She ran into the bright shine of the tubular metal hall. She hoped with a flash of unexpected feeling that Daddy Mike would leave the building before the G-Agent was activated.
He loved her. Her heart throbbed painfully as she remembered how much Daddy loved her. How he had held her on his lap and stroked her hair and philosophized endlessly to her, not caring that she was not supposed to understand such complexity. But sharing this as he did all things with her in his aging loneliness.
She crouched there in the hall and thought of that, how she would love Daddy as Daddy loved her. Except that she was incapable of love. Dimly she remembered that once, long, very long ago, there had been a kind of spontaneous expression of physical desire, and sensuous pleasure, from the contact with others. But since then there had been the experiments, endless, too painful to recall. The bursting of blood and the repair, the brain slicing and the laying open of cells, and the sewing up. Years, a lifetime, a foreverness of pain, and the apparent making good as new again. But the scars were too deep too show, and too deep to mend.
Such pain for so long, the cold objective testing, had killed any capacity for love. Mary was convinced of that.
She held the gun to her left side and ran in nakedness and silence down the glowing tube.
An overweight guard in his brown UN uniform eased around the curve in the tube and stood with his back to her. It was a good place for him to walk what was to him a useless beat. There was nothing to guard against but boredom. This was the building's left wing and fairly isolated, and he could merely stand here and wait for the far end of his shift.
She slid along the wall. Her feet moved with a vague whispering silence, the silence of unconscious stealth. But then the guard turned to place his heel more comfortably on the inward-sloping bottom of the tube. And he saw her.
He grinned. "Mary!" he said. Everyone knew her. And everyone loved Mary. "What are you doing out here?"
He could never guess the truth, she thought. Even if someone told you, you would never believe it.
The good humor spontaneously beginning to bubble from the fat guard was changed into a kind of gasping cough of unbelieving fear. Desperate words filtered out through his teeth. A white line moved around his lips. His hands reached out and hung suspended.