Alicia arose from the log, ran to him and locked her hands behind his neck. She drew his head down and kissed him so passionately on the mouth that it increased his unsteadiness and almost stopped his breathing.
He was still clasping the hand-gun which he had taken from the guard and he tapped her gently on the shoulder with it, and ran the long steel muzzle gently up and down her spine, hoping that the firm, bizarre caressment and the cold feel of it would calm her and enable them both to recover a little from shock and strain and torment, and decide what they still must do to save themselves.
"If I'd been armed I could have taken him completely by surprise and knocked him unconscious without a struggle," he whispered. "I've managed to knock him unconscious, all right, with his own weapon. But I had to be as brutal as he was. It went against the grain somehow."
"But you had no choice," she breathed in vehement protest. "Darling, you had no choice at all. It was your life or his. And he's not dead, is he?"
Teleman shook his head. "I'm pretty sure he'll recover. But I couldn't just give him a light, friendly little tap on the skull. I had to make sure he wouldn't just blink his eyes and come at me again."
"You made sure. You did very well, darling. I'm proud of you."
Teleman sighed. "You've no reason to be," he said. "There must be a better way of solving human problems than going at it tooth and claw like beasts of the jungle. You'd have a right to feel proud of a man who could think out a way. I'm afraid it's beyond me."
"But we have to resist tyranny," she said. "We have to fight with every weapon we can seize hold of—with our naked fists when there's no other weapon. That's simple common sense, human nature being what it is."
"I've heard that argument before," Teleman said. "I'm not sure that it completely convinces me. But I haven't got what it takes to think out a better answer. Someday a man will be born who will have such a great, calm, wise mind that it won't even seem like a problem to him. He'll know the answer, and other answers as well, to other life-destroying and beauty-destroying and peace-destroying problems. Answers must be found or Man will go down into everlasting night and darkness."
"The man you speak of. He'd have to be ... a very great scientific specialist."