He did not terrify her as he terrified other people.

  He would like to see her again in the cabin. He would enjoy folding his arms about her soft body, carrying it to his maleness, sinking her down upon his strength. God! The pleasure of that act, once again!

  It had been such a long time, such a long time. Years, many years. The last woman who had known his body was that waitress, the night he had been driving through the rainstorm on his way to the Bionics Research Institute. How long ago had that been? He had been at the Institute for five years now.

  Five years! Five years of illness, really, and of being worked on, for the past two, by Adrian Trent and Rhea Parker. God! Five years without a woman. No wonder the sight of Eve standing naked had excited his flesh.

  His mind smiled. He was recovering some of his lost humanity. He was no longer all animal, despite his appearance. It was so pleasant to lie there in the warm darkness and remember.

  A worry tugged at the strings of his mind.

  He should be thinking about something else, not remembering the way the waitress had flirted with him in the diner where he'd stopped to eat fifty miles from Valley Rill. She had been wearing a soiled, white uni form, rumpled and dirty with sweat and food stains. But her uniform lacked a top button. When she bent over her big, pallid breasts had come pushing into the opening. His eyes had stared.

  Her voice had grown softer when she talked to him. It was late at night; he was the only customer in the place. She was through work when he was finished eating. It had been an invitation of sorts; at least, that was the way he considered it.

  He had put a hand on her hip, casually. She did not push it away; she just smiled down at him and asked if he were going far, and if his wife was waiting for him. When he replied that he had no wife, she began to melt even more.

  She was lonely, too, she admitted.

  “Why not come home with me?" she asked. “We're both looking for a little human companionship. Let's give a little, each of us."

  He offered to buy some liquor and the makings. She undid her apron, stretching to hang it on a peg, making her short skirt rise. His eyes had lingered on her shapely leg in the nylon stocking that had a run in it, seeing the stretch of pale thigh above it and the garter-clasp. It had been such a long time between women for him even then that his man-flesh had bloated in response to that viewing.

  The nagging worry touched him, but he put it away. An animal for so long, it was very pleasant to lie there and dream about his human past. He wondered vaguely if his long-buried humanity was surging to the surface, making him forget something—something that was very important—that he had to do...

  No matter!

  She had primped before the mirror, fluffing her brown hair, her eyes smiling into the mirror at his reflection as he stood just a little behind her. His eyes ran up and down her fleshy body crowded into the rumpled uniform and the anticipation swelled in him, swelling, swelling...

  He had come up behind her, pushed his loins into her buttocks that he found soft and ungirdled. She gasped a little, feeling his rigid flesh against her softness.

  "Oooooooh, you are lonely, honey," she had whispered.

  He had kissed her throat, found it warm, soft, scented with cheap perfume. Kenneth Frost had never known any other kind of woman, really. The Eve who had undressed in the cabin had been different. No cheap perfume for her, no stockings with a run in them. She was something Kenneth Frost had never known.

  And walking down the dark street after she had locked the diner, giggling like school kids, the two of them in their late thirties or early forties. He had not been ashamed; it was almost frighteningly enjoyable with her arm holding his and that solid breast nudging his ribs when she squirmed against him. He had the liquor bottle in a paper bag in the crook of his right arm.

  Going up the narrow hallway to her walk-up apartment, unable to resist sliding his hand along her shapely leg, up under her skirt to the soft flesh. She had paused and turned and come down two steps to stand with him, her open mouth fastened on his lips and he thought he'd die with the delight of that kiss, and the way her soft thigh was nudging him where,' on this night, he was very much a man.

  It was so pleasant to think back, to remember.

  The worry that lurked in a corner of his head was silent now because he pushed it back and away from him. Whatever it was could wait.

  In her apartment, the door closing, her warm body coming against his own, softness of breasts spreading as they mashed to his chest. A wet, wide mouth, scarlet and gaping, taking his lips to it, and her tongue like a snake of Eden, crying out to his soul with its twistings and lickings. His right hand still held the bottle in its paper bag but his left went down to her buttocks, finding them soft and giving.

  “Oh God,” he breathed when she let him go.

  Something in his yearning eyes touched her femininity because her soft, brown eyes filled with tears and she almost blubbered, "Is it that way with you, too?”

  Wanting. Needing. Yearning for another human. As he yearned for Eve, this moment.

  He was still a human being. No monster, he. He wanted to throw back the darkness covering him and go out into the world and find that Eve and carry her off with him to a room where he and she could be alone.

  As he had been alone with the waitress, laughing and unbuttoning her uniform with her laughing protests not hindering his shaking fingers, not one little bit. Open the uniform, see her in the black brassiere and the black panties with the imitation lace on them, and the garter-belt under them and...

  He wanted to weep, so happy he was.

  Female flesh, partly hidden, with the tiny hairs of her mons veneris visible, pushing out of the pantie legs. He had gone to his knees, he had wrapped her hips in his arms and he had kissed.

  The eternal adoration, the male of the female.

  She wept a little, squirming, asking, “Will you do that, will you? I'll take a shower—we'll both take a shower. You don't have to rush, honey, do you? I mean, not before tomorrow morning? We can have all night."

  He would not have rushed for all the gold in China. He told her so, kissing her soft belly through the panties, with her soft hand holding his head to her middle and the tears oozing from her closed eyes. His hands were sliding up and down the backs of her meaty thighs above her laddered stockings, and he thought he loved her a little more because of those torn nylons.

  She was a human like himself, not rich, struggling to make the ends meet, to have enough food in her middle and a comfortable bed on which to lie of nights, with old age yet to come and a grasping for life and the sharing of life with another person, this kneeling man. Of what frail clay, we humans.

  Oh, he read her mind so well, since he was a part of it. His illness was in the future but he sensed it now and then, with the pains that made him cry out. Frail clay, the two of them. But seeking something better, something that was so much a part of them—a soul? The knowledge that each was part of a higher wisdom with only their bodies to tell of that seeking.

  That which had been Kenneth Frost smiled.

  He had sensed all that philosophic thought that night even while his lips browsed on her soft flesh, but not until this moment did he really understand it. His loneliness was the loneliness of all men and women, really. There is something missing in each one of us, he thought.

  Find that which is missing, Kenneth Frost! He stirred in the blackness, groaning.

  No! No, he would not. He wanted to think on the woman, of the sharing of their flesh, their grasping of a moment out of time together, when they were not one alone but—but something else.

  She had undressed him and when she saw his arousal she had knelt before him and had taken it in her soft hands and kissed it. He had cried out in shocked delight, no one had ever done that to him. For the instant it seemed she was telling him that they were one, they were part of some Eternal Plan.

  He looked down at her plump shoulders, seeing how the brassiere straps indented the pale flesh. His hands caught those straps, pushed down her upper arms. His hands slid around to her front and over her big breasts. His palms held her breasts very gently, his fingers went around and over their solid roundness, touching the stiff brown nipples, bending them and gripping them as the woman moaned.

  All this was a part of it, the caress and the kiss. He was male, she was female, and only by a blending of their natures could they both achieve that which they could see but dimly.

  His hands lifted her to her feet, he turned her, kissing her bare shoulder, undoing her brassiere, sliding his palms under her breasts as they fell out. Long he stood like that, staring down at those breasts, pressing his need to her buttocks.

  "Come with me," she whispered. She brought him with her into the bathroom, all white tile with a pink shower curtain, and she had let him slide down her black panties until he could see the dark growth of her pubic hair and the wideness of her pallid hips, and he kissed her again, reverently.

  The shower water was warm, pleasant. The soap in their hands was slithery, foaming as she rubbed it over his flesh. He took the soap from her, rubbed her body with it. The shower water had cleansed them as if it washed away everything they had ever been and were to be and left them this night with one another.

  Her fingers quivered as they stroked his manhood. “The bed, the bed," she breathed.

  White buttocks twitching, moving before him and drawing him with them out of the bathroom and across a rug toward a bed. Shapely white woman legs, moving with unconscious grace. Slender hips and the soft back looking like rich cream.

  I am not worthy, he thought. “Wait,” he said aloud.

  She paused, glancing over her shoulder at him, eye brows arched. His eyes were on her soft buttocks, and he knew the need to kneel and kiss that woman-flesh. A touch of masochism? He did not know. It was the need that drove him, the wanting and the hunger, perhaps the need to abase himself. Because of his scrawny build and the hundred and twenty pounds of his five foot three inch frame? Was there a guilt inside him that needed assuagement because he did not consider himself a man?

  She thrust her buttocks at his eyes.

  He knelt and kissed those soft globes, delighting in the abandonment of pride, the subservience. She made little gurgling sounds above him; apparently she enjoyed these caresses of lips and tongue.

  "Enough,” she said after a time, and he knew she was right. With her feminine wisdom she had known it was time for the burying of the male blade within the female sheath that yearned, in its own turn, to be filled.

  Upward she drew him to the bed, and there she sprawled her nakedness in open-thighed invitation and he gave a soft cry and fell upon her. Deep he plunged, deep, deep in this symbolized returning to the womb. He gasped as the pleasure caught him, lifted the soul of him swirling up, up, up. His body pounded at her body, his flesh slithered and swooped; the carnal hawk feeding on its natural prey.

  Long he feasted, long.

  And when he fell away she was screaming out her delight in him as a man, holding him with her some what fleshy arms and kissing his face adoringly. He had lain naked beside her on the bed with the shades pulled down and the dim light—pink it was, he recalled shedding itself on their nakedness as if in blessing.

  Now it was her turn, as the submissive female, the conquered flesh striving to rouse up the carnal hawk to be conquered once again. Her lips kissed his hairless chest, slid down his belly. To his maleness her mouth went, kissing in worship.

  And she roused him again. A phoenix in happyland,

  She swung on him, knelt over his recumbent body and his standing flesh, taking him with a low cry of delight, and he lay there watching her big breasts flop and shake and she was everything he had ever wanted in all his life. Even as the pleasure swelled him, he thought wryly what small and insignificant goals he had set for himself, for this man who was Kenneth Frost.

  All night long, the pleasure. Never before like that; never since. Why didn't I ever go back? Why?

  She was there, she had told him she would always wait for him. She would go with him; she did not want to marry him, just to be there when the mood for loving came upon his flesh. It was all she asked, and he had denied her that crumb of carnality.

  Because he was sick, inside his small body?

  Yes. He knew it, even then, but he had put it out of his mind, just as he was putting something else out of his mind, the worry.

  The Un-human washed his mind of thought as he had washed his body and the body of the waitress on that long-ago night. He let the worry come flooding in, and then he knew.

  The Drann...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The General swore softly.

  “You've got to be kidding, Eve. Walk into the Madison hotel suite where Suradar Selm and those others are staying and shoot them? Oh my God! What's got into you?”

  “They’re poisoning the atmosphere.”

  “Hogrot!”

  "Is anybody testing the air around that spaceship?"

  "Goddammit it! It would be a breach of hospitality!”

  "Hospitality! What kind of hospitality is demanded of you when your guest is killing you? That's what I want to know."

  "You don't have one single concrete bit of proof. Everything you've told me is sheer, unadulterated speculation! Your feminine instinct. Bah!”

  “What about those photographs?” I screamed.

  He picked them up and flipped through them, scowling blackly all the while. “So their normal bodies are different than ours, that's all these prove. I guess so they wouldn't offend us, they put on humanoid bodies in some way.

  "But this doesn't mean they're out to poison the air.

  “I can't go off half-cocked, girl. I run a responsible department. If I did what you want, I might find myself facing a murder charge right along with you. No, no. I can't do it.”

  “Test the air around the spaceship! It's all I'm asking!"

  He glowered at me, his shaggy brows drawn together. With his muscular bulk crammed inside his office chair, the chief looked like a bull about to charge and gore. I had never faced up to The General before like this, I'd always accepted his pronouncement as divine writ. But now I was fighting for my own life and for that of every man, woman and child on this planet Earth—and I was God damned if I was going to quit.

  “Get out of here," he growled. “The hell I will," I yelled back. “You're fired,” he screeched.

  “You can't fire me. Not without a hearing. And I tell you that there won't be any hearing because we'll all be dead by the time the League bigwigs get around to holding one."

  He reached for a cigar, then threw it back into the humidor on his desk. “Eve, I respect you. You have a fine record as an agent. But you've gone off the deep end this time."

  "What are you afraid of? If I'm wrong—you can cashier me. You'll have proof enough to lay before the board of inquiry! But if I'm right..."

  He seethed with fury. Thick, stubby fingers drummed a tattoo on his glass desktop as his eyes glowered at me. The wheels were turning inside his head; I could practically see them whirling. He was a smart man, The General, not hidebound by rules or by tradition. While he was no liberal, he was a free thinker.

  For more than a full minute our eyes held together, mine with challenge in them, his with baffled rage, deep thought, and a weighing of actions pro and con. Finally, he slapped the desktop with the flat of his palm.

  "All right, you made your point. Now prove it." I could have leaned over the desk and kissed him.

  But even Double Oh Sex doesn't kiss The General. I satisfied myself with a loud, “Whoopee! Chief, you won't be sorry.”

  "I hope not!"

  "I'll need gadgets, and somebody to operate them. I want to test the air all around that spaceship.”

  He reached for the intercom, flipped a switch. “Miss Hogsworth, put me through to the city's department of Air Pollution Control.”

  Cupping a hand over the receiver, he snapped, “Those boys will know what you want—they do it every day. They hunt for everything from burning leaves to smokey chimneys every day of every year. The issue about a thousand summonses a year, too, for illegally polluting the atmosphere."

  His hand went away as he jerked the phone to his mouth. “Get me Smedbury." There was a pause, then, "Smed? One of my agents wants to make some atmosphere tests. In a hurry. Yes, yes. It's damned important. Give me your best man. All right, all right, I'll make out a request in triplicate—but let your man and my girl get together in this without any more red tape.

  "No, no. I'll explain it to you over a coffee mug one of these days. Just trust me, Smed.”

  He hung up. "There'll be a man and a truck at the back door in an hour. Be there.” He studied me a few moments longer. "I hope you're wrong, for all our sakes, Eve. If you're right—well! God help us all. Now get the hell out of here!"

  I blew him a kiss instead of leaning over the desk. His craggy face broke into a grim smile and his shoulders hunched forward, then relaxed. I closed the door gently behind me.

  The man was waiting in the truck when I marched out the rear door and into the parking lot of the building that L.U.S.T. shares with certain other governmental agencies in the Capitol. He reached over, opened the door, and glanced down at my nyloned legs revealed by the micro-skirt I was wearing.

  "Where away, love?”

  “The airport, honey."

  He was a young man, a little to my surprise. I'd expected a balding fifty-ish scientist. He drove with one eye on the traffic, the other on my gams. I let him look. Being like any other female, I enjoy being admired.

  He asked, finally, "What's at the airport?” "The spaceship from Andoth.”

  His eyebrows rose. "Oh? And what's that got to do with us?”

  I told him what I suspected in as short a time as I could. He got a bit excited, maybe because I sounded more convincing to him than I had to The General.

 

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