Then those perfect arms slipped around my neck and that body pressed itself against mine and—
I am only human. That's a trite enough excuse, if an excuse is necessary, but under those conditions I could certainly do no less. I let my arms come around her perfect waist, and I bent her back in the most acceptable televex manner and planted a long solid one right on those perfect lips—lips I'm very certain had never been kissed before.
And that was precisely the trouble, perhaps, with that thoughtless, but irresistible, impulse of mine. Her nails were long and sharp and they clawed at my face. Cold light blazed in her eyes, flashing with outraged dignity and burning hate.
I swung down and away, sliding across the metal table, and stood with blood running down my face, with the table my only protection between myself and this paradoxical Circe.
"Savage," she shrieked, and shrieking was very unbecoming to the cold austerity of her. In fact it was like a cloak I had torn away from her body. "Primal, barbaric beast!"
"I'm not quite primal enough to cope with you," I said, looking more frantically still for an exit. There still weren't any exits, but people came into this room, and people went out of it. How?
I expected her to vault the table after me, but she lithely backed away, and though I didn't realize it then, her cold brain was summoning her eunuchs from afar.
A section of the wall to one side began to glow like a light through semi-opaque glass. The light deepened and began to whirl. And then I saw that there was a kind of opening there. Yes. A kind of opening with something promising no good lumbering through, its head and massive shoulders projecting up out of the shifting mist like a televexed fictional monster.
It was a monstrous metal man. A real, animated robot out of an old scientification fabrication. It was coming directly for me. I flashed one look—I think it was a beseeching one—at Jokan. In such instances as that people swallow great lumps of their pride.