Part 21 (1/2)
I was in love.
She was still speaking. ” After her experiences with the jet ski set and the artist's colony on Fire Island, she returned to the city, and sought more and different experiences.
”Eventually she came upon them. The Men of the Eye. They were a religious sect, unto themselves. They wors.h.i.+ped sight and experience. This was what she had been born for. She fell into their ways at once, wors.h.i.+ping in the dawn hours at their many-eyed idol and living life to its hilt.
”Their ways were dark ways, and the things they did were not always clean things. Yet she persisted with them.
”Then, one night, during what they called the Time of the Eye, they demanded a sacrifice, and she was the one so chosen.
”They took her eyes.”
I sat very still. I wasn't quite sure I'd heard what I'd heard. A weird religious sect, almost devil wors.h.i.+p of a sort, there in the heart of New York City; and they had cut out the eyes of the most famous fas.h.i.+on model of all time, in a ceremony? It was too fantastic for belief. Surprising myself, I found old emotions flooding back into me. I could feel disbelief, horror, sorrow. This girl who called herself Piretta, and was that Piretta, had brought me to life again, only to fill me with a story so ludicrous I could do nothing but pa.s.s it on as dream-fantasy and the results of a persecution complex.
After all, didn't she have those shallow blue eyes?
They were unseeing, but they were there. How could they have been stolen? I was confused and dismayed.
I turned to her suddenly, and my arms went about her. I don't know what it was that possessed me, I had always been shy when women were involved, even before the War, but now my heart leaped into my throat, and I kissed her full on the mouth.
Her lips opened like two petals before me, and there was ardor returned. My hand found her breast.
We sat that way in pa.s.sion for several minutes, and finally, when we were satisfied that the moment had lived its existence fully, we separated, and I began to prattle about getting well, and marrying, and moving to the country, where I could care for her. Then I ran my hands across her face; feeling the beauty of her, letting my fingertips soak up the wonder of her. My smallest finger's tip happened to encounter her eye.
It was not moist.
I paused, and a gleam of smile broke at the edge of her wondrous mouth. ”True,” she said, and popped her eyes into the palm of her hand.
My fist went to my mouth, and the sound of a small animal being crushed underfoot came from me.
Then I noticed she had the sharpened stick in her hand, point upward, as though it was a driving spike. ”What is that?” I asked, suddenly chilled for no reason.
”You didn't ask if Piretta accepted the religion,” she answered softly, as though I was a child who did not understand.
”What do you mean?” I stammered.
”This is the Time of the Eye, don't you know?”
And she came at me with the stick. I fell back, but she wound herself around me, and we fell to the ground together, and her blindness did not matter at all.
”But don't!” I shrieked, as the stick came up. ”I love you. I want to make you mine, to marry you!”
”How foolish,” she chided me gently, ”I can't marry you: you're sick in the mind.”
Then there was the stick, and for so long now, the Time of the Eye has been blindly with me.
Life Hutch
TERRENCE SLID HIS RIGHT HAND, the one out of sight of the robot, up his side. The razoring pain of the three broken ribs caused his eyes to widen momentarily in pain. Then he recovered himself and closed them till he was studying the machine through narrow slits.
If the eyeb.a.l.l.s click, I'm dead, thought Terrence.
The intricate murmurings of the life hutch around him brought back the immediacy of his situation. His eyes again fastened on the medicine cabinet clamped to the wall next to the robot's duty- niche.
Cliche. So near yet so far. It could be all the way back on Antares-Base for all the good it's doing me, he thought, and a crazy laugh rang through his head. He caught himself just in time. Easy! Three days is a nightmare, but cracking up will only make it end sooner. That was the last thing he wanted. But it couldn't go on much longer.
He flexed the fingers of his right hand. It was all he could move. Silently he d.a.m.ned the technician who had pa.s.sed the robot through. Or the politician who had let inferior robots get placed in the life hutches so he could get a rake-off from the government contract. Or the repairman who hadn't bothered checking closely his last time around. All of them; he d.a.m.ned them all.
They deserved it.
He was dying.
His death had started before he had reached the life hutch. Terrence had begun to die when he had gone into the battle.
He let his eyes close completely, let the sounds of the life hutch fade from around him. Slowly, the sound of the coolants hush-hus.h.i.+ng through the wall-pipes, the relay machines feeding their messages without pause from all over the galaxy, the whirr of the antenna's standard turning in its socket atop the bubble, slowly they melted into silence. He had resorted to blocking himself off from reality many times during the past three days. It was either that or existing with the robot watching, and eventually he would have had to move. To move was to die. It was that simple.
He closed his ears to the whisperings of the life hutch; he listened to the whisperings within himself.
”Good G.o.d! There must be a million of them!”
It was the voice of the squadron leader, Resnick, ringing in his suit intercom.
”What kind of battle formation is that supposed to be?” came another voice. Terrence looked at the radar screen, at the flickering dots signifying Kyben s.h.i.+ps.
”Who can tell with those toadstool-shaped s.h.i.+ps of theirs,” Resnick answered. ”But remember, the whole front umbrella-part is studded with cannon, and it has a h.e.l.luva range of fire. Okay, watch yourselves, good luck-and give 'em h.e.l.l!”
The fleet dove straight for the Kyben armada.
To his mind came the sounds of war, across the gulf of s.p.a.ce. It was all imagination; in that tomb there was no sound. Yet he could clearly detect the hiss of his scout's blaster as it poured beam after beam into the lead s.h.i.+p of the Kyben fleet.
His sniper-cla.s.s scout had been near the point of that deadly Terran phalanx, driving like a wedge at the alien s.h.i.+ps, converging on them in loose battle-formation. It was then it had happened.
One moment he had been heading into the middle of the battle, the left flank of the giant Kyben dreadnaught turning crimson under the impact of his firepower.
The next moment, he had skittered out of the formation which had slowed to let the Kyben craft overshoot, while the Earthmen decelerated to pick up maneuverability.
He had gone on at the old level and velocity, directly into the forward guns of a toadstool-shaped Kyben destroyer.
The first beam had burned the gun-mounts and directional equipment off the front of the s.h.i.+p, scorching down the aft side in a smear like oxidized chrome plate. He had managed to avoid the second beam.
His radio contact had been brief; he was going to make it back to Antares-Base if he could. If not, the formation would be listening for his homing-beam from a life hutch on whatever planetoid he might find for a crash-landing.
Which was what he had done. The charts had said the pebble spinning there was technically 1-333, 2-A, M & S, 3-804.39#, which would have meant nothing but three-dimensional coordinates had not the small # after the data indicated a life hutch somewhere on its surface.
His distaste for being knocked out of the fighting, being forced onto one of the life hutch planetoids, had been offset only by his fear of running out of fuel before he could locate himself. Of eventually drifting off into s.p.a.ce somewhere, to finally wind up as an artificial satellite around some minor sun.
The s.h.i.+p pancaked in under minimal reverse drive, bounced high twice and caromed ten times, tearing out chunks of the rear section, but had come to rest a scant two miles from the life hutch, jammed into the rocks.