Mating center

by Frank Belknap Long

But first the long voyage, the long honeymoon beneath the stars. Days and nights of rapture, of almost continuous love-making while the constellations wheeled above them and new strength flowed into them.

They had dared to dream and to act boldly, but from the first they had been prepared for the disaster which had now come upon them. The Monitors had been warned and the air above the ship was black with wings and there could be no escape now, for each flying machine carried a deadly cargo.

The order to open fire was given twenty minutes after the black mechanical hawks had assembled in battle formation above the slow-traveling vessel.

The message was in code and it was quietly communicated to the pilot-commander of each flying machine, by a uniformed man with an expressionless face standing stiffly at attention. The message bore the signature of three Monitors and was countersigned by the entire council of Monitors with the code letters which the Council used when it was summoned into emergency session.

There was no escape from that message. It was delivered in completely undramatic fashion and there was no drama in the quiet response of the commanders. The bearers of the messages were simply dismissed with a nod and when they returned to their battle stations their faces were still expressionless.

A little tightening of the lips here and there perhaps, the faintest glint of sympathy and compassion in eyes ordinarily cold and duty-disciplined.

On the flying machines there were a few men who had experienced the stirring and so could have wished that they were not security specialists and could meet and mingle with women, know the soft caress of a woman's hand and look with tenderness into a loved face and abandon themselves to all the delights of the dark as the rebels far below had done.

But on none of the flying machines was there any hesitation or open rebellion when the order to open fire was given.

The carrying out of that order was immediate and cataclysmic. The entire sky seemed to burst into flame. There was a roaring and a screaming and the black mechanical hawks careened down the sky, each dropping an egg on the water below and wheeling and returning and dropping more eggs until the thunder of their wings became deafening.

The eggs did not explode instantly. They bobbed about for a moment in the water on both sides of the smoke-enshrouded ship and in its screaming wake and directly in front of it.