"You mean you're becoming jaded, lover?"
"Not exactly. But you can't improve on a snow-white lily in all of its natural glory. Not when you've once seen the lily."
"That just goes to show how blind you still are in some respects. If a woman's attire is unusual and exciting, it's more exciting when she takes the dress off. Of course some women wear black to conceal all of their charms because that's exciting too in a different way. I read that in one of the old books. But it must be true, because all of our experience confirms it."
Teleman reached out and took firm hold of her hand again. "We've got to keep moving," he warned. "They'll be dropping another para-guard any moment now."
"I know," she breathed. "They'll surround the forest. We'll be completely at their mercy, with all escape cut off."
"This stretch of woodland extends for miles," Teleman said, his fingers tightening on her hand. "If we can find an isolated dwelling we'll have at least a fighting chance. There are certain ways of making scanner readings come out wrong. There are neutralizing techniques. With all of the household equipment of a dwelling to work with I may be able to confuse them completely. They'll have to search every square foot of the forest to get to us, and an exhaustive search takes time. With fifteen or twenty hours of grace, I may be able to work out some plan of escape that will get us to a crowded center undetected. We'll see!"
"But even if we lose ourselves in a crowded center they'll find us in the end," Alicia protested. "I want desperately to believe we'll have at least a fighting chance. But I'm too much of a realist—"
"Just don't think about it, darling," Teleman whispered. "Not right now. Trust me and believe in miracles. Just enough, anyway, to stay right where you are while I bind our friend."
The forest grew increasingly dense as they continued on, the foliage-filtered sunlight suffusing the darker recesses with an eerie, emerald glow. The droning of the flying machine had diminished and they heard it only as a faint, far-off echo.
They moved swiftly but cautiously, picking their way between tumbled masses of fallen foliage, huge, brightly-colored mushroom growths, and boulders overgrown with moss. They were five or six miles from the bound para-guard when they emerged quite suddenly into an acre-wide clearing and saw a small, stone-walled dwelling glimmering in bright sunlight.