CHAPTER IV

That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment. Win—short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her
that
—opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had died away.

The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display artist with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a pale aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it was drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral of silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back. Her nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity, was graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe nails were lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of her blue eyes were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.

Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.

"How, oh squaw of rainbow brilliance," said Brave, holding up a hand in grave salute. "I leave this warrior in your keeping, whilst I shuffle down to the recroom and squander a few bucks on the pinball machines."

"How, oh mountain that walks. Will you have a slug of Scotch first?"

"The noble red man, pampering his internal workin's, drinks only rum this week. No thanks, Win. The gambling fever's got me. See you."

Alan closed the door behind him and took Win into his arms. He kissed her, gently at first, then hard, their lips parted, warm on each other as their bodies warmed, his hands strong and taut on her back; he smoothed his fingers down the hollow of her spine, ran them up into her soft hair. She said against his mouth, "You demolish that toilsomely-wrought thatch, boy, and I'll demolish you." He laughed and pushed her away and lit a cigarette, stray flecks of mauve from her hair glittering on his fingers.

She went to the low cocktail table and picked up an already filled glass. He took it from her. "Here's atomic dust in yer eye, Winniefred," he toasted, and drank long and thirstily.

"Whoa, Nellie. Haven't you drunk anything today?"

"Only the dregs of woe," he said lightly, and then his lean face changed and his eyes looked into a remote place which they did not like. At once she touched his arm.

"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched tailor-fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?"

"I wish I knew."

"Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache around the place as you after you've missed your lunch."

"No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now."

Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes, Brave's indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's discovery of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up ending the almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he should have been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he listened to his own words a dreadful idea was born and grew and expanded throughout his intellect until suddenly he knew that here was his answer, that no other could be rationally accepted. He sat silently for minutes, while Win watched him, and gradually the color swept out of his face and he began to shiver.

She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink, and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave him another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald stud of the drawer.

"What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection between these events. What is it?"

He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I know. I know what we have to fight."

"Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from—"

"My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a score of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire. It's no secret, everyone has it. Right?"

"Sure, darling. Even I want to see—well, Mars, anyway."

"But here are these disks, too good, too damned good by far, possibly capable of doing just that; and the government and most of us have thought they were only for earth travel. Why? Who would want to build ships for interplanetary, or even for all I know interstellar-space flight, and keep it hidden from the rest of mankind?"

"Russia?" she suggested humbly.

"Oh, nuts. You might as well say Switzerland. No, it's here at home, on Project Star, and it's a handful or more than a handful of our own top men.

"Now the other angle: there are men here who apparently can't be hurt by ordinary means, who don't feel pain, who can resist the force of such a weapon as a thousand-pound cutlass-edged juggernaut, and who only stare quietly when their hands are melted off like butter in a flame."

"Yes?"

"Put the two together, Win. Remember that after I'd seen one evidence of this lack of pain, I was ambushed. Someone thought I ought to die before I spread the word around. Who?"

"Well, who?"

He drank again and lit a cigarette. The lighter shook in his hand. "There's only one answer I can see," he said. "Correct me if I'm crazy, baby. There are mutants among us. We've been anticipating them in fiction for decades. Now they're here, and they want to reach the stars before we do, they want to pass unnoticed until they're ready to—to take over, or whatever their purpose is."

"Mutants, Alan?"

"The natural progression from Homo Sapiens. Homo superior. The supermen."

She slid a pointer across its bar two notches and pressed the emerald button and the table delivered a dry Martini, which she sipped as she regarded him steadily. At last she said, "Is that the sole possibility, sweetheart? Isn't it a pretty wild explanation to accept on the evidence of a couple of queer accidents?"

"I don't think so," he said gruffly. "No, blast it, I don't think it's too wild. It's perfectly possible, and it fits the facts."

"Your Homo superior must be about as fallible as poor old sapiens then, because he's let his secrets out with a vengeance. I'd think that anyone smarter than we are would at least simulate pain after his hand was burnt off."

"That was a slip-up, yes. But he didn't know anyone was watching."

"Homo superior must have a low opinion of our intelligence, or he wouldn't have let those blueprints get into our hands."

"The progression of the disks' manufacture has come to the point where he couldn't help it, I suppose. And maybe by now it doesn't matter. Don's had those fuel tank charts for three months, because it was necessary that he work on aspects of construction so close to the tanks that it was impossible to falsify them. But he only saw the instrument panel plans this morning. As I said, maybe it doesn't matter now. If the disks are near enough ready to be taking test flights, maybe the mutants are going to step out in the open."

"Then why would they shoot at you?"

"Hell, I don't know. Perhaps they'll publish the purpose of the disks without mentioning their own roles, as secret designers and builders and as creatures that can't be hurt. They could say 'security reasons' and get away with a lot."

"It's an explanation, all right," said Win. "I don't swallow it, boy, but it does fit the facts. So do all sorts of other weird theories."

"Such as?"

"Ah, you don't want my ideas. They're as mad as your own." She leaned over the arm of the couch and touched several glowing spots on its outer surface; at once the illumination of the room cooled and faded. The forest green walls, complimentary to her own coloring and to the clothing she wore, appeared to recede and become the dark depths of a woodland on a moonless night; the furniture seemed to change into moss-grown stumps and great misshapen rocks. Overhead, the ceiling turned dusky blue under the play of hidden tint-beams, and miniature galaxies twinkled and gleamed across its surface, their varying incandescence giving the illusion of tridimensional infinity.

Alan set down his glass and looked over at her. She was a shape of nocturnal secrecy, sinuous darkness against which her nails and eye-lashes burned with phosphorescent sapphire. Her use of the luminous lacquer was an artful bit of technique. It made her into a fantastic mystery which cried out to be solved. Although Alan had seen the trick before, he could never resist it. It was unbelievable that the sober girl in a shapeless smock who sweated in the metallurgy lab was also this Cleopatra, this shadowy temptress; Troy's exquisite Helen, yearning for love, her strong enchantments designed to make her both conqueror and conquest.

Forgetting the half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, forgetting the supermen and everything else but his physical craving, he threw himself down on the wide couch beside her. His hands touched the live softness of the halter and slid to her back. The sweet strong muscles glided under his fingers as she lifted her arms to take his face between her hands. Then his hands went down from flesh to fabric and he felt her long body pressing tight against him, close as his own skin.

He opened his eyes and saw the glowing purple of her lashes and in the thick gloom the dimmed luster of her teeth between the parted lips. He kissed her and closed his eyes again. He touched her throat, where the blood throbbed close to the surface in a fast steady rhythm; he found other pulses and held his fingertips on them until his own caught their beat and merged with it and the separate throbbings were one.

It was dark, then very dark, the dark of a sunless sea lapping all about them, and slowly it grew lighter and he was sitting up to run his fingers through his unmanageable hair and remember that some time ago he had been holding a cigarette.

"Hey," he said, "what happened to my Rocketeer?"

Win stretched out a lazy arm and brought the lights up once more. "Sure you didn't put it out?"

"I swear I didn't. My God, here it is," he said, picking it off the couch where it had been smashed and its tobacco scattered. "What did I stub that out on?"

"Probably the couch. It doesn't matter, it's resistant."

He looked carefully but could find no place where a cigarette's fire might have been crushed. He shrugged. "So long as I didn't burn you, baby."

"You didn't." She had the automatic table mix them two cocktails. "There's Brave back from the recroom," she said.

"Ears like a fennec," he said admiringly. "I didn't hear anything."

"Watch it, brother. I know what a fennec's ears look like." She went to open the door for the big Indian. "How'd you do, Brave?"

"Gambled away a dollar and seventy-five cents in a reckless passion. Are you ready to go home, sheikh?"

"Yes, I am. I have a theory I want to talk about."

"You argue him out of it, Brave," said Win. "He's been working too hard. He thinks supermen are after him."

Brave looked at Alan and his fine face grew hard and set. "Supermen ..." he said. "Mutants. Alan, is that it?"

"I think that's it."

"It fits the picture, all right."

"It explains every instance we've observed."

"I believe you're on the right track," nodded Brave. "When did you find it?"

"While I was telling Win about it. Let's go home and thrash it out, son. She's a disturbing influence."

Brave eyed Win up and down with a leer that on anyone else would have been particularly lewd and lascivious. From the faithful Brave it was merely what he meant it to be—a piece of mild buffoonery. "You understate the case, my liege. Yon woman has a plump and supple look; she wriggles too much, such minxes are dangerous. Let's drag tail."

"Okay, boys. Go knock your steel-plated skulls together. But remember that I think you're barking up an impossible tree at an invisible possum what ain't thar." She swung the door open for them and stood aside, one arm upraised with the hand on the jamb.

Alan kissed her a light farewell, and Brave patted her on the head and said, "Ketch-um sleep, squaw, you look bushed." Then, as Alan turned away, his glance was caught by a mark on Win's arm. It was a round blemish, an angry-looking red welt to the edges of which still clung infinitesimal flakes of gray ash smudged into the skin. He turned away and walked down the corridor with Brave at his side, and he thought ferociously of every possibility he could imagine, but his mind always came back to the same answer.

It was a burn, just such a small wound as would result, say, from a cigarette being pressed out against the arm by an oblivious lover.

And it should have been shockingly painful.

But Win had not felt it at all....