Roy looked up at her. Very pretty. About five-five, blue eyes, blond hair, fair-skinned. Very well endowed. No makeup. He wondered if she spelled her name with a C or a K? “Roy,” he said, getting to his feet.
“How do you like it so far?” Katrina asked.
Roy returned her smile. The opening was just too good to let slide by. “I don’t know,” he said, “yet.”
She looked puzzled for a moment, then the double meaning came to her. She smiled, but the smile did not quite touch her eyes. They remained as cold as the land she reportedly was from. “Yes,” she said, “I see. A joke. That’s funny.” She laughed.
Roy thought the laughter sounded very false. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
“You didn’t,” she was quick to reply. “A society without humor would be very drab indeed. Tell me, Roy, what are you going to report to General Raines?”
Roy felt the first mild clutches of panic grab at his guts. He kept his expression bland, but his face felt hot and he knew he was flushed. He thanked the gods for his dark complexion.
“Don’t try to deny it, Roy.” She stood calm and self-assured. “You and Judy were not on the campus six hours before we discovered you both were not what you pretended to be.”
Roy decided to level with her. There was something about the young woman. He kept picking up strange vibes that suggested-he hoped-she was not really happy with her role in the IPF.
“Very well, Katrina. I will report to General Raines that you and the others in your party are here spreading communist dogma.”
She cocked her head to one side and looked at him. “Dogma. A good word. I like it. I shall retain that word for usage. Aren’t you in the least interested in how we discovered your secret?”
Roy shrugged. He wondered if he was going to have to shoot his way out of this bind. He had a 9mm submachine in his kit, and could feel the weight of the .38 pressing against the skin of his belly. He wondered where Judy was.
“I noticed the minute we arrived we didn’t exactly fit in with the crowd.”
“How?” she asked politely.
“Other than the fact I’m Indian and Judy is Jewish, I think we are too well-fed, too healthy, and that we walk with a military bearing, perhaps. Is that good enough for you?”
“Yes. That is correct. That is totally accurate. Thank you.”
She sounded like a computer. “Are you a clone, or something?” Roy asked her.
She cocked her head to the other side. Roy felt something soft touch his heart. Oh boy, he thought. Feelings of gentleness for a goddamned Russian, he berated himself. Roy, you’re coming unwrapped. But she sure was pretty.
“Clone? I do not understand that. What is a clone?”
“Your speech is perfect. Your dress is perfect. Your posture is perfect. Your hair is perfect. Are you real?”
This time the smile touched her eyes. “Would you like to touch me to see for yourself?”
Roy smiled, mischief in his eyes. If, the young man thought, I’m to be hanged anyway, I might as well make the best of a bad situation. He reached out and cupped a soft breast.
Katrina did not pull away. But her eyes darkened a bit.
“I guess you are real,” Roy said, removing his hand reluctantly.
Katrina licked her lips. “Why… what was the purpose of touching me there?”
“Because I wanted to touch you there.”
She looked confused for a moment. “In your society, does one always do what one wishes to?”
“No, of course not. What I just did was wrong. It would be considered very rude and I’d probably get slapped for doing it.”
That only seemed to confuse her more. “Why, I mean, it felt… nice.”
Now Roy was confused. “You’re, ah, you’ve never been touched, I mean, like that before?”
She shook her head. “Oh no! Any type of… sexual touching is not permitted before the committee chooses a marriage partner.”
“What? I mean, Katrina, are you supposed to be telling me all this?”
“That is correct. I am not.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
Again she shook her head. Her eyes, once so cold, now seemed troubled. “I… don’t know why. You’re … different, I think.”
Roy had been correct: The girl was not happy with her life. “How old are you, Katrina?”
“I believe I have seventeen years of age.”
She believes? Jailbait, Roy thought. But if we have no nation, then we have no laws. And if we have no laws … He shook that thought away.
“What do you mean, Katrina, that bit about a marriage partner being chosen? I never heard of such a thing.”
“How many years do you have, Roy?”
“I’m twenty-three. Don’t you want to answer my question?”
She hesitated, cut her eyes toward a group of people gathered a few hundred meters away, then took his arm. Her touch was warm to his skin. “Let’s walk around some, Roy.”
They walked the weed-filled campus, heading away from the crowd.
Katrina said, “I was chosen to confront you with the news of your discovery. Your deception. I was instructed to let you run if that was to be your choice of action.”
“The IPF would have killed me?”
“No. I do not believe so. That is not supposed to be our mission. But with Mike one never knows. There are members of the IPF surrounding this institution. They would have stopped you.”
“Judy?”
“The Jewess? She would have been taken alive. She would probably have been … would have become one of the pleasure women.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Malestfemale contact in any sexual manner is strictly forbidden in our society. To preserve the races. But males over the age of twenty-one are allowed to satisfy themselves with selected women who have been altered.”
Roy looked at her, not understanding any of this.
“Altered women cannot bear offspring,” she explained matter-of-factly.
“I see. I think. Let me see if I can put the rest of this … story together, Katrina. You people-your leaders-practice selective breeding among humans?”
“That… is one way of putting it, yes. We-they-are attempting to purify the races.”
“Blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin?”
“Yes. Most of us.”
Something yanked gently at Roy’s mind. Something he had read or heard or seen about some other person or group, a long time ago, who had strived for the same thing. He couldn’t bring the person or group to mind. He thought it had something to do with Europe. Long time back. Before his parents were even born.
“There are no people of color in your society?” he asked.
She looked at him as though he had asked a very stupid question. “No. That is why we chose Iceland. Theirs is practically a pure race.”
Germany! The word leaped into his consciousness. It had something to do with Germany. And some guy with a funny name. But history had never been one of Roy’s favorite subjects, and like so many others his age, his education was erratic at best.
“What will you-your people-do with the different races here in America, Katrina?”
She shrugged. “Over a period of time, we shall breed all colors out. That will take many generations, but our leaders believe it can be done. Our learned people have said so.”
Hitler. Roy found the man’s name. More flooded into the light of consciousness. The Gestapo, the SS. Concentration camps. Extermination. Gas chambers. The horror he had seen in old movies. He looked at Katrina. He just could not believe she could do such things to another human being.
But he also knew that looks could be very deceiving.
Katrina said, “Our people have taught us that people of color are inferior to us. From what I have seen-or have been allowed to see-I tend to believe it.” She seemed eager to talk and Roy wondered if he was being set up for a fall. For some reason, he didn’t believe so.