She pushed him away. His hands reached, his body crushed. Panic. She felt unable to breathe, and she started to scream. His hand was over her mouth.
"Don't look any deeper, don't probe any farther!" he said, like a suddenly terrible threat. "I beg you, don't do it! You're different—beautifully different, Madeleine. But not different enough! None of them ever are!"
She squirmed away, onto the floor between the glass and the couch, and scurried toward the door. She could hear the gasping, the sobbing desperation in his voice, and his shadow lengthened across the walls.
Then, as she hesitated in the doorway, he was gone.
She put on a nylon hiking suit and left the room. The silence of the hall was not real, and the emptiness was not really emptiness. It was like waking and being exasperatingly aware of only the fleeting end of a dream. And as she slipped out a side entrance, even the wailing of exotic musical instruments seemed in a sense not real. Even the silence, the feeling of being followed, watched, even that seemed artificial—it was impossible to substantiate the suspicion.
Her palms were wet as she slipped along the wall toward the garage where the sandsleds were kept. From the amphitheatre she could hear the rituals, the intercessions, comminations, hymns, libations, incense-burning, and who knew what else. She saw the reflection of chrome and artificial glitter disguised as Martian authenticity, the lights hanging like a grove of pastel moons, and the shrill empty laughter of girls uncoiling as bright as tinsel through the sluggish Martian evening. And in spite of the sound and elaborate pretension, it all had the undying feel of lugubrious solitude.
It had, for a doomed generation driven into inescapable conformity, the necessary quality of a dream in which a stubborn unconsciousness seeks ever for truth. And later, back on Earth, in the rut and groove, it would remain only a dream no one ever talked about to anyone else. After all, it would simply be something that happened on another world.
She gave one brief, bitter laugh. And even on another world the last desperate dream was false.
There might be something to be said for release through a pagan orgy under the double moons; she had no moral scruples about it. But the paganism would have to be real, that was the thing. Besides, it was too late. For a moment she pressed her flattened hands against her face and felt tears squeezing through the tightly-locked fingers. She felt as though she might explode somewhere inside and realized how the invisible edges of living had cut her soul to pieces.