Chapter IV: Part 4

"I do not know. I really do not know. He resisted twice. The first time he was almost at the point of capitulation but he resisted in time. The second time we controlled the android woman by means of the disk embedded in her thigh. We made her almost mindless, a creature given over entirely to sensual delights. We made her a body solely--a body that could twist and writhe--and drive a man to madness."

"And still he resisted."

"Not--not exactly. But his ardor cooled instantly when deep in his unconscious mind something warned him that he was holding an android in his arms. We could not hope to succeed with the Plan if such a warning signal were to be flashed to the men and women in high places we intend to enslave."

"And the woman? I have been told she also resisted when she saw the android man in her bedroom."

"That is true. They both resisted. So far we are at a dead end. So far we have created more than a hundred android women and half that number of android men. But we cannot release them on Earth until we are sure that the Plan will succeed. It would expose us to the deadliest kind of danger. It is bad enough that Earth has the hydrogen bomb and could destroy our ships if we resorted to open warfare. Even the Great Plan itself could fail."

Tragor could have bitten his tongue out when the words had left his lips, for it brought a sudden dangerous tightening to the Coordinator's face.

"And so you think the Plan will fail."

"No, no, I did not say that. I would like--"

"What would you like, Tragor?"

"One more chance. One more chance with both the man and the woman. I want to take them to Mars."

Kraii stared at Tragor for an instant as if unable to believe what he had heard. But he controlled himself with an effort and spoke in a calm tone.

"Why?" he asked.

"We have taken both the man and the woman captive. The woman remained in his room when he went to her apartment, expecting him to return. We captured him first and then we captured her. She is very beautiful, almost as beautiful as the android woman. Perhaps that is why he was able to resist the android woman the first time."

A totally irrelevant thought crept into Tragor's mind. She is very beautiful, with red-gold hair. The woman I took captive this morning has hair of almost the same color. But she loves the man and I am not loved. Would it matter so much if Kraii killed me? Why should I be afraid to die? Why should I care?

"Well, Tragor," the Coordinator said, impatiently. "I am waiting to hear why you want to take them to Mars."

"I have a plan."

"Another plan? It would seem that your brain is cobwebbery with plans, Tragor."

"It is all part of the same Great Plan. We must make the Earthman and the Earthwoman slaves of love, we must break down all of their resistance. I believe I can accomplish that on Mars."

"How, Tragor? This is most interesting."

"When men and women have been subjected to a great and almost unendurable strain, when they expect every moment to be their last, when they have to struggle desperately to stay alive--amorous impulses often overwhelm them. Love becomes to them a refuge and a solace, a temptation impossible to resist. They have a saying for it on Earth. 'Let us drink, love and be merry, for tomorrow we die.'"

"I see. But the temptation would have to be very great, the love offering exceptional."

"Have we not Temples of Love on Mars? What if we should fill those temples with android men and android women? Expose both the Earthman and Earthwoman first to danger: see that they walk in the shadow of death. Frighten and terrify them, make them struggle desperately to survive. Drive them to the brink of despair by confronting them with unknown dangers on a planet alien to them. Then imprison them in a Temple of Love. It would not be a prison to them. It would be a garden of delight after such terrible experiences. They would be sure to succumb. They would yield themselves to all pleasure with no thought for each other."

As Tragor contemplated the images his own mind was conjuring up his eyes began to shine. "Imagine what it would be like. A man and a woman surrounded by a thousand temptations, every bursting fruit that voluptuousness can give birth to! On Earth there is no such paradise. But on Mars...."

For the first time the look of cold condemnation went out of the Chief Coordinator's eyes. He arose slowly, nodding, looking at Tragor with an unmistakable glint of admiration in his gaze. He raised his arm, and Tragor felt a great wave of relief and warm gratefulness flooding over him, for he knew that it was a gesture of benign dismissal and not a sentence of death.

"Very well, Tragor," the Chief Coordinator said. "You have my permission to take them both to Mars."

It was only when Tragor had left the Central Coordinating Compartment and was proceeding down the cold-lighted passageway which branched off from it that everything that he had been saying to Kraii rebounded on himself. He too had just been in great and terrible danger, fighting desperately to stay alive. And now he felt himself in need of love's solace. He had never needed a woman more, never needed the touch of a woman's hand and a woman's warm and eager lips with quite so compulsive an urgency.

If only she would....

Five minutes later he was standing before the locked door of his sleeping compartment, raising his voice in passionate pleading, calling out to the woman within to give him--at least, pity.

"Let me in," he begged. "I promise that I will not touch you if you do not wish to be touched. Just let me stand near you, and look at you. That is all I ask."

There was silence for a moment beyond the locked door. Then he heard her say: "You killed my husband. Even if you were not so repulsive to me I would hate you. Do you hear? I would hate you with my dying breath and if necessary, I shall die. I will find a way. Go away, or I will beat my head against the wall until I can no longer hear your loathsome voice. Go away. I will never let you in and if you try to force your love upon me--"

"No," he pleaded. "I want you to love me willingly."

"That is strange talk for a Martian. I will tell you something. One of the women who was taken captive may soon find herself with child. Did you know that? Didn't those brutish lovers tell you? Lovers! What a mockery, what an insult to the very name of love! If I found myself with child by a Martian I would strangle--oh, no, no. I did not mean to say that. I could never be that cruel, no matter how great my loathing. But if that happened to me, I would make doubly sure to kill myself before such a cruel choice was forced upon me."

It seemed to Tragor that he could endure no more. His triumph of a moment before had the taste of ashes. He had argued persuasively with the most formidable Martian on Earth, and--for that matter--on Mars. He had argued and won. His life had been spared. But now it seemed unimportant to him, of no consequence whatever. Only the woman beyond the locked door was important to him. She was more than important. She had become his whole life. Without her he felt drained and empty--a hollow shell of a male.

He sank to his knees and covered his face with his taloned hands. If only she would pity him and open the door a crack and let him see her!

Just the sight of her would enable him to endure the loneliness and emptiness of space when he took the two captive lovers to Mars on the mother ship. Just the sight of her beautiful white body and her face so torn with grief and torment that he could scarcely bear to meet the accusing fury in her eyes.

SEVEN

On Earth a man named Peter Summers and his wife Ruth--two people out of Earth's teeming millions, but chosen with care because of their exceptional courage and comeliness of form--went about their daily affairs with no memory of what had happened to them on board a Martian ship a short month previously.

Summers was a writer of mystery novels and his wife an artist whose paintings had been widely acclaimed by critics. They were quite ordinary people in some respects, brilliantly exceptional in others. They had both been used as models by Tragor in constructing experimental android men and android women, but those particular androids had been discarded as not quite what the Plan called for. The android who resembled Summers and the lithe-limbed, sultry-eyed robot-woman who was almost an exact duplicate of Summers' wife had not been destroyed, however. They had been kept immobilized in a laboratory on Mars, the disks on their thighs turned off.

Summers and his wife had not been harmed. They had been released at the completion of what had been one of the earliest of the android-constructing experiments, with all knowledge of what had happened to them on board the Martian ship blotted from their minds.

They were no longer of any interest to Tragor. However, the two androids who resembled them had now become of vital interest to Tragor, for the writer, Peter Summers, was a strong-willed, imaginative and sensitive man and greatly resembled the crucial figure in the entire Plan: David Loring. Not physically, but in the subtle and complex configuration of his mind, and that configuration had been duplicated in the robot-man fashioned in Summers' image. And Ruth Summers bore a quite striking resemblance, even physically, to the woman whom Loring loved.

The man and the woman awoke and stared about them. The man was not Peter Summers. The woman was not Ruth, his wife. But the man resembled Peter Summers in all respects. He had the same physical build, the same eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Not only were his facial contours the same, his body was a twin-duplicate of Peter Summers' body. He moved in the same way, with the same gestures and mannerisms, and his voice would not have seemed in any way strange to his wife or to any of the people who knew him well.

The woman looked exactly like his wife. Her face and body would have deceived anyone who knew his wife, knew precisely how she gestured and talked. Even the tiny mole on her right shoulder was the same, and the way her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners when she smiled.

In fact, the resemblance was almost too perfect, for there is something obscurely and indefinably artificial about a duplication that is flawlessly exact, unassailable in all of its parts. The living organism changes constantly, is never quite the same from moment to moment. In a duplication such elusive changes are hard to capture and preserve. Even when the effort has been made and can be looked upon as successful, a faint aura of artificiality remains.

The man's first words were simple and direct. He asked: "Where are we?"

"I do not know," the woman replied.

"How did we get here?"

"I do not know."

The man looked down over himself. He was attired as Peter Summers had been aboard the space ship. There was no recognition or surprise in his eyes. Simply acceptance, as if he'd known he would be attired in precisely that way and would only have been surprised if he had found himself naked or clothed in garments strange to him.

He looked at the woman and saw that she was also attired in garments familiar to him. There was no need for him to recognize the garments in a strict sense, for a knowledge of what they would be like had been deeply grooved into his mind. His garments were as much a part of him as his slightly heightened breathing and the calluses on his palms. And so were the garments of the woman facing him with slightly widened eyes.

"I can remember so little," the man who resembled Summers said. "Everything here is strange. I am quite sure that we have never been in this place before. Do you also feel as if you have never been here before?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, I do. It is very strange."

"It is a very large room."

"Very large. There is something frightening about it. All of those instruments...."

"They are not navigational instruments. I am quite sure of that. We are no longer on board the ship."

"Were we ever?"

"Yes, I am sure we were once. On board a large ship traveling through space."

"I seem to remember now, too. Some of it is coming back. Slowly, almost painfully. I'm afraid to think about it, to even try to remember. We were far more frightened than we are now. Something terrible happened to us."

"We'd better just relax, take it easy and let it come back in a natural way."

The woman shuddered. "Sometimes not knowing is worse than remembering, worse than any positive knowledge can be. When a memory is crouching like some great beast in the darkness of your mind it is safer to remember. Safer to see the hideous shape clearly, to at least try to force it out into the open."

"Not always, Ruth."

"Ruth. Yes, I am Ruth. You are Peter. You are my husband. The instant you spoke my name it came back to me. Oh, darling, I love you so much. I have always loved you."

"I know, Ruth. And I have always loved you. But beyond that everything is obscure, and in some strange way incomplete. It's as though there are many things which I should recall and understand but which have been--left out."

"Left out? What do you mean?"

"It's hard to explain. But there's a kind of gulf, an emptiness, a falling away when I try to remember what happened to us. The memory doesn't seem to be there at all. I can remember the ship, and how frightened we were. We were traveling through space toward a distant star. There were others. How many I do not know or even what they looked like. It may come back. We must wait and see."

"Wait? What good will waiting do, Peter? We can't just stand here trying to remember or refusing to remember. We don't know where we are. We have no idea where we are, or why we were brought here. Were we brought here against our will? Or did we come voluntarily? Shall we wait for something to happen, or try to make it happen? What shall we do, Peter? Beat on the walls with our bare hands? Shout and create a disturbance? Some of these instruments look fragile. Perhaps if we smashed one--"

The man who resembled Summers shook his head. "No, Ruth. That would be too dangerous a way of bringing down the thunder."

The man turned as he spoke, and looked more steadily and carefully at his surroundings. The woman stared with him, standing very still, a growing wonder in her eyes.

The instruments which towered on all sides of them differed greatly in size and configuration. Some were metallic and complex, as intricate in construction as the time-regulating mechanism of a great watch, set on a pedestal and reflecting the downstreaming radiance in all of its parts. Others resembled more translucent globes, resting level with the floor, fragile in design and filled with a swirling blue mist. But that globelike aspect was only partial, for they were pierced by metal rods which projected sharply from their surfaces in hedgehog fashion and obscured or distorted their roundness in various ways.

There were also several flat, boxlike structures with a fine mesh covering and one huge box which was heavily screened in front and bore a chilling resemblance to a cage. The screening was enveloped in radiance, so that the mesh was only evanescently visible through the glow and it was impossible to see beyond it. Yet for an instant there was a deepening of the glow and the man who resembled Summers thought he could detect a faint stir of movement behind the mesh, as if some monstrous shape had been imprisoned within; a shape which was self-luminous and very restless in its pacing.

The enormous room was illuminated by globular overhead lamps which cast stationary shadows on its glass-smooth floor and turned the walls into light-mirroring surfaces which deflected the radiance without diminishing it.

The man who resembled Summers spoke calmly, but there was a slight tremor in his voice. "We will have to wait. We must force ourselves to be patient. It would be easier to let ourselves go, to act impulsively. Inaction is difficult when you feel you're at the mercy of something dangerous which you know nothing about. But we can't afford to take unnecessary risks. We still have one safeguard. Being armed may not protect us, but it's an advantage we can't afford to toss away. We'll be tossing it away if we lose our heads."

It seemed only natural to the man that he should be armed. The weapon he was clasping surprised him no more than his familiar attire had done. Its presence in his hand he took for granted, and its absence would have bewildered him and greatly increased his apprehension. The woman was also clasping a weapon, and taking her possession of it so much for granted that she did not even glance down at it when the man stressed the fact that they were both armed by tapping her lightly on the wrist.

The two small, compact energy weapons glittered in the downstreaming radiance. Outwardly they were exact replicas of nuclear hand-guns, accurate in range and deadly when fired. Nuclear hand-guns were capable of disintegrating any object in their path, living or inanimate, within a radius of thirty-five feet. There was no nuclear fallout, no diffusion of destructive radioactivity, no risk to the user at all.

Seventy years of controlled atomic research on the red planet made such weapons available to everyone privileged to carry them: regional law-enforcement coordinators, authorized destroyers of dangerous animal pests and explorers in space. But the weapons which the man and the woman were clasping had not been atomically powered. They were infinitely less destructive, with barely enough fire-power to kill a man or large animal at close range, or bring down a bird in flight. But the man and the woman did not know that. They had no way of knowing.

The woman was the first to notice the change in the large, cagelike object. The light shifted, and a slow shadow crept across it, elongating as it moved, first parallel with the box and then at right angles to it.

The shadow was sinuous and very dark, and it made a rasping sound on the glass-smooth floor as it advanced in a swift glide. A yard from the cage it ceased to be a shadow.

The woman went rigid. Her hand darted to her throat and all of the color drained out of her face. She stared wordlessly, unable to move or speak, and her stunned helplessness almost led to the man's undoing. He was half turned toward her and did not see the long-fanged, catlike beast until it was within eight feet of him.

He cried out when he saw it and leapt back. It sprang then, straight toward him. Sprang with a terrible, deep-throated roar, its tawny flanks quivering.

The man fired. He had no time to take aim, and there was no need for him to aim with precision. Any blast from any weapon, at almost pointblank range, would have found its mark in so huge a target.

A great gash appeared in the creature's right flank, and turned crimson even before its body swerved and the man fired for the second time, staggering backwards with a sobbing gasp. The wounded beast landed upright directly behind him, and flattened itself. It hugged the floor for an instant as its belly and right flank turned a brighter red, flooding the glass-like surface with a swiftly spreading pool of blood that was startlingly like its own elongated bulk in configuration.

Then it was in motion again, rearing on its hindlimbs with a roar and swaying toward him. He swung about and fired three more shots into its body, holding the hand-gun steady, and taking careful aim now despite the pain-maddened animal's flailing claws and snarling ferocity.

The man did not escape unscathed. The enraged beast raked his shoulders with its claws, tore a deep gash in his flesh from his neck to his waist. The man leapt back and fired again. As the hand-gun blasted the woman began to scream.

The beast staggered, fell back, and began slowly to crumple, his body arching forward as it sagged, its forelimbs giving way first and the rest of its bulk collapsing like a weighted sack, lopsidedly and with tumultuous heavings. The man stood very still, watching it crumple, seemingly unaware of the grievous wound he had sustained. The long gash did not bleed. It remained a long, livid disfiguration running the length of his spine, as if a scalpel dipped in acid had etched a blemish with ragged edges in the precise middle of his back.

The man waited until the beast ceased to move, his gaze intent, strangely calm. Not a muscle of his face moved. His absolute quietude had followed so quickly upon his first startled outcry and his aggressive action in defending himself that it would have baffled a psychologist whose stock in trade was the reasonably predictable within the limits of what is known about the human mind.

If there was a mental conflict within him it was not mirrored on his features and even his posture was amazingly relaxed. He did not hold himself stiffly, as might have been expected, but simply stood waiting in a completely natural attitude--an attitude free of all strain--for the wounded beast to breathe its last.

The instant the catlike creature's tawny flanks ceased to heave and a rust-colored froth appeared at its mouth he turned quickly, moved to the woman's side and took her into his arms. He held her firmly, stilling her trembling with whispered reassurance and running his left hand gently up and down her back.

"It's all right," he murmured. "I've killed it. It won't move again. Easy now, there's nothing to fear."

The woman was shuddering violently and to quiet her he began more firmly to stroke her bare back, running his hands over the velvety smooth skin between her shoulder blades and even more firmly caressing the twin mounds of her breasts.

Suddenly she was clinging to him, her arms locked about him so tightly he had difficulty in remembering his only desire was to comfort and reassure her. Or perhaps he did not want to remember. Passion awoke in him, fierce, irresistible. He lowered his head and brought his mouth down hard on lips that seemed to melt beneath the demanding ardor of his kisses. She seemed suddenly unbelievably young to him, eager and vibrant, as if he had met her for the first time. Yet she was his wife, surely, and they had known many such moments of rapture in the past. Or had they?

He had the strange feeling that he, too, had been born anew, that he was not quite the same man who had plucked the blooming rose of love many times before. He felt almost like a young boy, clasping his virginal first love in a forest glade and watching her face turn crimson....

"We have seen enough," a cold voice said. "My insight was flawless. They were exposed to danger first--a great and terrible danger. And they were stirred to passion as I was sure they would be. They are only androids, but the proof is strong and convincing enough. I am quite sure now that we will succeed as well with David Loring and the woman of his choice."

The android man and woman did not hear the voice. It was too remote and Tragor was not addressing himself to an Earthman. He was speaking to Sull, and they both stood at the door of the laboratory.

And then, quite suddenly, the disks on the androids' thighs glowed with a blinding incandescence and they slumped to the floor and lay motionless.

EIGHT

David Loring only knew at first that the room in which he found himself was enormous. He could see the high walls towering up into shadows, and the great distance which separated wall from wall, shadow from shadow.

He saw the room in fitful flashes, between sleeping and waking. He saw it as a prison and a sanctuary, the ward of a hospital, a waiting room at the hub of some intricate and planet-engirdling web of communication. He saw it even as a quite simple, peaceful place, soothing to the eye, where a man could sleep and dream with a beautiful woman at his side, their bodies completely at ease in the dawn light, relaxed and languorous.

Finally, after what may have been days, or only hours, he saw the room as it really was. He saw it as a prison on an alien world, and the woman who shared it with him as a captive like himself who had to live with the shattering knowledge that what she saw in his eyes he saw in hers. "Janice," he whispered.

She was nodding at him and trying hard to smile and when he saw the tenderness and warmth in her eyes, tears started to gather beneath his burning eyelids and suddenly he was weeping unashamedly.

She got up quickly and came to him and settled herself at his side, pressing her scantily clad body close to him in womanly solicitude, reaching up and touching his face.

She was wearing the strangest of costumes; a band of golden-textured cloth which completely encircled her hips and the lower part of her torso, but left her breasts exposed. There were sandals on her feet, and her red-gold hair had been cut short, and was caught up in an entrancing way by a ribbon. She had never seemed more beautiful in his sight or more feminine and desirable.

"I thought you'd never wake up, darling," she whispered, her lips brushing his throat and passing upwards until their moist warmth came to rest against his mouth and stopped his breath for an instant.

"I've been waiting for you to look at me," she said, when he could breathe again. "To really look at me as you did just now. I was afraid to wake you up too abruptly. You seemed so close to exhaustion, so desperately in need of sleep. Oh, David, hold me close. At least we're together again."

"Everything is so strange," Loring said, his hand going out to stroke her hair. "So confused, mixed up. I remember struggling to free myself from a very horrible kind of net--a net with strands that seemed to move and cling to me, strands that seemed almost to have a life of their own. Then I was imprisoned, shut away in the darkness. I saw nothing, heard nothing, for hours. Then I saw a light moving slowly back and forth in front of me. I tried to rise, tried to get to my feet. But something seemed to lift me up and hurl me further back into the darkness.

"There were times when I could hardly breathe, when I seemed to be suffocating. I know that I slept a great deal. The passage of time--that was the most frightening thing of all. Days must have passed and yet I was only obscurely aware of their passing. But I knew that we were no longer on Earth, that we were traveling through space to another world. I had no way of knowing through observation, because I was in total darkness and felt nothing, heard nothing. The knowledge must have been implanted in my mind."

"It was," Janice said. "I know, because a strange cold voice spoke to me just once, and told me that when I woke up I would see you again, but that neither of us would remember what happened after you left me alone in your apartment waiting for you to return. Do you remember, David, or was the voice telling the truth? Do you remember what happened after that? If you do--"

Loring shook his head. "No," he said. "It's all a complete blank. I remember going out on MacDougal Street and hailing a cab. I even remember getting into the cab and riding to your apartment. But after that it's as if I had blacked out. I can only remember struggling to free myself from that ghastly web and how the blackness closed in on me, almost smothering me."

"And you remembered nothing more until you woke up here? Think hard, David. Are you sure about that? Completely sure?"

"Just what I've told you--nothing more. The feeling that I was in space, traveling through space. No, it was more than a feeling. It was certain knowledge. But it was nothing that I could have found out for myself."

"It frightens me, David. If you could remember even a part of what happened...."

"I don't think they want us to remember," Loring said. "Whatever their purpose was in bringing us here, they don't want us to know too much about them. That's pretty obvious."

"We've been here a long time, David. I spoke to you once, but you didn't answer, didn't seem to hear me. Your eyes were half closed and your face looked strange, as if everything in the room had gone far away from you. Then everything went far away from me too. I fell into a deep sleep and just woke up a few minutes ago."

Loring was staring about the room, a look of mounting apprehension in his eyes. But he heard her when she said: "I wanted to put my arms around you, and draw you close and bring my lips down hard on yours. But I was afraid, as I said, to wake you up too abruptly. The sudden shock...."

"We'll make up for that right now," Loring said. He clasped her firmly and kissed her until they were both out of breath. "I'm not as exhausted as you might think," he said.

He realized suddenly that he was as scantily clad as she was and was amazed that he had not realized it immediately upon awakening. A Greek athlete in the days of Pericles might have worn less clothing while discus-throwing, but he seriously doubted it. He was not a man who liked to strut his maleness and he had no particular liking for exhibitionists. It embarrassed him a little, even in the presence of a woman who had often seen him wearing far less clothing.

"They took away our clothes," she whispered, as if aware of his thoughts. "I don't know how they undressed me and put this ridiculous sash around me but I'll have to make the best of it. I don't really mind too much. Do you?"

"I think it might be a good idea if you removed the sash," he said. "It isn't becoming to you."

"If you wish," she said, and unwound the strange garment.

She stood before him completely unclothed and for an instant his breath caught in his throat. Then she was in his arms again, covering his face with kisses.

After a moment she put the strange garment back on, smiling a little. "If it was just you I wouldn't mind at all," she said. "But we don't know who we'll be meeting."

Her face turned suddenly sober, all of the levity leaving her eyes.

"The window," she whispered. "We'd better--see what's outside. Just the thought of looking terrifies me, but we may as well get it over with."

Loring nodded. "If we had any real sense we'd have looked out immediately," he said. "We'd have let nothing stand in the way."

"David! What kind of talk is that? Think of what you would have missed. A completely undraped female, distinctly on the shameless side."

The taunting levity was back in her eyes again, as if she dreaded the thought of walking to the window even now and wished to put it off as long as possible with a whistling-in-the-dark bravado.

"You're right," Loring said. "Forgive me, darling. I spoke without thinking and I didn't mean it in quite that way. I'm glad we waited. It isn't just what I saw. It's what I--"

"David, please don't make me blush now. Shut up, damn you."

"All right, Gorgeous. I won't say another word."

They walked to the window together. Janice cried out, and Loring drew in his breath sharply. A tiny vein at his temple bulged and began to pulsate.

The city which stretched out for miles beyond the pane transcended in height and depth and grandeur anything Man's creative genius had conceived on Earth, or was perhaps capable of conceiving, even in the realm of imaginative prophecy. Human history supplied no parallels which would have brought such a soaring architectural miracle within the scope of pictorial art at its most prophetic.

William Blake alone might have been capable of portraying it on canvas, if he had been born at a later period in human history and had been familiar with space-age technology and the intricacies of the twentieth century's non-Euclidean mathematics. But even then his vision might have faltered and his palette, lacking the full range of colors, dropped from his hand.

The Martian city was so large it would have completely dwarfed the largest city on Earth. If New York, London and Paris could have been combined in one great wonder city there might have been a few points of superficial resemblance to the metropolis of white buildings beyond the pane. But a few points only, for in a sober and completely realistic sense all comparisons broke down.

It was a city of spiderweb traceries against a sunrise sky, of buildings so enormous that their pinnacles seemed to blend with the clouds. It was a city of floating gardens agleam with vermillion-tongued flowers that seemed to sway and dance in response to some gigantic and invisible baton, so that they resembled myriads of tiny ballet dancers constantly in motion, voluptuously a-twirl, bending first to the left and then to the right and then swooningly backwards.

It was a city of parks and lakes with tree-fringed borders and of column-supported terraces bridged by aerial traffic lanes, where vehicles that resembled gold beetles darted back and forth with a speed so great that the eye could scarcely follow them.

It was a city of clean, strong lines, without elaborate ornamentation to mar a perfection which its builders must have kept constantly before their minds. There was no visible areas of new construction or areas where the buildings seemed to be crumbling. No wrecking instruments at work, or skeleton structures black against the sunrise. Not the slightest sign anywhere of demolition or repair. It was as if the city had been built to endure for centuries, with every stone in place, a monument to the creative genius of a race that had somehow found a means to create a vision of splendor which time or the elements could not mar or efface.

It was a breathtakingly beautiful city and yet, in some strange way, it seemed to be enveloped in an aura of cruelty and wickedness. There was a lewdness about some of its contours--a lewdness that could be physically sensed. It stirred the imagination in a strange way, as a woman utterly abandoned, lost to all shame, may cease to be a capricious wanton, given to light-hearted amours and become so coldly lascivious that she repels the most passionate of men.

And suddenly, as Loring stared, he saw the woman-shape. He saw that the city, its entire circumference, its central mass, was shaped like a recumbent female with great wanton knees and flame-tipped breasts.

Janice saw it too, and retreated from the window with a gasp, her face and throat darkened by a quickly spreading flush.

Loring stared for an instant longer and then turned and drew her to him, holding her tightly for a moment and saying nothing at all.

There were no words that could have eased the shock of what they both had seen, and silence was better, Loring felt. After a moment her breathing steadied and the flush vanished from her cheeks.

"What are we going to do, David?" she asked. "Just stay here and let the builders of that city visit us? Kill us perhaps, or insist that we accompany them on a sight-seeing tour? I don't think we'd like what we'd see."

"I don't think so either," Loring said. "And I don't think we're staying if that window isn't locked and opens outward. Or inward, for that matter. I'm going to find out right now. If necessary, we'll conduct our own sight-seeing tour. If we can get out fast we may be able to hide somewhere before they realize we've had the quickness of mind to outsmart them."

"Not quickness of mind alone, David. Courage enough to act quickly and descend those stairs."

"You saw the stairs?"

Janice nodded. "Yes, I saw them. A flight of stone steps leading downward, starting just below the window and leading straight down. I was going to push on the window, to see if it would move. You do it, David. Hurry. We've no time to lose."

"All right," Loring said. He returned to the window and pressed firmly on the pane. For a moment the pane held and then, as he increased the pressure, it swung slowly outward.

Janice ran to him with an exultant cry.

They emerged from the room cautiously. The steps began just beneath the window but they were not directly joined to the ledge. They had to take a short leap to reach them. What purpose they had been designed to serve Loring did not know and had difficulty in imagining. The topmost step was very broad and flared slightly, and it occurred to him that a very small flying machine--a midget helicopter or an auto-gyro--would have encountered no difficulty in making use of it as a landing platform. Perhaps there were hundreds of such structures scattered throughout the city, directly adjacent to the windows of tall buildings. He had no way of knowing and no time to puzzle over it.

The stone stairway was very steep and contained at least three hundred steps. It led to a flaring, disk-shaped expanse of shining metal several hundred feet in diameter. Directly below the disk the tiny moving vehicles which Loring had observed from the window darted to and fro, obscurely visible through its translucent glimmering.

Loring took Janice's arm and supported her firmly, and they started down with a heightened sense of togetherness. "Remember this," he said, with quiet reassurance. "It's some comfort, at least. There are few situations which are _absolutely_ hopeless. They may look that way, but they're not. Escapes take place when every door to freedom seems bolted down tight. Not only in fiction--in real life. The deadliest diseases often fail to kill. The patient survives and lives for many years. And men condemned to death can always hope for a last-minute reprieve."

"But how often are they reprieved?"

"More often than the average person realizes. There are always possibilities of escape. A failure of intelligence at any point can reverse an advantage. And we've no reason to believe that the minds that planned and built this city, tremendous as it is, are infallible. The slightest flaw in their thinking could give us an advantage which would even the score."

"But this is their world, their home, David. We are aliens here, imprisoned in a web so dark and terrible we can't even begin to understand it. It's like a blind maze with no familiar landmarks, nothing to guide us--"

"It may not be quite as blind a maze as you think," Loring whispered, tightening his hold on her arm. "In another hundred years we'll be building cities on Earth just as tremendous. We use the same basic patterns, and we'll eventually acquire just as much engineering skill."

"It's still a blind maze to me," Janice said. "We may be walking into a trap. Did you think of that, David?"

"I thought of it. But staying in that room would have put us completely at their mercy. Steady now. We'll soon be at the bottom."

"Just looking down makes me dizzy."

"Don't look down then," he cautioned. "Move slowly and stay close to me."

The stairway was enveloped in a faint radiance which grew swiftly brighter as they descended. They were soon caught up in the brightness, the steps beneath them becoming a descending series of polished stone mirrors which reflected the more diffuse and distant brightness of the sunrise. Their shadows flickered across the brightness, sometimes elongating and becoming immense, sometimes contracting into wavering small replicas of themselves.

They moved arm in arm through a kaleidoscope of shimmering curves and angles, a constantly increasing steepness keeping them constantly on guard, making them feel at times that they were descending an upright ladder teetering precariously in some unimaginable abyss of emptiness.

They were almost at the bottom now and could see the shining surface of the disk which they had seen from above without being able to determine its precise configuration. It spread out from the base of the stairs in a translucent glimmering, a surface of smooth, almost glass-like texture that spiraled slightly downwards for perhaps a hundred feet and then became completely horizontal. Where it rose to a level gradient it widened out so that its faintly luminous edges graded off into shadows.

There was a pylon-shaped structure at the far extremity of the sloping section. It could have been either a gateway or a small building, but Loring was almost sure that it was a building.

He did not pause when he reached the bottom. He tightened his hold on Janice's waist and then released her, gesturing out across the brightness.

"Walk fast, but don't run," he cautioned. "They may be watching us. That small tower could be anything: a communication control structure, a guardhouse, even a dwelling. We won't know until we get to it."

He nodded and left the stone stairway, moving out across the glass-like surface of the disk without looking back. Janice kept almost abreast of him, quickening her steps but not quite running.

Loring studied the structure appraisingly as he drew near to it. It was smooth-surfaced and completely featureless, a massive block of metal that rose to a height of about eighty feet.

He halted directly in front of it and waited for Janice to join him before he reached out and ran his hand over a square foot of its smooth metal surface. The metal was yellowish with a burnished copper sheen to it.

"What do you suppose it is?" Janice asked breathlessly.

Loring shook his head. "I wish I knew. It could be a guardhouse or a signal tower or something of the sort. There's no entrance on this side, but there may be an entrance in back. It could have been erected here as a kind of sentry barrier to guard this particular part of the city. It could even be a remotely controlled robot structure, equipped with detective devices and destructive weapons."

"You really think--"

"I don't know what to think. I'd like to pound on the metal to see if it gives off a hollow sound. But I'm afraid to risk it. Even raising our voices might be dangerous and activate some delicately balanced instrument of destruction."

A look of decision came into Loring's eyes. "You stay here," he said. "Don't move or touch that wall. If there's an entrance I don't want you to be with me until I've made sure there's nothing dangerous inside."

Janice looked at him, startled. "You're not going inside?"

"I will if there's an entrance."

"But darling, don't you see? If anything happened to you I wouldn't want to go on living. You think of what could happen and all that unrealistic nonsense about shielding a woman, not letting her share a danger with a man she loves more than her own life, breaks down."

"It hasn't broken down with me," Loring said. "I'm sorry, darling, but you're staying here."

"Please, David--"

"No chance. You're staying right here."

Before she could protest again he kissed her and turned quickly, not trusting himself to prolong the embrace. He walked to the edge of the building, rounded it and moved forward cautiously, keeping a short distance from the wall. The side of the structure was as wide as the facade, quite possibly a little wider.

The vague fear, the sense of danger, remained with him, but so far he had encountered nothing alarming. His uneasiness angered him a little, made him impatient with his own perhaps wholly unjustified caution. He came to a sudden decision. If there was an entrance at the rear of the building he would not hesitate but would go immediately inside.

There was an entrance at the rear of the building; an unlighted, oblong-shaped opening without ornamentation, twice the width of a man's body and eight or nine feet in height. Although the structure was metallic, the entrance had a stone-carven look, as if it had been chiseled with precision from a block of solid granite.

Having come to a decision, the swift dwindling of his dread surprised him. It was as if a point of pressure had been removed from his mind, leaving him free to walk without restraint into the structure.

The falling away of tension gave him no satisfaction. He mistrusted it, feared it, for it strengthened his belief that his thoughts were under scrutiny and an effort was being made to influence his emotions. Had he won a momentary victory or was that, too, an illusion?

The tension started mounting again the instant he had passed through the aperture. The darkness was just as bad as he had imagined it might be, totally unrelieved by the faintest glimmer of light. It was a smothering blackness, shroudlike and all-engulfing.

He stood very still a few feet within the entrance. The aperture was faintly filmed with light, but the dim glow did not penetrate for more than a foot or two into the darkness. Beyond that slight penumbra of light there was an impenetrable wall of darkness hemming him in on all sides.

The odor which came to his nostrils was equally unnerving. It was sharp, acrid, but with a faint mustiness about it which made him think of tomb rot.

For a moment there was no sound at all, no faintest stir of movement. Then he heard a rustling sound that seemed to come from deep within the darkness. A rustling, a shuffling, the kind of sound that could have been made by a snake unwinding its coils, or someone dragging a heavy sack over a stone floor, or by nothing more unnerving than the slow backward and forward movements of a broom.

Loring did not think it was a broom. The fear which came upon him was primitive, elemental. In some respects it was the kind of fear which a man in a dark wood would experience if he came upon a nest of copperheads while exploring a foliage-choked crevice in search of edible mushrooms. Expecting to find some poisonous varieties perhaps, but hardly death staring up at him out of the opaque eyes of a snake poised to strike.

He moved slowly backwards, keeping the same distance from the entrance but putting as much space as possible between himself and the shuffling. He kept backing away until he came up against a firm metal barrier which he quickly explored with his hands. It had the solid feel of a wall.

His breathing became a little less strained. With a wall at his back he was at least in no danger of being attacked from two directions. And if the wall made further retreat impossible the danger had not increased, for he was still the same distance from the entrance and could still, if he wished, make a very swift dash for it.

He had no immediate intention of doing so. He stood listening, motionless and alert, his shoulders barely touching the wall. The shuffling sound did not seem to be coming any nearer. It even stopped for an instant. The silence closed in about him and he became aware of the over-loud beating of his heart. When the sound started up again it seemed to come from another direction, closer to the entrance.

Now it _was_ nearer. Unmistakably louder and nearer, very close to him in the darkness. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing. He had to depend on his hearing alone, and hearing, he knew, could be deceptive. It was often very difficult to determine the precise location of a sound, to pinpoint it with any certainty.

Suddenly his heart skipped a beat, and his breathing quickened. His throat turned cold as he swallowed, and tightened as well, the muscles stiffening, cording into knots. Unconsciously he gripped his leg, just above the knee, and dug his fingers into the flesh, as if physical pain alone could keep reality from taking on an aspect so nightmarish that his sanity would be imperiled.

The creature was passing directly across the entrance. It was moving so slowly that he could see it distinctly in the sharply sheared-off glow from outside the building. The glow penetrated the darkness hardly at all, but when the creature paused and half turned about even that abruptly curtailed illumination was strong enough to bring it into stark relief.

He saw the monstrous shape clearly. Saw the long, insectlike legs with their tapering hairs, and the very slender, flylike body. Saw its gauzy, tightly folded wings, the metallic glitter of its immense, many-faceted eyes and the slow turning of the eyes as they sought him out in the darkness.

The enormous flying insect framed for an instant in the glow was a shape of terror. It was not its size alone which was making his flesh crawl and his chest heave as his eyes remained fastened upon it in the swimming darkness. He was quite sure of that.

There was something rapacious about it, a deadliness that could be instantly sensed. It seemed intent on his destruction, its enormous eyes filmed with a malignancy that made his blood run cold.

Its attitude was just as terrifying, the body poised as if for attack, a rapier sharpness in the writhing mandibles, a wire-tight tension in the rhythmically vibrating thorax, the slender abdomen, and the long, hairy legs which terminated in rust-colored, cuplike disks.

Loring's thoughts went into a mind-chilling whirl. The human mind does not associate ferocity with an ordinary fly. A house fly, a fruit fly, even a blue-bottle fly hovering over carrion and evoking no more than a slight, momentary shiver of disgust. But wasps and hornets are flylike in aspect and they are equally graceful in flight. Winged insects of great beauty, delicately constructed and the opposite of revolting. Yet wasps and hornets can inflict stings that can paralyze and kill.

A long blue hornet in a drowsy woodland glade can be a flying torpedo, a death-dealing precision instrument, as billions of fat, sluggish caterpillars have discovered over a very long period of geologic time. And if a hornet could become large enough....

A gigantic hornet might well find a man more to its liking on an alien world, a far more delectable feast for its larvae when paralyzed with care and stored in a clay-constructed hive. Or a metal-constructed hive.

The solitary wasps. The mud builders. Every schoolboy was familiar with them, every young naturalist exploring the countryside near his home, the autumn leaves turning red and yellow, the tang of woodsmoke in the air. The small, gray, skillfully cemented-over openings to their nests deep underground where unspeakable acts of insect vampirism took place. The paralyzed caterpillar shrinking, turning sere, losing its substance but remaining tormentingly alive while the gnawing, insatiable grubs waxed fat and strong. Dying in the end, its substance liquefying.... And a human caterpillar?

Despite his terror Loring knew that he was letting his imagination get out of control. He was taking too much for granted, letting his thoughts lead him into a dark abyss which probably had no basis in reality. The hideous thought had leapt unbidden into his mind and he had elaborated upon it, filling in the total blankness of the unknown with images so ghastly that they glowed blood-red. It was exactly what an expressionistic artist might have been forced to do if his morbidity became a genius-inspired flame and he could no longer restrain an impulse to torture himself to win immortality for what could be, at best, a purely symbolical vision of madness completely remote from reality.