The Lovers

A low moan answered him. He unlocked the bedroom door and shoved it open. She was lying with her eyes wide.

'Jeannette. Do you feel better?'

'No. Worse. Much worse.'

'Don't worry, baby. I've got just the medicine that'll put new life in you. In a couple of hours you'll be sitting up and yelling for steaks. And you won't even want to touch that milk. You'll be drinking your Easyglow by the gallon. And then–'

He faltered as he saw her face. It was a stony mask of distress, like the grotesque and twisted wooden masks of the Greek tragedians.

'Oh, no... no! ' she moaned. 'What did you say? Easyglow?' Her voice rose. 'Is that what you've been giving me?'

'Shib, Jeannette. Take it easy. You liked it. What's the difference? The point is that we're going–'

'Oh, Hal, Hal! What have you done?'

Her pitiful face tore at him. Tears were falling; if ever a stone could weep, it was weeping now.

He turned and ran into the kitchen where he took out the sheath, removed the contents, and inserted the needle in the tube. He went back into the bedroom. She said nothing as he thrust the point into her vein. For a moment, he was afraid the needle would break. The skin was almost brittle.

'This stuff cures Earthpeople in a jiffy,' he said, with what he hoped was a cheery beside manner.

'Oh, Hal, come here. It's – it's too late now.'

He withdrew the needle, rubbed alcohol on the break, and put a pad on it. Then he dropped to his knees by the bed and kissed her. Her lips were leathery.

'Hal, do you love me?'

'Won't you ever believe me? How many times must I tell you?'

'No matter what you'll find out about me?' 'I know all about you.'

'No, you don't. You can't. Oh, Great Mother, if only I'd told you! Maybe you'd have loved me just as much, anyway. Maybe–'

'Jeannette! What's the matter?'

Her lids had closed. Her body shook in a spasm. When the violent trembling passed, she whispered with stiff lips. He bent his head to hear her.

'What did you say? Jeannette! Speak!'

He shook her. The fever must have died, for her shoulder was cold. And hard.

The words came low and slurring.

'Take me to my aunts and sisters. They'll know what to do. Not for me . . . but for the–'

'What do you mean?'

'Hal, will you always love–'

'Yes, yes. You know that! We've got more important things to do than talk about that.'

If she heard him, she gave no sign. Her head was tilted far back with her exquisite nose pointed at the ceiling. Her lids and mouth were closed, and her hands were her side, palms up. The breasts were motionless. Whatever breath she might have was too feeble to stir them.

18

 

Hal pounded on Fobo's door until it opened.

The empathist's wife said, 'Hal, you startled me!'

'Where's Fobo?'

'He's at a college board meeting.' 'I've got to see him at once.'

Abasa yelled after him, 'If it's important, go ahead! Those meetings bore him, anyway!'

By the time Yarrow had taken the steps three at a time and beelined across the nearby campus, his lungs were on fire. He didn't slacken his pace; he hurtled up the steps of the administration building and burst into the board room.

When he tried to speak, he had to stop and suck in deep breaths.

Fobo jumped out of his chair. 'What's up?'

'You – you've – got to come. Matter – life – death!'

'Excuse me, gentlemen,' Fobo said.

The ten wogs nodded their heads and resumed the conference. The empathist put on his cloak and skull-cap with its artificial antennae and led Hal out.

'Now, what is it?'

'Listen, I've got to trust you. I know you can't promise me anything. But I think you won't turn me in to my people. You're a real person, Fobo.'

'Get to the point, my friend.'

'Listen. You wogs are as advanced as we in endocrinology, even, if you lag way behind in other sciences. And you've got an advantage. You have made some medical examinations and tests on her. You should know something about her anatomy and physiology and metabolism. You–'

'Jeannette? Oh, Jeannette Rastignac! The lalitha!'

'Yes. I've been hiding her in my apartment.'

'I know.'

'You know? But how? I mean–'

The wog put his hand on Hal's shoulder.

'There's something you should know. I meant to tell you tonight after I got home. This morning a man named Art Hunah Pukui rented an apartment in a building across the street. He claimed he wanted to live among us so he could learn our language and our mores more swiftly.

'But he's spent most of his time in this building carrying around a case which I imagine contains various devices to enable him to hear from a distance the sounds in your apartment. However, the landlord kept an eye on him, so he wasn't able to plant any of his devices.'

'Pukui is an Uzzite.'

'If you say so. Bight now he's in his apartment watching this building through a powerful telescope.'

'And he could be listening to us right now, too,' Hal said. 'His instruments are extremely sensitive. Still, the walls are heavily soundproofed. Anyway, forget about him!'

Fobo followed him into his rooms. The wog felt Jeannette's forehead and tried to lift her lid to look at her eye. It would not bend.

'Hmm! Calcification of the outer skin layer is far advanced.'

With one hand he threw the sheet from her figure and with the other he grabbed her gown by the neckline and ripped the thin cloth down the middle. The two parts fell to either side. She lay nude, as silent and pale and beautiful as a sculptor's masterpiece.

Her lover gave a little cry at what seemed like a violation. But he said nothing because he realized that Fobo's move was medical. In any case, the wog would not have been sexually interested.

Puzzled, he watched. Fobo had tapped his fingertips against her flat belly and then put his ear against it. When he stood up, he shook his head.

'I won't deceive you, Hal. Though we'll do the best we can, we may not be good enough. She'll have to go to a surgeon. If we can cut her eggs out before they hatch, that, plus the serum you gave her, may reverse the effect and pull her out.'

'Eggs?'

'I'll tell you later. Wrap her up. I'll run upstairs and phone Dr. Kuto.'

Yarrow folded a blanket around her. Then he rolled her over. She was as stiff as a show-window dummy. He covered her face. The stony look was too much for him.

His wristphone shrilled. Automatically, he reached to flick the stud and just in time drew his hand back. It shrilled loudly, insistently. After a few seconds of agony, he decided that if he didn't answer, he would stir up their suspicion far faster.

'Yarrow!'

'Shib?'

'Beport to the Archurielite. You will be given fifteen minutes.'

'Shib.'

Fobo came back in and said, 'What're you going to do?'

Hal squared his mouth and said, 'You take her by the shoulders, and I'll carry her feet. Rigid as she is, we won't need a stretcher.'

As they carried her down the steps, he said, 'Can you hide us after the operation, Fobo? We won't be able to use the gig now.'

'Don't worry,' the wog said enigmatically over his shoulder. 'The Earthmen are going to be too busy to run after you.'

It took sixty seconds to get her into the gig, hop to the hospital, and get her out.

Hal said, 'Let's put her on the ground a minute. I've got to set the gig on auto and send her back to the Gabriel. That way, at least, they won't know where I am.'

'No. Leave it here. You may be able to use it afterward.'

'After what?'

'Later. Ah, there's Kuto.'

In the waiting room, Hal paced back and forth and puffed Merciful Seraphim out in chains of smoke. Fobo sat on a chair and rubbed his bald pate and the thick golden corkscrew fuzz on the back of his head.

'All of this might have been avoided,' he said unhappily. 'If I had known the lalitha was living with you, I might have guessed why you wanted the Easyglow. Though not necessarily so. Anyway, I didn't find out until two days ago that she was in your apartment. And I was too busy with Project Earthman to think much about her.'

'Project Earthman?' said Hal. 'What's that?'

Fobo's V-in-V lips parted m a smile to reveal the sharp serrated ridges of bone.

'I can't tell you now because your colleagues on the Gabriel might, just possibly, learn about it from you before it takes effect. However, I think I can safely tell you that we know about your plan for spreading the deadly globin-locking molecule through our atmosphere.'

'There was a time when I would have been horrified to learn that,' Hal said. 'But now it doesn't matter.'

'You don't want to know how we found out about it?'

'I suppose so,' Hal said dully.

'When you asked us for samples of blood, you aroused our suspicion.'

He tapped the end of his absurdly long nose.

'We can't read your thoughts, of course. But concealed in this flesh are two antennae. They are very sensitive; evolution has not dulled our sense of smell as it has among you Terrans. They allow us to detect, through odor, very slight changes in the metabolism of others. When we were asked by one of your emissaries to donate blood for their scientific research, we smelled a – shall I call it furtive? – emanation. We finally did give you the blood. But it was that of a barnyard creature which uses copper in its blood cells. We wogs use magnesium as the oxygen-carrying element in our blood cells.'

'Our virus is useless!'

'Yes. Of course, in time, when you'd learned to read our writing and got hold of our textbooks, you'd have discovered the truth. But before that happened it would be too late, I trust, hope, and pray, for the truth to be of any importance or consequence.

'Meanwhile, we've determined just what you were up to. I'm sorry to say that we had to use force to do it, but since our survival was at stake and you Earthmen were the aggressor, the means justified the ends. A week ago we finally found an opportunity to catch a biochemist and his gapt while they were visiting a laboratory in the college. We injected a drug and hypnotized them. It was difficult getting the truth out of them but only because of the language barrier. However, I've learned a certain amount of American.

'We were horrified. But not really surprised. In fact, because we suspected something was afoot that we wouldn't like, and from the very first contact, we were ready to take action. So, from the first day your ship landed, we've been busy. The vessel, as you know, is directly–'