The man turned abruptly and caught the woman in his arms. He gripped the hem of her garment just above the neckline, and with a choking sob tore it from neck to waist, completely baring her bosom. He buried his face in the hollow between her breasts and strained her to him, his hands unyielding on her naked shoulders. So fierce was his embrace, so firm and impetuous the pressure of his finger-tips in love's behalf that she cried out in pain but did not plead with him to release her. Instead she found his hand and clasped it tightly, whispering: "Yes, yes, I know. Yes, my darling. It was hard to do, and terrible. But you had no choice."
He released her after a long moment and began slowly to caress her hair, smoothing and rearranging it a little as he did so, making the dark, wind-ruffled tresses look less unruly and twining one strand around his finger in gentle love-play.
Gradually, as the gentleness of his caresses blurred the memory of a hateful violence, the color returned to her cheeks and she drew close to him again and kissed him on the lips.
"It was his life or ours," he said. "And the lives of every man and woman on this ship. We discovered the identity of that guard just in time. If he had kept silent, if he had not revealed his identity to you, he would have sent out a message which would have destroyed us all, for we are all in revolt. That is the great miracle. We drew strength from one another and love-making no longer seems criminal to us."
"It was never criminal," she said. "Only to the warped minds of the Monitors would anything so beautiful seem less than what it is—life's most generous gift to men and women everywhere. It breaks down all barriers, dissolves all hatreds."
"It dissolves all unjust hatreds," the man said. "But I hated that security guard because of what he said to you. Even though I knew the wonder of your love, I could not quite drive hatred from my mind. But that is not why I killed him, and perhaps it is a fault in me. I am only human."
"I hated him too," the woman acknowledged. "No, I do not think it a fault in you or in me. We have a right to hate treachery and hypocrisy and deceit. If that guard had sent a message of warning to the Monitors and they had ordered us all destroyed I would not have held him responsible, even though you had to kill him to save the lives of a hundred men and women. He would have simply been carrying out orders. What I hated him for was his betrayal of the Monitors, not out of sympathy for us, but to gain a cruel and brutal advantage for himself."
The woman tightened her lips and her eyes flashed again in bitter anger. "I hated him because he made brutal advances to me, clasping me like a ruffian while I struggled to free myself, and insisting that I endure a night of shame and horror in his embrace—demanding that as the price of his silence. I did not submit and he had to free me, but his loathsome kisses still burn my mouth. If love is forced on a woman by a man not of her choice how can it be other than intolerable and degrading to her integrity as a human being?
"What woman does not desire, in her secret heart, to have for a lover a man who is capable of virile love-making, who is not afraid to embrace her as you did just now, with such ardor that she cries out, and wishes almost that he would take his questing hands and burning lips away and yet is swooning with the sweetness of it, and would never forgive him if he became less vehement before hot tides of passion flow in the moment of love's supreme fulfillment. What woman would not welcome such love-making, would not rejoice in it? But what woman, by the same token, wishes to be taken against her will by a man whom she does not love? There is an ugly word in the old books for that kind of love-making. It was called rape."
The man's face had gone very pale. He said: "If I had known that he had dared to embrace you I would not have stabbed him. I would have seized him by the throat and killed him with my bare hands."