While to the slow mind’s eye she was still standing at the far end of the room, she was already at Maltzer’s side, her long, flexible fingers gentle but very firm upon his arms. She waited—
The room shimmered. There was sudden violent heat beating upon Harris’ face. Then the air steadied again and Deirdre was saying softly, in a mournful whisper:
“I’m sorry — I had to do it. I’m sorry — I didn’t mean you to know—”
Time caught up with Harris. He saw it overtake Maltzer too, saw the man jerk convulsively away from the grasping hands, in a ludicrously futile effort to forestall what had already happened. Even thought was slow, compared with Deirdre’s swiftness.
The sharp outward jerk was strong. It was strong enough to break the grasp of human hands and catapult Maltzer out and down into the swimming gulfs of New York. The mind leaped ahead to a logical conclusion and saw him twisting and turning and diminishing with dreadful rapidity to a tiny point of darkness that dropped away through sunlight toward the shadows near the earth. The mind even conjured up a shrill, thin cry that plummeted away with the falling body and hung behind it in the shaken air.
But the mind was reckoning on human factors.
Very gently and smoothly Deirdre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers unwrapped themselves from his arms slowly, so that he could regain control of his own body before she released him.
He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an unmeasurable length of time. Harris could not. Deirdre waited patiently. It was Maltzer who regained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep.
“All right,” he said breathlessly. “All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know! You can’t hide your feeling from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time — next time I won’t wait to talk!”
Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible exertion of the past minutes; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human.
“You still don’t see,” she said. “Think, Maltzer, think!”
There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head tilted back to watch Maltzer’s face. She saw only stunned stupidity on it now; he had passed through too much emotional storm to think at all.
“All right,” she told him. “Listen — I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was true — but not for the reason you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?”
Harris saw the tremendous effort that went into Maltzer’s wakening. He saw the man pull his mind back into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness.
“You… you do admit it, then?” he asked in a bewildered voice.
Deirdre shook her head sharply.
“Do you still think of me as delicate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could” — she glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence— “tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but then, I have no feeling—”
Maltzer gasped, “Deirdre—”
She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look — listen!”
She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.
The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction — toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jarred itself shut.
“You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?”
But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.
Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was panther-like in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.
“You were wrong about me, Maltzer,” she said with an effort at patience in her voice. “But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them. Why” — her voice took on a tinge of contempt— “already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot — I’ve learned too much already.”
Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight — could she see microscopically and telescopically? — and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?
“You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste,” she went on, still pacing with that powerful, tigerish tread. “Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer — Harris — but why do you think it’s the last?”
She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.
“No,” Deirdre said, “I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy… too easy.”
She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now.
“I didn’t mean to let you know,” she said. “I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew.”
“But Deirdre—” breathed Maltzer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, “but Deirdre, if we did succeed — what’s wrong? I can feel it now — I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy — you still are. Why Deirdre?”
She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare.
“Why are you so sure of that?” she asked gently.
“You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein… you say my creation’s flawless. Then what—”