Lewis walked back up to the first floor, and out into the night, heading for Betty Seton's apartment. Maybe she was sober enough now to talk this thing over. The hell with security regulations. Just the same, he walked along in the shadow next to the building to avoid any eye-witness of his proposed rendezvous.
Science, he thought, was really another name for freedom. It couldn't function without freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry. You couldn't mix it up with security and cut off communication, because communication is the essence of science. An idea is universal, and how can you go on thinking when you're no longer a part of the world?
Whatever the decision arrived at in Lewis' own heart might otherwise have been, he was never to know. His decision was made for him by an hysterical laugh, the sound of scuffling on boards, and another laugh. He came around the corner of the barracks and saw the Guard manhandling Betty Seton down the steps of her apartment building.
The guard was big, built like a wedge, with a flat bulldog face bunched up under his white helmet. The Guard's brain had been carefully honed down to an efficient, completely unintelligent but precise fighting machine level. He neither knew nor cared why he did anything. But he was handicapped by having Betty Seton in one hand. He was whirling, raising his stungun with the other hand, when Lewis hit him.
Lewis drove in with his weight behind first a solid long blow that broke a rigid wall of muscle in the Guard's belly, turned it to soft clay. Betty fell free and lay laughing on the gravel. Her face was a white smear in the starlight.
Lewis brought his knee up into the Guard's face as he bent over, sank another one into the soft belly, kicked the Guard in the crotch, stamped on his booted foot, came back and ran forward again, driving his shoulder again into the Guard's belly. The Guard's feet hit the bottom step, he smashed into the boards, and his helmet flew off as his head thudded on the stanchion.
The Guard just shook his shaven head, started to get up heavily, reaching again for his stungun, his face expressionless. Lewis heard footsteps pounding around the corner, slashing on gravel.
More Guards. Dehumanized and insensitive, they were almost as invulnerable as so many robots—
He turned, ran past Betty Seton, stilly lying there with only a thin housecoat around her, not laughing now, but looking suddenly sober and horrified.