.

  As Leif listened to Candleman talk and at the same time try to embrace Halla, he saw the pattern. Evidently the dead woman had once felt sorry for him and had given in to him. Or perhaps she’d done it to find out something or to secure a favor she desperately needed. No one would ever know. Whatever the reason, she had refused to have any more to do with him after that one time. And he, finally convinced she loathed him, had tried to kill her. Not tried—he had done it. And the woman he was talking to must realize that and must hate him.

  “Listen to me!” panted the Uzzite. “I told Dannto I was coming back to keep an eye on you, that I was still worried
about assassins. It’ll be hours before he and the other hunters return.”

  “What about Dr. Barker?” said Halla, straining to keep his face from hers.

  “That lecher! He wouldn’t dare bother us. For the sake of Sigmen, Halla, don’t fight me so! I can’t help myself; I must have you. I know you really want me. Otherwise, you’d never have acted the way you did that one time. You’re just bothered by your unreal conduct. Halla, how do we know what is real and what is not?”

  Leif hoped she could handle him, for he didn’t want to be forced to reveal himself. If he hadn’t been in love with her, he would have allowed Candleman to have his way. Halla was a CWC agent. That would only have been in line of duty. But he knew that he couldn’t stand the Uzzite’s pawing her much more.

  “Please, Halla! I’ll never try to kill you again.”

  “You beast,” she said. “You were the one that loosed that Gemman at me.”

  “Forgive me, Halla. It won’t happen again.”

  Suddenly, he stood up and seized her wrists and bent them back and leaned forward and placed his mouth against hers. Leif started to step out, but he paused when the man yelped with pain and jumped back from her. His lower lip was bleeding where she had clamped down upon it.

  “You always did bite, Halla,” he said. “But not too hard next time, please.”

  How blind could you get? wondered Leif. Another thought struck. Candleman had even covered up by using his favorite bugaboo: J.C. He’d had that pseudo-Neanderthal tattooed with those initials to confuse anybody who might possibly read them. Everybody was getting in on the game.

  Halla stood up and said, “If you don’t leave at once, I’ll scream, and I’ll get a gun and shoot you. Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

  Not a bad idea, thought Leif. That would solve many problems.

  He raised his automatic and aimed at the high and narrow forehead, now covered with sweat.

  Before he could pull the trigger, he heard a gentle tapping upon the suite-door.

  Halla called out, “Who is it?”

  Candleman brushed his hair back and wiped his face with a handkerchief and put his cap back on. Then he strode towards the door, bent forward more than ever, as if the hinge in the middle of his body had broken.

  He thrust his frequency-finder key into the lock, pressed the button, and opened the door.

  Ava stepped in, said, “Pardon me, Chief,” and went on.

  The Uzzite did not look back but slammed the door behind him.

  Leif came out from behind the closet door. “What’re you doing back here?” he said to Ava.

  “This!”

  Ava handed him a comic, the latest issue of the Adventures of the Forerunner.

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “In my pocketbook. One of the guides must be CWC. It contains a message on the third page.”

  Leif opened it to the third page and read the words underlined in a balloon above one of the characters.

  “All get under the bridge. Stand your ground if the evil Backrunner sees us. Two of you repair this gun as fast as you can.”

  “All H must be breaking loose,” said Leif. “What happened? Trausti talked? They caught Jim Crew? Zack Roe? Or something unexpected?”

  Discussion was useless. There was nothing they could do about getting back unless they could find a reasonable excuse. At the moment, none was available. So they had to pass the next two days in Canada.

  Ava fretted at the delay and became even more disturbed because Leif was not also anxious. He, on the contrary, hiked through the woods and fished. He wasn’t going to sit around with tensed muscles and tight lips.

  Much as he would have liked to take Halla along with him, he could not do so without exciting dangerous comment. He did find it possible to go fishing with her the second afternoon when he invited her and a couple of other hierarchs’ wives along. While the women were unpacking the picnic luncheon, Leif managed a few words with Halla. His curiosity about certain things he’d discovered during the dissection of the original Halla was still driving him.

  Halla answered his question calmly and entirely unselfconsciously.

  “Then that is why you make such a good agent for the CWC in this particular society?” said Leif.

  “Yes,” she answered. “The repression of normal sex impulses, the deliberate creation of frigidity in men and women, results in psychic castration. Tyrants long ago found out they could control their subjects much more easily if they set up a system, enforced by taboos instilled at an early age, that crushed the development of the human being as a whole. Quenching of wholesome relations between the sexes is an integral part of the Jack system.

  “To put it briefly, psychically impotent people, by which I mean perverted people of any kind, by which I mean those not normal...”

  She halted in confusion and laughed. “Actually, all I know is that the type of repression you find in the Union fulfills the function of keeping men more easily in submissiveness. You can find your parallel in geldings. They make more willing beasts of burden.

  “But if, say, one of these men were to find a woman whose responses did not go by the books he’d read or the lectures he’d heard, a woman who possessed an organ that would automatically release those inhibitions and make him a free man for the first time in his unhappy and confused life, then he’d value that woman and keep her, even if he had to do so secretly and in defiance of the mores. You follow me?”

  “Pretty much so,” he said, glancing around to see if any of the hierarchs’ wives were in earshot. “Frigidity in a man results in what we call a muscular armor, a contraction of the pelvic floor. The armor is a result of the neurosis. The psyche deliberately causes the soma to use muscular rigidity and squeezing to inhibit itself. But, curiously enough, if the muscular armor can be relaxed, then the neurosis quite often lessens or goes away. The man, freed in one part of his development as a complete human being, also gains liberty in other fields. That is, he laughs more, thinks more deeply, is more sincere and yet is at the same time gayer, is even freer of psychosomatic diseases, and so on. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes. Take my husband, Dannto, for instance. He used to be almost as gloomy and hostile as Candleman. Now, though he’s a long way to go as a desirable individual, he’s much jollier and broader-minded than before he met me. He doesn’t realize it, consciously, but he wouldn’t allow me to leave him for any reason.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Leif. “The bio-electrical current from the organ that was put into you stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. This results in the uninhibiting of the muscular armor and the consequent momentary freedom from the anxiety feeling. The floodgates are opened; there is no damming up of emotion and its consequent stagnation into a cesspool. Am I right?” “Yes. And the men are quite grateful. We gain an enormous hold over them—to the profit of the world and the loss of the Haijac Union.”

  Leif had several more questions which he had to have answered.

  “You and your sister were twins,” he said. “But your retina prints and your fingerprints should have been different. Yet they were identical.”

  “The March biologists removed one of my sister’s eyeballs. Using it as a pattern, they grew two duplicates. They replaced my sister’s eyeball, removed mine, and implanted the duplicates in me. To make my fingerprints identical to my sister’s, they stripped the skin from my fingers and grew new skin, again using my sister’s patterns as a blueprint.”

  “And the rudimentary antennae on your head and nerve cables connecting them with your brain?”

  “They’re the result of an unsuccessful experiment,” she said. “My sister and I are—were—the only agents equipped with them. We were supposed to be able to transmit and receive brain waves through the antennae. As a matter of fact, we could. But the waves meant nothing to us. They were just so much static. We needed some biological device to filter out the ‘noise.’ The scientists left the antennae on us while they worked
to perfect a filter. As far as I know, they haven’t found one yet.”

  Leif grinned and said, “So there goes my theory you two were of extra-Terrestrial origin. Too much imagination on my part—and too little knowledge of what my own country was doing in science!”

  Chapter 20

  On THE FOLLOWING evening Dannto, Halla, Leif, Ava and several others got into a Paris-bound coach.

  Candleman was not with them; he had left two hours after the scene in the bedroom. Business was his plea for leaving, but Leif suspected he didn’t want to ride with Halla.

  Their trip was quick and pleasant except for one puzzling event. Leif noticed that Ava had gone into the woman’s room for just a moment. On coming out, Ava was very pale. Leif had no chance to ask what the matter was, but he thought Ava must have received a message from a CWC-agent. That disturbed him. As Ava’s superior, he should have gotten it. However, it might have been that the setup was such that Ava could be reached easier than he. Or Ava might have, not a message, but a stomachache.

  When the coach slid into the Paris field, Dannto reminded the others they were to come at 1900 to his house for a party. The occasion would be a celebration over his wife’s quick recovery following the accident. Dannto seemed to be very happy. He laughed and waved his hands as he told jokes. Halla was not so radiant. She looked at Leif meaningfully, and her eyes told him what kind of celebration Dannto was planning later that night.

  For the first time since he’d been a very young man, Leif was jealous. He felt sick. He also felt like getting up and hitting the Sandalphon in the nose.

  The rest of the trip the red-haired beauty glanced now and then at him. Once he thought he saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

  He was sure of it when she excused herself and went to the women’s room, and stayed there a long time.

  Later, after all had disembarked and gone their ways, Leif said to Ava, “Why so pale, pretty maiden?”