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  Where was the source? Was it a chemical laser, or a gas laser, or what?

  “Neither,” Mirtin said. “It doesn’t work on the same principles as the portable lasers Earth now has.”

  “Then-what-?”

  Mirtin was silent.

  “It’s something we aren’t supposed to know about? Something we have to discover for ourselves?”

  “To some extent, yes.”

  Charley brimmed with curiosity. They talked for a while; and then Mirtin visibly tired. The boy got ready to take his leave.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised, and flitted off into the night.

  Some time later, Mirtin discovered that the disruptor was gone. He had seen Charley put it back with the other tools, or at least he thought he had; but there was no sign of it now. Mirtin felt a stab of alarm, only briefly. In a way, he had expected something like this. It was the risk he had run by showing Charley his tools.

  Would Charley use the disruptor as a weapon? Hardly.

  Would he show it to anyone else? Certainly not.

  Would he try to get it open and study its mechanism? Quite probably, Mirtin admitted.

  However, he could not bring himself to see that as any menace to anyone. Let the boy have it, he thought. He may benefit from it. And in any case there’s nothing I can do about it now.

  Fourteen

  Vorneen had begun to ask himself wonderingly how it had happened, and when. He was in love with Kathryn Mason, there could be no doubt of that. What he felt for her was as strong as what he felt for Mirtin and Glair, and since he loved them, he must love her. But was it possible? Did it make any sense? Where had it begun?

  He had wanted to have sexual relations with her, of course, right from the start. But that was not at all the same thing as being in love with her.

  Vorneen was by nature a seducer. That was his role in the sexual group: he was the predator, the aggressor who initiated the matings. Mirtin would never take an active role, while Glair provoked sexual activity only in the feminine facet of the healer, the consoler, the soother. Vorneen sought passion for its own sake. That was acceptable, and moreover necessary to the continuity of the group. Within the group, he kindled, he galvanized. If sometimes he found it needful to go outside the group, neither Glair nor Mirtin objected. Why should they?

  Of course, all that had to do with Dirnan mores and the specifically Dirnan type of sexual activity. Vorneen had never considered the possibility of extending his range of seductions to the Earthborn female. Like any watcher, he assumed that there would never be an occasion for him to come in contact with an Earthman, and certainly he had never visualized himself thrown into such intimate circumstances as he now had entered with Kathryn Mason. Nor had it ever crossed his mind that he might feel physical desire for a woman of Earth.

  Yet he wore an Earthman’s body. It was anatomically perfect, at least externally. Its inner drives were purely Dirnan, or so he thought; his body could ingest Earth food, but if he ate something that Earthmen loved which happened to make Dirnans ill, he would get ill. He had assumed, too, that the governing sexual nature of his outer body would remain purely Dirnan. He went on feeling desire for Mirtin and Glair, even though they were hidden beneath synthetic Earthman flesh. When they had made love aboard the ship, they did so in the Dirnan fashion, making no use of their external Earth-type sexual organs. Why, then, should he expect his counterfeit Earthman body to feel authentic desire for an Earthman female?

  Was it simply his inner drives, his Vorneen-drives, seeking an outlet in a different context?

  That was it, he told himself at first. As seducer, he was primed to seduce, and his drives related to the appropriate context. With no Dirnans at hand, this female Earthman would have to suffice.

  And there was the sense of challenge. Could he seduce her as he seduced so many of his own kind? Would his present body function properly? How successful would he be? Would he give her pleasure? Would there be pleasure for him?

  A game, then. No emotional content. Seduction for its own sake, pursuit merely to find out certain aspects of his present condition.

  That was not love, Vorneen knew. That was sport.

  How then, had this unwanted, unexpected, troublesome element of emotion entered the situation?

  It had begun sometime during the second week of his stay with her. He could reconstruct the outline of the process, but not the emotional sequence. He knew what he had done, but not how, or why. Especially not why.

  From the day of her visit to the Contact Cult office, Vorneen had been fully aware that she knew of his extraterrestrial origin. Of course, she must have realized what he was almost as soon as she had begun to care for him; she was an intelligent woman, and his body was only an approximate imitation of an Earthman’s, beneath the surface. She could gather from the metabolic evidence alone — his body temperature, his lack of any need to excrete wastes — that he was an alien. But until that day, Kathryn had given no outward sign of any awareness. He had seen the look in her eyes, though, when she tossed the bundle of Contact Cult literature on the bed. He had listened to the words between her words as she told him of her visit to the cult’s headquarters. Unmistakably she had been telling him, “Those people are frauds, but I know what a real alien is like, because I’ve got one living in my house!” So the pretense was over. She did not make a point of exploiting her knowledge; she never said a word about his origin, or asked a question; but she knew, and he knew that she knew, and now they were beyond a certain barrier that had separated them.

  Still, she remained aloof. She continued to sleep in the other room. When she bathed him or dressed his broken leg, the sight of his nude body clearly disturbed her. Vorneen expertly diagnosed her sexual dilemma, though his insight was purely intuitive, and not related to any pattern he had ever known among Dirnans. She desired him, and yet she was afraid of him — afraid of her own desire for him. So she kept away.

  The first time, when he had suggested she get into bed with him, he had been in real pain, still battered and bruised from his landing, still shocked and dazed over the almost certain death of Glair and the possible death of Mirtin. He had wanted warmth. He had wanted closeness. Well, she had refused that; but she had held his hand, and that was good enough.

  After that, though, he had wished for something more than that. He wanted her close enough so that he could work his wiles of seduction on her. But that, naturally, she would not countenance.

  He wished he knew more about local sexual beliefs. He had studied Earthman tribal taboos during his indoctrination sessions, of course; and during his ten years of observing these people from the sky, he had come to know a bit about their thinking on the subject. But there were gaps, and just now they were turning out to be distressingly large gaps.

  Her mate was dead. Her husband; they had only one mate at a time, always of the opposite sex, in a socially accepted sexual group here. She was a “widow’. Were widows required by custom to remain chaste for a certain mourning period? If so, how long? Her husband had died a year ago.

  There was a child in the house. Was sexual intercourse prohibited within a certain distance of a child? Was it necessary to send the child away, or to go themselves to some permissible place to perform the act?

  What about religious rites? Did they invariably precede any physical consummation?

  Vorneen did not know the answers. Privately, he suspected that Kathryn was free to give herself to him any time she pleased, and that she could not bring herself to do it.

  Certainly she was modest. Her attitude toward his own nakedness was complex, for he had learned that she once had belonged to a social caste — nurses — in which young women were allowed to view and handle ailing males without inhibition. So her half-veiled reactions to his body sprang from some conflict of desires within her, not from any violation of tribal taboo.

  She kept her own body concealed from him. In the many days he had lived here, Vorneen had seen Kathryn’s naked
ness once, and that only by accident. It had happened after dinner one night. Vorneen was reading; the child was sleeping; Kathryn was in the bath. Suddenly the child awoke from some frightening dream and began to scream. Vorneen, immobilized in the bed, could do nothing. But Kathryn had left the bathroom door open so that she would hear just such a sound. Vorneen saw her rush across the corridor, naked and glossy with moisture, momentarily visible in front of his open door as she raced toward Jill’s room. After comforting the child, she retreated just as swiftly. But he had seen her. Her body was quite different from the one Glair had chosen for herself. Glair had made a serious study of North American sexual preferences, and had designed a body crafted for maximum erotic appeal. Kathryn, since she had to make do with her own genetic heritage, fell short of Glair’s opulance. Kathryn was taller, with long, thin legs, flat buttocks, small breasts. Her body seemed built for speed and strength, rather than for softness.

  Vorneen did not object to that. The criteria by which Glair had designed her body did not happen to be his criteria for feminine beauty; Earthfolk were so alien in form to him that he had no such criteria at all. To him Kathryn was just as beautiful as Glair. More so, perhaps, since Kathryn was authentic, Glair only a sleek replica.

  He wished Kathryn would be less prudish about her body.

  He wished she would step into his room one night, in-candescently nude, and give herself to him.

  It happened, of course. But it happened without planning and with little employment of his bag of tricks.

  His broken leg was knitting rapidly, and he felt the time had come to test its strength. He had lolled in bed long enough. Since his suit’s communicator had been shattered in his landing impact, he had to get up and around if he hoped ever to be picked up by a rescue team, and it seemed to him that his leg might already be able to support his weight. One night after Kathryn had gone to sleep he pushed the coverlets back and swung both legs over the side of the bed.

  An instant of vertigo swept through him. This was the first time that he had tried to come to a true sitting position in bed. He gasped and clung to the edge of the mattress for a moment while bis body adjusted itself.

  Then, delicately, he placed the soles of his feet against the floor.

  Vorneen sat quite still. He pictured the broken leg buckling and snapping the moment he exerted pressure on it. His entire outer body might be artificial, but it was linked neurally to his inner Dirnan self; as he had had ample opportunity to discover, he felt real pain when he injured his unreal housing. Perhaps it was best to wait another few days?

  No.

  He moved his center of gravity forward, clung to the table beside the bed, and pulled himself to his feet. Gently, gently, gently---How was the leg? Supporting him? Yes!

  A moment later a wave of dizziness convulsed him like the power of a winter storm.

  His body seemed to be falling apart, each limb dropping away from the core. Vorneen cried out and took a wild plunging step with his good leg, then a half-hearted sliding step with the injured one, and finished the maneuver standing in the middle of the room, quivering violently and grasping the back of a handy chair for support. He thought the floor would open wide and engulf him. He could not see for dizziness. He shifted all his weight to the good leg, so that it fired angry protests to his neural center at being imposed upon in this fashion after such long inactivity. His broken leg was whole again, but he had not allowed for the weakness of his muscles, the chaos in his nervous system, that had come upon him from so many days in bed. Momentarily bewildered, he could not even summon the presence of mind to begin shutting down ganglia.

  “What are you doing?”

  Kathryn stood in the doorway. She wore a flimsy thigh-length nightgown that concealed nothing of her body, and her face was a study in outrage. Vorneen fought to focus his consciousness.

  “My leg— testing it—”

  She rushed to him. He was frozen where he stood, seven feet from the bed, unable to go back, unable to go forward, and rapidly losing the strength even to remain standing. Her arms were about him, steadying him. Relief flooded his system. She clutched him fiercely, and in the same instant he lost his grip on the chair and began to fall. Somehow Kathryn absorbed the full thrust of his and held him up just long enough for them to stumble three steps together and topple onto the bed.

  Together.

  He was nude, and she wore only a millimeter’s thickness of fabric. They landed in a confused heap, laughing and panting, Kathryn on top of him, and more by accident than anything else their lips touched, and suddenly, as if he had opened some immediate sensory conduit between their bodies, he felt the fire blazing within her and knew that she was his.

  How did one make love to an Earthwoman? Where were the places of excitement?

  Vorneen frantically summoned what he could recall of his theory.

  It was no use; veteran of a thousand affairs though he was, he was baffled and flustered by this unexpected encounter. His hands surged across her. But where? Elbows, breasts, shoulders, knees, buttocks? He discovered it did not matter. Kathryn was aroused. She ripped her gown away. Her flesh was like flame against him. His body was responding, which solved one question that had perturbed him.

  She covered him with her warmth.

  He knew the anatomy, but not the method of effecting consummation. Very shortly he learned it. The next thing he did not know was the increment of pleasure: when was he supposed to stop? He learned that, too, when Kathryn cried out in ecstasy and his reflexes supplied the final answer.

  Afterward she clung to him, weeping, kissing his cool skin.

  After that, she drew back and lectured him for having left the bed. “You could have hurt yourself! What did you think you were doing?”

  “Testing my leg.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking for weeks yet.”

  “I’m not so sure. My bone has knit. I ran into trouble because I got dizzy.”

  “Healed so fast?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s impossible! It couldn’t have — no broken bone could—”

  “No human bone.”

  “But you’re not“

  “No.”

  “Say it”

  “I’m not human, Kathryn.”

  “Yes. I wanted you to say it.”

  “And if I hadn’t left the bed, you wouldn’t have come in and caught me, and we wouldn’t have—”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad, Kathryn. I don’t repent at all.”

  “Neither do I.” Defiantly. “Only— I’m afraid, Vorneen.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know.” She took his hand and put it to her breasts. “What we did — what you are — if you aren’t human, how could you make love?”

  “The people who built my body knew what they were doing, I guess.”

  “Who built your body?”

  “My outer body. My disguise. Inside it’s different.”

  “Vorneen, I’m lost. Tell me—”

  “Later. We’ve got a lot of time to talk. Not now.”

  “I feel so strange, Vorneen. As though I’ve crossed a river into a strange land, a place I’ve never been before, and I don’t know where it is, I don’t know where I am.”

  “Do you like where you are now, wherever it may be?! “I think so,” she said.

  “Then why worry? You can pick up a map of the country-side some other time.” She laughed. She embraced him. “Do you still feel dizzy?” she asked. Tor different reasons, now.”

  “And your leg? You didn’t hurt it again while you were standing on it?”

  “No.”

  “Nor while we were—”

  “No. Especially not then.”

  He kept her close to him. He felt more relaxed than at any time since trouble had begun aboard the ship. And he had answered most of his questions about the body he wore. It responded; it could give pleasure. Functionally he was sufficiently Earthlike to meet the prese
nt needs. He found that quite remarkable. He found it even more remarkable how tempestuous Kathryn could be, once she allowed herself to show her emotions.

  They got little sleep that night, and Vorneen learned a “good deal more about North American erotic techniques. Toward morning he heard Kathryn murmuring sleepily, “I love you, Vor, I love you, I love you!”

  Well, that could be part of the ritual too, he told himself. He wondered if he should reply in kind and decided against it. As a being from another world, he was not required to follow the local rituals, and he might look too insincere if he tried. The successful seducer, he had learned in his youth, is always sincere . . . where sincerity is appreciated.

  After that, Kathryn slept in his bed every night, and they were lively nights indeed. By day she helped him learn to walk again. She got him a stick to lean on, though he preferred to lean on her arm; he shook off his dizziness, rebuilt his muscles, began to move about with some assurance. His leg was still lame, but that would clear up. Kathryn gave him a robe to wear, evidently so that propriety would be observed in front of the child; Kathryn herself no longer seemed bound by any taboos whatever. He watched her become more radiant day by day, night by night.

  She talked a good deal of how much she loved him. She talked very little of where he had come from and what he might be doing on Earth.

  Vorneen accepted the talk of love casually, as part of the game. But then, somewhere, he discovered that he had unknowingly crossed a bridge himself, and what had been for him a sport had turned into an emotional union. He realized it when he considered that he might be returning to his own people at any time. That was splendid — and then he felt the unexpectedly powerful pang at the awareness that it meant parting from Kathryn. He did not want to part from her. He wished actively to remain with her. He looked with dismay on the idea of a separation. Which meant he had fallen in love with her.

  How had it happened?

  It was unthinkable. He was biologically different from her. He had gone to bed with her merely to find out if it were possible. Those thrustings and gruntings — how could they have created an emotional bond between an Earthman and a Dirnan? The whole idea was inexpressibly bewildering. He knew there were some Dirnans who would regard this relationship as perverse, while others would have him brainburned at once. He felt helpless in the fact of events. He had never meant this to happen at all.