"I know," the girl whispered, grasping his hand and pressing it warmly. "If you were love-privileged you might have taken me into your arms and covered my lips with burning kisses. And I should have liked that. I should have liked that very much."
The surgeon tightened his lips and turned away from her, a look of torment on his face. "Dance," he whispered again. "There is no time to be lost. In a few moments the effects of the drug will begin to wear off."
The girl nodded, and walked toward the center of the laboratory. The eyes of the man on the table followed her and when she was standing almost directly in front of him, and less than eight feet from the table, his rigidly erect body seemed to stiffen still more and a look of bewilderment came into his eyes.
The girl began to dance.
Her movements were slow at first, and although no music accompanied the slow turning of her body and the graceful weaving motions of her arms, she seemed to be dancing in response to rhythms sensuous and beguiling and audible to her alone. It was almost as if her inner ear had become attuned, at the very beginning of the dance, to melodies unheard and she was pirouetting about to the accompaniment of measures that, beginning as a series of widely spaced chords, would soon change their tempo and became in an instant tumultuous and wild.
That instant was not long delayed. Faster and faster her movements became and she was suddenly whirling and swaying in utter abandonment, her head thrown back, the veins in her throat pulsing as she whirled.
Faster and faster she moved, until she seemed not so much a living woman as a shape of flame, her thin gauze tunic floating up above her knees and exposing her shapely legs and the milk-white flesh of her thighs.
Then, abruptly, she ceased to whirl, and stood poised on the tips of her toes, like a bird in flight coming miraculously to rest amidst a fluttering tumult of beating wings and spinning, skyward-ascending feathers. Her arms were bent sharply at the elbows and she was clutching at both of her breasts and arching her torso backwards.
For a full minute she remained on her toes, her eyes half-closed, her moist red lips opening and closing; as if, hovering in the air above her, an invisible lover was draining the sweetness of her lips between moments of trancelike rapture.
Then her body was in motion again and as she turned slowly about on her toes she unfastened the hem of her tunic and let it slip from her.