“Me, too.”
Again, she pressed herself against him.
Thurlow felt his blood pounding. He pulled away with an abrupt, defensive motion.
“Sometimes I wish you weren’t so damned Victorian,” she said. “But maybe I wouldn’t love you then.” He brushed a strand of the red hair away from her cheek. How faintly glowing her face looked in the light from the bridle trail lamps behind him. “I think I’d better take you home… to Sarah.”
“I don’t want you to take me home.”
“I don’t want you to go home.”
“But I’d better?”
“You’d better.”
She put her hands against his chest, pushed away.
They got into the car, moving with a sudden swift embarrassment. Thurlow started the engine, concentrated on backing to the turn-around. The headlights picked out lines of crusty brown bark on the trees. Abruptly, the headlights went dark. The engine died with a gasping cough. A breathless, oppressive sensation seized him.
“Andy!” Ruth said. “What’s happening?”
Thurlow forced himself to turn to the left, wondering how he knew where to look. There were four rainbow glows close to the ground, the tubular legs and the green dome just outside the grove. The thing hovered there, silent, menacing.
“They’re back,” he whispered. “Right there.” He pointed.
“Andy… Andy, I’m frightened.” She huddled against him.
“No matter what happens, you don’t hate me,” he said. “You love me. Remember that. You love me. Keep it in your mind.”
“I love you.” Her voice was faint.
A directionless sense of anger began to fill Thurlow. It had no object at first. Just anger. Then he could actually feel it trying to point at Ruth.
“I… want to… hate you,” she whispered.
“You love me,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
“I love you. Oh, Andy, I love you. I don’t want to hate you… I love you.”
Thurlow lifted a fist, shook it at the green dome. “Hate them,” he rasped. “Hate bastards who’d try to manipulate us that way.”
He could feel her shaking and trembling against his shoulder. “I… hate… them,” she said.
“Now, do you believe me?”
“Yes! Yes, I believe you!”
“Could the car have hysterical paralysis?”
“No. Oh, Andy, I couldn’t just turn on hate against you. I couldn’t.” His arm ached where she clutched it. “What are they? My God! What is it?”
“I don’t think they’re human,” Thurlow said.
“What’re we going to do?”
“Anything we can.”
The rainbow circles beneath the dome shifted into the blue, then violet and into the red. The thing began to lift away from the grove. It receded into the darkness. With it went the sense of oppression.
“It’s gone, isn’t it?” Ruth whispered.
“It’s gone.”
“Your lights are on,” she said.
He looked down at the dash lights, out at the twin cones of the headlights stabbing into the grove.
He recalled the shape of the thing then—like a giant spider ready to pounce on them. He shuddered. What were the creatures in that ominous machine?
Like a giant spider.
His mind dredged up a memory out of childhood: Oberon’s palace has walls of spider’s legs.
Were they faerie, the huldu-folk?
Where did the myths originate? he wondered. He could feel his mind questing down old paths and he remembered a verse from those days of innocence.
“See ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland.
Where thou and I this night maun gae.”
“Hadn’t we better go?” Ruth asked.
He started the engine, his hands moving automatically through the kinesthetic pattern.
“It stopped the motor and turned off the lights,” Ruth said. “Why would they do that?”
They! he thought. No doubts now.
He headed the car out of the grove down the hill toward Moreno Drive.
“What’re we going to do?” Ruth asked.
“Can we do anything?”
“If we talk about it, people’ll say we’re crazy. Besides… the two of us… up here…”
We’re neatly boxed, he thought. And he imagined what Whelye would say to a recounting of this night’s experiences. “You were with another man’s wife, you say? Could guilt feelings have brought on this shared delusion?” And if this met with protests and further suggestions, “Faerie folk? My dear Thurlow, do you feel well?”
Ruth leaned against him. “Andy, if they could make us hate, could they make us love?”
He swerved the car over to the shoulder of the road, turned off the motor, set the handbrake, extinguished the lights. “They’re not here right now.”
“How do we know?”
He stared around at the night—blackness, not even starlight under those clouds… no glow of weird object—but beyond the trees bordering the road… what?
Could they make us love?
Damn her for asking such a question!
No! I mustn’t damn her. I must love her… I… must.
“Andy? What’re you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Andy, I still find this whole thing so unreal. Couldn’t there be some other explanation? I mean, your motor stopping… Motors do stop; lights go out. Don’t they?”
“What do you want from me?” he asked. “Do you want me to say yes, I’m nuts, I’m deluded. I’m…”
She put a hand over his mouth. “What I want is for you to make love to me and never stop.”
He started to put an arm around her, but she pushed him away. “No. When that happens, I want to know it’s us making love, not someone forcing us.”
Damn her practicality! he thought. Then: No! I love her… but is it me loving her? Is it my own doing?
“Andy? There is something you can do for me.”
“What?”
“The house on Manchester Avenue… where Nev and I were living—there’re some things I want from there, but I’ve been afraid to go over there alone. Would you take me?”
“Now?”
“It’s early yet. Nev may still be down at the plant. My… father made him assistant manager, you know. Hasn’t anyone told you that’s why he married me? To get the business.”
Thurlow put a hand on her arm. “You want him to know… about us?”
“What’s there to know?”
He returned his hand to the steering wheel. “Okay, darling. As you say.”
Again, he started the motor, pulled the car onto the road. They drove in silence. The tires hissed against wet pavement. Other cars passed, their lights glaring. Thurlow adjusted the polarizing lenses. It was a delicate thing—to give him enough visibility but prevent the pain of sudden light.
Presently, Ruth said: “I don’t want any trouble, a fight. You wait for me in the car. If I need help, I’ll call.”
“You’re sure you don’t want me to go in with you?”
“He won’t try anything if he knows you’re there.”
He shrugged. She was probably right. Certainly, she must know Nev Hudson’s character by now. But Thurlow still felt a nagging sensation of suspended judgment. He suspected the events of the past few days, even the menacing encounter of this night, made some odd kind of sense.
“Why did I marry him?” Ruth asked. “I keep asking myself. God knows. I don’t. It just seemed to come to the point where…” She shrugged. “After tonight, I wonder if any of us knows why we do what we do.”
She looked up at Thurlow. “Why is this happening, darling?”
That’s it, Thurlow thought. There’s the sixty-four dollar question.
It’s not who are these creatures? It’s… what do they want? Why are they interfering in our lives?
&n
bsp; Chapter 8
Fraffin glared at the image projected above his desk. It was Lutt, his Master-of-Craft, a broad-faced Chem, steely skinned, harsh and abrupt in his decisions, lacking subtlety. He combined all the best qualities for one who supervised the mechanical end of this work, but those very qualities interfered with his present assignment. He obviously equated subtlety with caution.
A moment of silence served to acquaint Lutt with the Director’s displeasure. Fraffin felt the contour pressures of his chair, glanced at the silvery web of the pantovive across the salon. Yes, Lutt was like that instrument. He had to be activated correctly.
Fraffin ran a finger along his jaw, said: “I didn’t tell you to spare the immune. You were directed to bring the female here—at once!”
“If I have erred, I abase myself,” Lutt said. “But I acted on the basis of past directives concerning this immune. The way you gave his female to another, the way you…”
“He was an amusing diversion, no more,” Fraffin said. “Kelexel has asked to examine a native and he has mentioned this female specifically by name. She is to be brought here at once, unharmed. That proviso doesn’t apply to any other native who tries to interfere or delay you in the execution of this order. Am I understood?”
“The Director is understood,” Lutt said. There was fear in his voice. Lutt knew the possible consequences of Fraffin’s displeasure: dismissal from a position of unlimited delights and diversions, from a life that never bored. He lived in a Chem paradise from which he could easily be shunted to some tertiary post and with no recourse because they shared the same guilt, he and Fraffin, the same guilt with its certain terrible punishment if they were ever discovered,
“Without delay,” Fraffin said.
“She will be here before this shift is half spent,” Lutt said. “I go to obey.”
Lutt’s image faded, disappeared.
Fraffin leaned back. It was going fairly well… in spite of this delay. Imagine that Lutt trying to separate the lovers by manipulating their emotions! The clod must know the danger of trying that on an immune. Well, the female would be here soon and Kelexel could examine her as he wished. Every tool and device to bend the native’s will would be provided, of course—as a matter of courtesy. Let no one question the hospitality of Fraffin the Director Fraffin chuckled.
Let the stupid investigator try the pleasures of this native. Let him impregnate the female. His flesh would know it when it was done. Accomplished breeding would accelerate his need for rejuvenation and where could he turn? Could he go back to the Primacy and say: “Rejuvenate me; I’ve produced an unlicensed child?” His flesh wouldn’t permit that—no more than would the Primacy with its hidebound absolutes.
Oh, no. Kelexel would know the storyship had its own Rejuvenators, its own surgeon. He’d come begging, his mind telling him: “I can have as many children as I wish and damn the Primacy!” Once he’d been rejuvenated, the storyship would own him.
Again, Fraffin chuckled.
They might even get back to the lovely little war in time to make a complete production out of it.
Chapter 9
Ruth was surprised to find herself enjoying the anger that condensed the room around her. The frustrated emotion that had built up in her out there in the night with Andy had an outlet at last. She watched the nervous twisting of Nev’s pink hands with their baby-skin creases at the knuckles. She knew how his hands betrayed his feelings no matter what the masked rest of him revealed. Eight months of living with the man had given her considerable knowledge. Words came out of her full lips now like slivers of bamboo to be inserted beneath Nev’s manicured soul.
“Scream about your husband’s rights all you want,” she said. “The business is mine now and I don’t want you anywhere near it. Ohhh, I know why you married me. You didn’t fool me for long, Nev. Not for long.”
“Ruth, you…”
“No more! Andy’s out there waiting for me. I’m going to take the few things I want here and I’m leaving.”
Nev’s wide high forehead creased. The shoe-button eyes stared at her with their matched nothingness. On one of her rampages again, that’s all. And enjoying it, damn her! I can tell by the way she shakes her head like a horse… whores… horse… whores—a horsey, high-class whore.
Ruth broke her gaze away from him. Nev frightened her when he stared that way. She studied the room, wondering if there were anything here she wanted now. Nothing. It was a Nev Hudson room with overlapping muted reds and browns, Oriental bric-a-brac, a grand piano in one corner, a closed violin case that opened to reveal three bottles of liquor and a set of glasses. Nev liked that. “Lets get drunk and make beautiful music, honey.” Windows beyond the piano stood uncurtained to the night and garden lights, lawn, barbecue pit, wrought iron furniture standing whitely dripping after the rain.
“California is a community-property state,” Nev said.
“You’d better look into the law again,” she said. “The business is my inheritance.”
“Inheritance?” he asked. “But your father’s not dead yet.”
She stood staring at the night, refusing to let him goad her.
Damn her! he thought. I should’ve done better in a woman but not with a business thrown into the bargain. She’s thinking about that bastard Andy Thurlow. She wants him but she needs my brains running the business. That ugly stick of a boy-man in her bed! She won’t have him; I’ll see to it.
“If you go away with this Dr. Thurlow, I’ll ruin him professionally and I’ll ruin you,” he said.
She turned her head sideways, presenting a Greek profile, the severe line of her red hair tied at the back. A barely perceptible smile touched her lips, was gone. “Jealous, Nev?”
“I’ve warned you.”
“You married me for the business,” she said. “What do you care how I spend my time?” And she turned toward him. Squirm, you little pig of a man! What was I thinking of? What was I ever thinking of to take you instead of Andy. Did something twist my emotions, make me do it? She felt suddenly weak with the hungry hating. Is any choice ever right right right? Andy choosing that Fellowship instead of me, his eyes full of innocence oh hateful! Where did I spend my innocence? Unthinking about animal bodies and power. Did I choose power in Nev? But he let me take it away from him his own power and now I can hate him with it.
“The daughter of a murderer!” he snapped.
She glared at him. Is this what I chose? Why why why? Lonely, that’s why. All alone when Andy left me for that damned Fellowship and there was Nev Nev Nev insistent kind kind like a fox. Drunk I was drunk and feeling hateful. Nev used my hate that’s the only power he had—hate my hate my hate I mustn’t hate then and he’s powerless I won’t even hate him putting his hand on my knee oh so kind so kind and a little higher and there we were in bed married and Andy away in Denver and I was still alone.
“I’m going,” she said. “Andy’s going to drive me over to Sarah’s. If you try to stop me, I’ll call him in and I’m quite sure he can handle you.”
Nev’s narrow, purse-string mouth tightened. His shoe-button eyes betrayed a brief flaring and then the mask was back in place. I’ll ruin them both! The bitch prattling about Andy well I showed dear old honest Andy the boy with the built in system of honor and what would she say if she learned I was the one put on the pressure to get him that Fellowship?
“You know what the town’ll think,” he said. “Like father like daughter. They’ll take my side. You know that.”
She stamped her foot. “You pig!”
Certainly, Ruth, my dear. Get angry and stamp around like a wonderful animal my god would I like to take you to bed right now angry and hurting throwing yourself and twisting and jerking my god you’re splendid when you’re angry. I’m better for you than Andy and you should know it we’re two of a kind we take what we want and damn the honor no honor no honor on her on her on her what an animal when she’s angry but that’s what life’s for to take to take and take and take unti
l we’re filled up on it and she raves about Andy going back to him but Andy doesn’t take from me no siree I’ll get rid of him just as easily as I did before and Ruthy’ll come crawling back to her ever loving Nev who knows her right down to her adorable most angry adorable if I only had the guts to yank you into the bedroom right now… well, I’d get rid of Andy just like I did before.
“We’ll strike a bargain,” he said. “Go along with your lover, but don’t interfere with how I run the business. You said it yourself: what do I care how you spend your time?”
Go ahead, compromise yourselves, he thought. I’ll own you.
She whirled away, strode down the hall, jerked open the bedroom door, snapped on the light.
Nev was right behind her. He stood in the doorway watching as she yanked clothes from drawers and the closet, threw them on the bed.
“Well, what about it?” he asked.
She forced words out of her mouth, knowing they told more than she wanted to reveal. “All right! Keep the business… or whatever. We know what’s precious to you.” She turned to face him, near tears and fighting to hide it “You’re the most hateful creature I’ve ever met! You can’t be human.” She put a hand to her mouth. “I wonder if you are.”
“What’s that supposed to…” He broke off, stared past her toward the French doors onto the patio. “Ruth…” Her name came out in a strangled gasp.
She whirled.
The French doors stood open to reveal three squat figures clothed in green moving into the room. To Ruth, their heads seemed strangely large, the eyes faintly luminous and frightening. They carried short tubes of silvery metal. There was a disdainful sense of power in the purposeful way they fanned out, pointing those metal tubes casually at the bedroom’s occupants.
Ruth found herself wondering with an odd feeling of surprise how they’d opened the French doors without her hearing it.
Behind her, Nev gasped, said: “See here! Who…” His voice trailed off in a frightening hiss, an exhalation as though he were a punctured balloon. A liquid trilling sound poured from the mouth of the creature on Ruth’s right.