David Loring had no way of knowing that he was under observation and
that his every movement was being watched. He could not see the lighted
tele-communication screen or the cold, alien eyes trained on his image
as he inserted the key which Janice had given him into the door of her
apartment and stood for an instant motionless, with an angry set to his
jaw.
He did not know that an alien electronic pickup device was transmitting
his image from an apartment house hallway in Greenwich Village to
a hovering flying disk high in the sky. Within the disk the screen
glowed brightly and Loring's image was life size. It stood out with a
startling, three-dimensional clarity. Not only was the image studied
carefully, it was relayed to a dozen other flying disks within a
radius of six hundred miles. The eyes that watched were dark and
inscrutable, buried in folds of pinkish flesh. They did not blink, but
stared steadily and without noticeable animation. Each eye was like a
smoky lens, concealing more than it revealed, keeping its many secrets
hidden. Each eye was a Sphinx-eye, brooding and unfathomable.
And each was the eye of a Martian.
The truth would have staggered Loring and broken down all of his
defenses. He would have stood motionless, his hand on the doorknob,
struggling to remain calm but feeling his sanity imperiled. Fortunately
he did not know, did not even suspect that everything he said or did
was being constantly scrutinized.
His ignorance was shared by every man, woman and child on Earth. Not
even the sharp, wise eyes of the astronomers had detected the rocket
flares on Mars when the Martian ships had taken off from the red planet
on their three-stage journey across space.
There were other things that Loring did not know or suspect. The
Martian invaders of Earth had been woman hunting. They had been woman
hunting so relentlessly for five days that even as Loring's image
flickered on their tele-communication screens their great, silvery
mother ship was moving slowly above the autumn-resplendent countryside
one hundred and forty miles from New York City, at an altitude of
ninety feet above ground level.
It was a deserted region of sapling spruce and birches and dwarfed
evergreens, growing so symmetrically on the sloping hillsides that
each isolated group of trees had a deceptive appearance of greenhouse
cultivation.
The Martian invaders were taking a calculated risk. They were almost
sure that the sparsely settled region would contain no eyewitness
whom they could not quickly capture and silence. But they could not
be completely sure. The screams of the captured women or the barking
of savage dogs on the scattered farms or in the streets of the small
village communities might be just loud and frantic enough to alert
the hard-eyed, stony-faced men whose duty it was to carry arms and be
always on guard.
The inhabitants of Earth had already seen far too many Martian ships.
Fortunately their Martian origin had not been stressed even by the
credulous, and the majority of eyewitnesses preferred to believe they
came from Venus, or the dark side of the moon, or some unknown region
of outer space. No scientist of world wide prestige had even seen a
flying saucer, and scientists in general refused to take Unidentified
Flying Objects seriously, and were quick to dismiss the many rumored
sightings as superstitious nonsense—a product of mass hysteria.
Nevertheless it was a dangerous undertaking. If a Martian ship should
meet with an accident and be forced to land, tangible proof would exist
in abundance. There would be a fiery crater in the quiet countryside
which would flame more brightly than a cluster of burning buildings.
The walls of the crater would be eroded and smoke-blackened, its
circumference sprinkled with radio-active dust from the descending
ship's exploding rocket jets. A search party would be likely to find,
scattered about in the immediate vicinity, fragments of a radio-active
metal unknown on Earth.
A wave of terror would sweep from city to city, from continent to
continent, until it engulfed the entire planet. Emergency warning
signals would be broadcast everywhere, from New York and London,
from Paris and Moscow, to the remote Asian villages: It has come.
The ultimate horror, the unbelievable. Earth has been invaded by the
intelligent inhabitants of another planet.
And if a Martian should be captured alive.... The thought could be
accepted by the human mind perhaps and even embraced with a momentary,
wholly unjustified feeling of triumph. But to a Martian it would be a
death thought, too hideous to contemplate.
A Martian in a cage or in a laboratory, stared at, jeered at perhaps,
completely at the mercy of his human captors. A Martian stretched
out on an operating table, with sharp instruments of human science
glittering in a cone of radiance above his strapped-down body. Pain,
torment beyond endurance. Martian pride humbled, and dragged through
the dust.
A dissecting laboratory. Would Earth display pity or stay its hand if
it needed knowledge to forge weapons to combat an intelligent race bent
on space conquest—a race so different from Man in some respects that
it would be easy to think of its captive members as caged beasts or
hideous and dangerous monsters?
No mercy would be shown. No mercy could be expected. It would be
a battle to the death, and in some respects Earth's technological
knowledge was formidable. No Martian ship could hope to survive a
full-scale atomic attack. The hydrogen bomb was far more destructive
than any Martian weapon, deadly as some of those weapons were. A single
nuclear bomb could destroy ten or twelve Martian ships moving in close
formation.
It was not a thought which Tragor cared to dwell upon. He stood in the
observation compartment of the mother ship, staring out at the bright
autumn foliage directly beneath him. The ship was hovering so low above
the sloping countryside that its hull almost brushed the branches of
occasional tall trees, looming like sentinel posts above the dwarfed
pines and the slender trunks of young birch trees, spruces and cedars.
Some of the hillsides were rocky and overgrown with lichen, their
leaf-choked recesses and bramble patches casting purple shadows. Others
were bright with a riot of autumn colors, reds and browns and golden
yellows.
Tragor could see his own reflection in the view-glass, tall and grave
and commanding. It seemed incredible to him that even on an alien world
his appearance could cause a female to recoil from him in terror and
revulsion. That he should seem handsome and desirable, an outstandingly
virile male, to all humanoid women—no matter what their lineage—was
something he had taken for granted.
Was he, after all, so different from the males whom women mated with
on Earth? Did he not have a strong, robust body, well-shaped, eyes
that could burn with an unquenchable ardor, hands that could clasp and
caress? Why, if the women of Earth seemed so maddeningly attractive and
desirable to him, did he not seem equally desirable to them? Why should
they recoil from him in horror? Why should they regard him as a monster?
There were physical differences, of course, but they were biologically
superficial. He was in every vital aspect of his being completely
human. Human enough to make love, to embrace a human female and
convince her in a hundred ways that in him she had a lover indeed.
And every other Martian felt the same way. They had made a tragic
blunder, but it was a blunder that could be wiped out, forgotten, and
compensated for. It was not too late.
Had it not been, after all, a natural blunder, a credit to a male
with pride? To conquer and colonize another planet was a hazardous
undertaking. To expose females to so great a danger, to such
unimaginable hardships, would have been unthinkable. But still, a
mistake had been made. A male cannot live alone. The woman-need must be
appeased, or unendurable frustration and wretchedness will result.
And on Earth there were women who, by a miracle that could not be
easily explained, were even more desirable to a Martian than the
females of his own race. If only—
Forget the "only" Tragor told himself with vigor. Their fear can be
overcome, their resistance broken down. Ardor will do it, flaming
ardor, all the delights of the dark, the words of love, the whispered
reassurances. Limbs crushing limbs, with a passion irresistible,
gentleness with fierceness intermingled....
Yes, yes. He only needed to be bold, virile, fearless. And he had a
great boldness within him. He was stronger than any male on Earth and
wiser and more understanding. In the long run no human woman could
resist him.
Had they not already captured and studied dozens of human women?
They had needed to do that for a quite different reason, a reason
not associated with lovemaking at all. They had held themselves in
restraint, because they had not been so long cut off from the women of
their own race that the torment and frustration had become unendurable.
Studying the women of Earth had been part of the master plan, the Great
Plan for Earth conquest.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with that plan even now. But now
there was another need—compulsive, overwhelming. For every Martian a
mate must be found—a woman tender and yielding.
For every Martian.
Tragor straightened in sudden alertness, his eyes on a stretch of open
countryside a few hundred feet in front of the steadily advancing ship.
Between a winding brook and a small, tree-shadowed grove eight or ten
tiny human figures were moving slowly about or sitting in pairs on the
grass.
He had seen such groups before and the sight did not surprise him. They
were hikers, relaxing after a strenuous tramp over the green-yellow
hills, and enjoying one another's company by a cool stream in the
shadow of whispering boughs. They had unwrapped packages of food and
spread a white tablecloth on the grass and at the edge of the stream a
girl with gold-red hair was filling a pail with water.
He could see the girl clearly now, her slender supple form bent
seductively above the pale, sky-mirroring water. There were other girls
in the group but even at a distance they seemed far less attractive.
Two were very stout and one was a gaunt, big-boned woman with almost
mannish features and no roundness where Tragor looked for roundness
with anticipatory delight.
He saw now that the group consisted of eight people, and that four
of them were men. The men could be destroyed without difficulty and
presented no problem. But he studied them carefully nevertheless. He
studied their physiques for muscular sturdiness and their faces, as the
ship drew rapidly nearer, for qualities which might prove troublesome
in a struggle, however heavily the odds were weighted against them:
resolution, defiance, firmness of mind and will.
He knew that a few men would fight to the death, counting their own
lives of no importance, if a monster threatened a woman dear to them.
Tragor recoiled a little at the thought, cursing himself for allowing
such an image to torment him at a moment when his triumph seemed
assured. He was not a monster, and he intended to make sure that the
woman by the brook did not think of him as one for long. She would very
soon find out he was the most perfect lover she had ever known.
How many human lovers had she known? he wondered. A woman that
beautiful could hardly have escaped lovers, but it did not matter to
him at all. It disturbed human males, sometimes even drove them to acts
of violence, but he was not that kind of a fool. He could make any
woman forget any lover in her past. He was sure of it. He could blot
the memory from her mind, make it seem less than the shadow of a dream.
She would exist for him alone and believe that she had come into his
arms completely virginal.
A little violence at first perhaps might be needed. He must be firm
and unbending, but it would not be for long. She would quickly enough
dissolve in his arms when the monster image was destroyed by an embrace
more passionate and unyielding than she could have dared to hope for,
even during those moments of wild surrender when a woman is asleep and
dreaming and restrained by nothing sternly forbidding and unfair to her
nature in the waking world.
The four men and four women had seen the ship now and were on their
feet, pointing, shouting, their faces contorted with terror. The girl
by the brook had dropped her pail and was running toward the others,
her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, her white limbs gleaming in the
sunlight.
Tragor swayed a little, so aroused and stimulated by her great beauty
that he was unable to take command. He stood very still, his heart
beating wildly, knowing that it was not really necessary for him to
act. Others would act for him, as they had often done in the past.
In the absence of direct orders the ship would veer slightly, and
then remain stationary, hovering above the women who were to be taken
captive and the men who were to be destroyed. A wide section of the
hull would swing open, and five heavily armed Martians would descend
to the ground over a collapsible metal stairway. The stairway would
be instantly withdrawn and not lowered again until the men had been
killed, the women taken captive.
It was happening now. Tragor could hear the thrumming of the opening
hull section, the metallic clatter of weapons and equipment as the
marauding party waited with no attempt to conceal their impatience for
the stairway to be lowered.
Then, through the view-glass, he saw the stairway go down and the
first of the five Martians start to descend, his massive shoulders and
hairless skull giving him the formidable aspect of a trained warrior
who would give and expect no quarter. The brutishness of the warrior
caste never failed to repel Tragor a little, but he realized that
warriors were necessary.
A human woman might almost be justified in looking upon a Martian
warrior as a monster. A straggle-legged brute, hairy and uncouth and
utterly lacking in refinement. To be seized by a warrior, roughly
slapped, and carried screaming and kicking to a space ship could hardly
fail to be abhorrent to a sensitive and delicate woman. But a desirable
woman could not be allowed to escape and the women of Earth were often
incredibly fleet of foot.
Two warriors were descending the stairway now and a third was just
emerging. The structure grazed the ground, but did not rest solidly
upon it. It was necessary to keep the ship in motion, and a grounded
stairway could cause unimaginable havoc.
Below there was havoc of a different sort. Two of the men were standing
their ground and one had picked up a rifle. But the fourth man was in
headlong flight, his shoulders jerking as he ran, his coat flapping
open. He stumbled and fell and picked himself up again, stopping for
an instant to look back in horror. He did not seem to care that he
had stamped himself a craven and cut a woefully pitiful figure, for
he added to his shame by crying out hoarsely. He changed his course
slightly and headed directly for the grove, moving slowly and awkwardly
now, as if fear had begun to paralyze him.
The gaunt, mannish woman was standing very still, shading her eyes with
her hands and watching the Martians descend with no pronounced change
of expression. But her face was drained of all color. The two stout
women were clinging to each other and screaming.
But the girl whom Tragor had seen first by the brook and now saw in
a different light, with the sunlight aureoling her hair and a man to
defend her, did not appear to be the kind of woman who could be easily
demoralized. She stood straight and still by the man with the rifle,
her head tilted back in defiance, her lips slightly parted.
All five of the Martians were on the stairway now, and the first to
emerge from the ship had been passed by the second, an equally muscular
warrior with an even more brutish countenance. With a quick leap he was
on the ground, his puckered, heavy-lidded eyes darting toward the four
women with lascivious eagerness, the pupils strangely luminous.
The Martian directly above him paused for an instant on the stairway,
raised to his shoulder a small, compact weapon that bore a slight
resemblance to a sawed-off shotgun despite its technical complexity and
took careful aim at the running man, who had almost reached the grove.
The weapon leapt in the Martian's clasp and a sharp crack echoed like
a pistol shot across the open countryside, from the hollow, metallic
sounding board of the ship's hull to the distant cluster of trees.
The running man screamed, threw out his arms and crumpled at the edge
of the grove. The spurt of blood from a severed artery was visible from
the ship, a thin, crimson jet that spattered the grass and the foliage
and gleamed brightly on the boles of the trees until the crumpled body
began to smoke. The smoke spiralling up from the slain man obscured
the gleaming, and was blown by the wind between the trees, filling the
entire grove with a thin, drifting haze.
One of the stout women swayed, released her hold on her companion's arm
and sank to the ground in a dead faint. The other went on screaming,
so shrilly and hysterically that for a moment no other sound could be
heard—not even the heavy tread of the Martians moving toward the four
women and three men with their weapons raised.
The slender girl, who Tragor coveted, gripped the arm of the man beside
her in desperate appeal.
"Don't shoot, Kenneth," she whispered, her face pale with fear.
"They'll kill you too!"
"They'll kill me anyway," the man said, closing his hand tightly
over her trembling fingers and gently freeing his arm. "This is one
nightmare that seems to be real. They're certain to kill us all. But
I'm going to get one of them first."
The rifle was at his shoulder before she could cry out in protest.
There was another sharp crack, not unlike the report which the
Martian's complicated weapon had made. The nearest Martian came to an
abrupt halt. For an instant his green-fleshed, masklike face remained
totally devoid of expression. Then the lineaments seemed to shrivel
and darken. The cruel, slitted mouth lost its firmness and the flesh
around the eyelids began to sag. Slowly, horribly the entire face
changed color, the green fading to an ashen gray, the pinkish hue of
the eyelids darkening to a deep crimson which did not fade.
From a ragged cavern in the Martian's chest there came a brighter flood
of crimson. It stained the fabric of his dark-textured, tight-fitting
garments, dripped from his garments to the ground and formed a widening
pool at his feet.
He swayed a little, but he did not totter and fall. He died standing
up, with the animation fading slowly from his eyes. The eyes clouded
over, became opaque. But still the Martian remained upright, a standing
corpse which maintained its equilibrium by the sturdiness of its firmly
planted legs and the sheer massiveness of its barrel-shaped torso and
dangling arms.
The mannish woman sank to her knees, covered her eyes with her hands,
and began to moan. The man with the rifle stood motionless, his lips
white, smoke pouring from the barrel of the half-lowered weapon. The
stout woman had ceased to scream. Her face looked gray and frozen and
her fingers had gone to her throat. She was plucking at the flesh of
her throat, as if the sudden tightening of her vocal cords was causing
her unendurable torment.
The slain Martian's costly delay in killing the man with the rifle
appeared to enrage his companions. With brutal callousness two of them
moved forward, and hurled the lifeless body to the ground. Then, they
took care not to repeat his mistake. They killed all three men, with
such rapid bursts of weapon fire that they were lifted into the air,
hurled backwards and were dead before their bodies struck the ground.
The slender woman whom Tragor coveted cried out in anguish and ran
toward the crumpled form of the man with the rifle, her eyes shining
with a near madness that went far beyond shock and made her waver as
she ran. He was still clasping the rifle, his fingers snagged in the
trigger frame. There were no visible wounds on his body, but blood
stained his left temple and his eyebrows and hair had been singed. His
face was ashen, the eyes blankly staring. She knew at once that he was
dead and flung herself upon him, weeping, moaning, her body racked by
uncontrollable sobs.
She did not hear the slow, heavy tread of a Martian drawing near and
if she had heard she would not have cared. She had no desire to go on
living, and had ceased to know the meaning of fear. Her life was over.
At that moment she realized, as never before, that no one dies alone.
He had taken her with him and she had died too. Only the hollow shell
of a living woman remained. She did not care what happened to that
shell. There is no fate worse than death to a woman who has ceased to
live.
At first, when she felt herself being seized and lifted up, she
struggled only to remain where she was—close to the man whose life she
had shared and would go on sharing forever, despite death and change
and Time's relentless tyranny in a universe which spared no one.
She was not even aware of the Martian's fleshly strength, the savage
cruelty of his embrace, the way he was drawing her to him mercilessly,
encircling her shoulders and refusing to relax his grip on her arms
until his flat, hard chest bruised her numbed breasts.
At first the Martian was no more than a hindrance, an obstacle, a
disembodied force that was keeping her from her dead lover. It was as
if a magnetic web had enmeshed her limbs and was lifting her from the
slain man's side, forcing her to abandon him.
It wasn't until the Martian had swung about and started back toward the
ship, his arms tight about her, that she started to struggle. Even then
her struggles were blindly instinctive, her flesh rebelling while her
mind remained remote and grief-shattered.
She was not the only captive. Both of the stout women were struggling
furiously in the arms of warrior-caste Martians, their faces flushed
and despairing, their bodies arched backwards, as if to remain pressed
cruelly to the boardlike chests of captors so brutish and alien, their
screams silenced by force, was a horror and a degradation which no
woman could sanely endure.
The gaunt, large-boned, mannish-looking woman was not being carried to
the ship. She was being propelled forward by nudgings from the weapon
of a Martian who wore upon his masklike face an unmistakable look of
distaste.
There was a cold anger in her eyes and she walked with dignity despite
the proddings, her composure completely restored now, her lips set in
tight lines.
Tragor, staring through the view-glass, had missed nothing of the
deadly, ten-minute struggle. He was pleased and almost beside himself
with eagerness to take the captive whose beauty had so maddeningly
aroused him from the arms of the warrior-caste brute and carry her to
his own sleeping compartment.
The warriors had done well, but he had no intention of congratulating
them. Discipline forbade it. A wave of revulsion swept over him again
when he thought of how crude the warriors were in their lovemaking.
They had no delicacy of perception, no true understanding of how to
make love to a woman. They went about it in the most brutal imaginable
way. Firmness, yes—that was necessary. You had to be very strong and
sure of yourself. The slightest doubt or hesitation could be fatal.
In fact, you could develop what human psychologists called a complex in
regard to one particular woman if you failed at the wrong moment, no
matter how accomplished you were with other women. He had been on Earth
long enough to understand these things, to realize that Martians were
no different from human males in that respect. One failure, and a woman
could be lost to you forever. And she might be the most desirable woman
you'd ever known, and couldn't do without.
It was important to understand all this, because when a Martian made
love to a woman who regarded him as a monster, failure might very
easily occur the first time. And that failure might be impossible to
overcome later on.
No, no, he told himself angrily. It wouldn't happen this time. The
captive who had stirred him beyond reason was now being carried up the
stairway into the ship. She was still struggling and her red-gold hair
had come unbound and fallen over her shoulders and he could see the
entrancing curvature of her half-revealed breasts. She was slender and
yet her beauty seemed full-blown in a pulse-stirring way, as the beauty
of a young girl often seems in the magic mirror which draws no sharp
distinction between a girl of twenty and a woman of thirty. If she is
lovely enough, she becomes not one woman, but two, her youthful charms
blending with the ripeness which will soon be hers and making that
ripeness another aspect of her present self.
It couldn't happen this time, he told himself again. He desired her too
overwhelmingly and her beauty was too irresistible. She would stir him
instantly to an amorous frenzy. He was sure of it. He would experience
no misgivings, no apprehension. Already he could feel her lips moving
against his. Her lips were full, red and enticingly curved. He would
drain the sweetness of her mouth like a thirsty man, a parched desert
wayfarer....
He straightened, anger creasing his brow. The warrior-caste brutes were
taking unwarranted liberties with two of the captive women when they
were under strict orders to do no more than clasp them firmly and
carry them into the ship. It did not anger him too much, because the
women the brutes had captured would probably soon become their mates.
But what if it gave the warrior who was carrying the slender woman
ideas?
The brute did not know that she was the woman of Tragor's choice.
He had not assumed command and he had issued no orders. What if the
warrior assumed that Tragor was hard to please and would not be likely
to have made a choice when so many opportunities were open to him?
Hadn't he surrendered even more beautiful women to warriors with a
shrug, simply because they hadn't seemed quite so desirable as the
slender woman who might, unless he acted quickly, find herself in the
deadliest kind of danger?
A sudden trembling seized him. His worst fears seemed about to be
realized. The warrior-caste Martian had paused a short distance from
the top of the stairway, and had taken firm hold of his captive's
unbound hair. He was drawing her head backwards, with the unmistakable
intention of implanting a kiss on her lips—a kiss that would be savage
and prolonged. Just to be kissed in that way by such a brute was a
desecration in itself. And Tragor knew that the brute would not be
satisfied with a kiss. It would not stop there. His hands....
Tragor left the observation compartment in three long strides, dark
anger surging up in him, a fury that he was powerless to control. He
knew that the warrior was not too much to blame, for he had issued no
orders. But if it went beyond a kiss, he swore that the brute would
die.
He had gone beyond a kiss but not too much beyond. Standing at the head
of the stairway, with the opened section of hull looming at his back,
Tragor took careful note of what the warrior-caste Martian was doing.
The brute had placed one of his taloned hands squarely on his captive's
back, and was running the other over her body, over the smooth
curvature of her hips and back and forth across her knees. Her knees
were drawn up and she was kicking her legs in protest, but her efforts
to free herself did not seem to be discouraging the Martian.
Tragor did not move at all for a moment. Then he stepped forward
into the light which was flooding up from below and spoke to the
warrior-caste Martian.
"Come into the ship. Put her down and walk away from her. Do you
understand? I expect instant obedience."
The warrior obeyed in complete silence. He cast one doubtful glance at
Tragor and then did as he was told. The slender girl slumped to the
deck the instant she was released, rolled over on her side and moaned.
The warrior spoke then, for the first time. "I did not harm her. You
saw—"
"I saw," Tragor said.
"If I did her no harm, why are you angry?"
"Your orders were to bring her into the ship without making love to
her."
"But you gave no orders—"
"They are permanent orders. All captive women are to be brought to me
first. I will decide who is to claim them."
The warrior nodded. "I am sorry," he said.
"You had better be. Turn now and walk away from me."
The warrior-caste Martian took a slow step backwards. He began to
tremble. "You will not—"
"You heard what I said. Walk away from me."
The Martian turned without a word and walked away from Tragor along the
deck.
Tragor removed a small metallic box from his three-pocketed waist
jacket, opened it, and withdrew the dart projector from its sterile
container. He raised the projector to eye level and took careful aim.
The dart struck the warrior-caste Martian at the base of the neck and
went completely through his skull, passing upward through his brain to
emerge at the top of his head.
He did not die standing up. The needlelike sliver of metal severed
a cerebral nerve that controlled the functioning of his muscles and
his entire body went flaccid, so that he slumped to the deck without
uttering a sound, but with a conclusive shudder that would have been
pitiful to watch if Tragor had been capable of compassion or remorse.
But Tragor felt only dark, terrible, anger, ebbing away a little now
that he had found a target for his ire and had laid that target low.
He turned and walked to where the slender woman was lying. He was more
shaken than he would have cared to admit even to himself. He had never
experienced a rage quite so uncontrollable and he knew that it did him
no credit. Jealousy? No, that was insane. How could he be jealous of a
brutish, warrior-caste Martian?
The brute had held her tightly in his arms, kissed her savagely, dared
to embrace her in a more intimate way. But he had not possessed her.
And she had not responded in any way to his brutal lovemaking. She had
struggled instead, had shown unmistakably that she would have preferred
death to a night in the dark with so primitive a lover.
But that was all over now. He had avenged and protected her and with
him it would be different.
It would be very different. He would destroy the beast image very
quickly by his tenderness and solicitude, and his virile, forthright
lovemaking. There was no brutishness in him but she would find him
very firm, accomplished, determined to make her realize that Martians
were completely human in every way that mattered—with minds and
hearts that worshipped at the shrine of love, and with bodies which
were lithe-limbed and well formed. Anatomically there was no actual
structural difference between Earthmen and Martians that went beyond
skin coloration and the more superficial aspects of posture, muscular
co-ordination in the higher cerebral centers, and the distribution of
body fat. Martians walked with a slightly stooped posture, but they
could stand straight enough when the need arose. In addition to the
difference in skin coloration their facial contours were at variance
with the human form, and their hands terminated in nails so sharp and
long that Earthmen thought of them as claws.
They were clawlike, but only because the nails contained a network of
tiny blood vessels and could not be cut without causing a Martian to
writhe in pain. Why did it so seldom occur to Earthmen that their own
bodies were primitive to an equal degree and that the heritage of the
jungle had left its mark on them? Why were they so slow to realize that
only the great beauty of their women could overcome such flaws?
Martians were human—as that term was used on Earth. To think of them
as merely humanoid did Earthmen and Earthwomen no credit, for it was
a reflection on their intelligence. And in one respect at least both
races possessed a splendor which no primitiveness could dim. In both
Martians and Earthmen the great organ of love was the same.
Tragor remained for an instant deep in thought, his eyes on the slender
woman for whom he had killed—and he would kill again, if necessary, to
make her completely his own. Then he bent and slipped one arm about her
slim waist, and gently raised her to a sitting position on the deck.
For an instant she seemed scarcely aware that she was no longer alone
with her grief. Her failure to struggle or offer any resistance at all
surprised him. She had surrendered limply to his guiding strength,
allowing him to lift her up and change the position of her body without
crying out or pleading with him not to touch her.
It was a good omen, even though it seemed strange and unnatural under
the circumstances. Then, quite suddenly, he realized that she wasn't
looking at him at all. She was staring dazedly beyond him, at the blank
expanse of metal surrounding the slowly closing hull section. Her eyes
were very wide, the pupils slightly dilated, and her lips were parted,
as if she lacked the will or desire to bring her thoughts to a focus,
and exercise control over the muscles of her face.
She appeared to be in a state of shock. Well that was understandable,
he told himself. He should have anticipated such a frustrating
development and made allowances for it. He could wait. She would find
him an impetuous lover but not an inconsiderate one. He would know how
to be gentle with her.
He would wait patiently and—it suddenly seemed to him that he could no
longer breathe. Her closeness, the pulsating of the veins in her soft,
white throat, the swelling firmness of her breasts, bursting like honey
mounds from the constraining tightness of her dress made it impossible
for him to wait.
It was all like a terrible dream that is both rapturously
intoxicating—sweet beyond anything the waking mind can experience—and
laden with the blackest kind of guilt. He had not wanted to be cruelly
importunate with this woman whom he desired so ardently—this woman
whom he had already begun to worship.
But now he had no choice. Restraint had become impossible.
His arms went out and around her. She was not the first human woman he
had ever made love to, but in that instant of fierce passion no other
woman existed for him. There were no memories to distract him and
provide comparisons, for all past amorous conquests dwindled to a pin
point glimmering in his mind, and then vanished completely.
He was only aware of her. Aware of her hair, which his taloned hands
caressed lightly and the soft flesh of her shoulders which he also
caressed, and the tender swell of her bosom which drew his eyes, and
her mouth, which he wanted to smother with kisses. He wanted to envelop
her completely, and in every pore of her being, to make of his body
a palpitating web of love which would bind and imprison her and make
her his captive and a slave of love through long months and years of
amorous dalliance.
He wanted to hold her tightly and never let her go. There were lovers
who remained entwined the whole night through and he wanted to be such
a lover now, but a single night would never suffice and he wanted it to
be a hundred nights, a thousand.
Earthmen were too quick in their lovemaking, headstrong and foolish.
They thought of love as a kind of explosion, which quickly burned
itself out and left only ashes. He knew better. He was far wiser and
now that wisdom and knowledge was a living flame consuming him. Not a
flame that could be extinguished in one soaring burst of ecstacy or a
hundred such bursts but a flame that would burn forever.
First her mouth. Claim and possess it, parted lips over parted lips
with the dartings of love between. Yes, her moist and yielding lips.
She would bend to him and he would kiss her with such ardor....
But it was not as he had expected. As his arms moved to envelop her
more completely and his lips approached her mouth she shuddered
convulsively and strained backwards, crying out in wild terror.
It was not the cry alone which unnerved him. He could see her eyes now.
They were very close and he could look directly into them. They were no
longer glazed and uncomprehending. They were trained on his face with a
blazing intensity of hatred and loathing.
It was horrible. It shamed him. He himself began to tremble and turn
pale. Not only had his ardor failed to arouse her, it had stirred
her to the kind of response that he most dreaded—anger, contempt,
revulsion. She was no longer even frightened. He could see that she
despised him too much to be afraid of him. He revolted her, sickened
her. But strongest of all was the hatred—a blazing hatred such as he
had never before seen in the eyes of a woman.
It was not even a womanly hate. It was the kind of hate that could
crush and destroy. She was clubbing him with it, using it as a
gladiator would use a mace—a mace encircled with cruel, blood-drawing
spikes.
He had no defense against such contempt, such hatred. It unmanned him,
so that he cowered back from her as if she had turned suddenly into a
savage beast with bared fangs, slowly pacing about in front of him, and
waiting for his knees to give way before closing in for the kill.
The words she flung at him were the worst of all. He had hoped never to
hear such words spoken by any woman. But from her lips they seared all
that remained of his pride, so that his image of himself as a lover,
accomplished and irresistible, shriveled and blackened and fell apart,
like a leaf on a burning tree.
Her words were destructive to more than his pride. They even made him
doubt the genuineness of his past triumphs, his success with Martian
women. Had his fierce lovemaking not been what Martian women wanted?
Had he been less than an artist in love? Had they submitted to him only
because of his high station, while secretly holding him in contempt?
If they had spoken such words as were coming now from the lips of the
woman before him would their voices have rung out with the same biting
contempt?
He could imagine a Martian woman saying such things to him. He could
picture it now. But the words of the slender woman before him were
infinitely more cruel and vindictive and even as he listened to
them he could feel his virility ebbing away. They were terrible and
crushing words and they burned into his brain like a firing rod glowing
white-hot.
"If you touch me again I will kill myself! I will find a way! If only
you knew how loathsome you are—what a beast thing you are! I would
rather be embraced by a toad! I do not know where you came from or what
you are. But you are inhuman beasts, cruel and cold and merciless.
We will fight you until every man and woman on Earth is dead. If
necessary, we will all die. But we will fight you. You can be sure of
that. Oh, you can be very sure! You killed my husband! He had every
right to defend himself. He saw what you did to the man who fled."
Tragor heard himself speaking in reply. How he managed to find the
right words he did not quite know, and perhaps they weren't the right
words at all. But he had to say them. He had to speak.
"Listen to me," he said, with a pleading urgency in his voice that he
could not repress and did not perhaps really want to repress. "I can
speak your language. We have been on Earth for almost two years but we
have taken care to keep our presence well concealed. We are from Mars.
We call our home planet Jagroon, but to you it is Mars. A few of our
spaceships have been sighted in the past, for almost twenty years now.
But we sent only a few ships to Earth to explore the planet at first
and did not come in force until two years ago.
"Do you understand? I want it all to be very clear to you."
The woman's lips had gone very white. "It is clear enough. It is what
I feared. Beasts like you, and men like my husband cannot live on the
same planet in peace. You will either destroy us or we will destroy
you. My husband took the flying saucer sightings seriously. I did not.
I only wish that my blindness had not been shared by so many."
"If that blindness had not been widespread you still could not have
struck a single destructive blow against us," Tragor heard himself
saying, knowing that he lied but determined to prevent the woman from
knowing. "You have atomic weapons, but so have we. And our weapons
are more destructive than yours. We could destroy all of your cities
overnight. We could destroy them instantly."
"Then why have you not done so? Isn't that what beasts would normally
be expected to do?"
"We have a better plan. It is not our purpose to destroy but to build.
That is why we are here. To build a better world for both men and
Martians."
"With the beasts in the saddle, is that it? Peace on your terms. Peace
with slavery for every man and woman on Earth."
"I did not say that."
"No, but you are thinking it. I can see it in your eyes."
"And what if it were true? Should a higher race bow to a race that
could not hope to build a ship like this? If you could see the Martian
cities you would understand."
"I have never seen a city built by beasts, filled with beasts. I doubt
if I would care to visit such a city. The constant stench would be
intolerable—the stench of cruelty and death."
"We are not beasts," Tragor said, still looking at her almost
pleadingly. "If I were stretched out on a table in the operating room
of a New York hospital, the surgeons busy with their scalpels, there
would be no horrified faces, I can assure you. There is nothing about
my body or brain that is in the least beastlike."
"You forget. I have seen a demonstration of just how beastlike Martians
can be."
"Is there nothing I can say to convince you then?"
"Nothing. You killed a man I loved more than my own life. You've killed
me too. I died with him. You are looking upon a woman who no longer
places any value upon the mockery life that remains. That is why I do
not fear you."
It seemed to Tragor that he, too, had died. At least a part of himself
had perished. For a moment life had flamed so brightly in him that he
had feared it might consume him. But now that vision of beauty, of
desire's complete fulfillment, had been snatched away. There could be
no rapture in the night with a woman who looked upon him with loathing
and contempt.
He could take her by force, easily enough. But how could love have any
meaning when it was completely one-sided? Just to make love was not
enough. You had to be loved in return, loved for yourself. He had never
been able to endure a completely unresponsive woman, a cold shape of
ice in his arms. The warrior-caste brutes felt quite differently about
it. They preferred either complete passivity in a woman, or protests,
tears, and wild strugglings. He had no great liking for either. He
preferred a woman who was as passionate as himself and who could return
his caresses with unrestrained ardor.
Perhaps it was a limitation in his nature. He had never felt
completely happy about it and now it returned to torment him. Why
couldn't he be primitively ruthless? Had not an Earth philosopher
said that all women were alike in the dark? Perhaps in the dark even
a completely unresponsive woman ... no, no, it was unthinkable. He
was not a warrior-caste brute and never could be. The small, fleshy
protuberances growing from his head were a mark of his high station.
The ruling caste alone possessed them, and no man who wore them could
ever descend to that kind of barbaric lovemaking.
It seemed suddenly horrible, unendurable to him that he should have to
surrender all hope of fulfillment. He had never before been quite so
stirred by a woman. Her great beauty had enraptured him beyond reason.
Not only her physical charms in the light of day when she was standing
close to him, but the promise of delight which those charms hinted at
when the daylight was gone and they would be alone together in the
night.
No, it could never be now and he had lost her forever. He felt like a
man cast adrift in an open boat, far from land, his throat parched,
the sun beating down. Water in abundance, but not a drop to quench his
thirst.
If only he were a man in a completely human sense, a man like her
husband. Then, no matter how much she hated him, he might be able to
overcome her resistance by continuous, passionate pleading.
But now there was no hope. No hope at all.
He turned and gestured to a waiting, warrior-caste brute, whose
stationary bulk cast a long shadow on the smooth metal wall opposite
the drawn up, now completely telescoped stairway. The warrior stepped
forward and stood waiting expectantly.
Tragor spoke tonelessly, as if the tumult within him had risen to such
unprecedented heights that its ebbing had left him exhausted.
"Take her to my sleeping compartment. I am quite sure that she will
go willingly." He looked at the woman as he spoke, and was not too
surprised when she nodded. She at least had the good sense to realize
that further struggle would be useless.
"If you harm her in any way I will kill you," Tragor said, surprised
and shocked by the explosive violence which gave his words so much
added weight that the warrior-caste brute paled and stared with alarm
in his eyes at the slumped form at the end of the passageway. From
the slain warrior's dart-pierced skull a thin ribbon of blood was
descending to the deck and spreading out in a widening pool which
gleamed in the overhead lamps.
"I warn you," the slender woman said. "If you touch me again I will
find a way to kill myself."
She turned then and followed the waiting warrior down the passageway to
where it turned sharply to the right.
