The woman had not moved. Her eyes were wider than they had been and the fear in her eyes was no longer overcast with uncertainty. It had sharpened into a more intense fear, a fear verging on stark terror. Her eyes darted from Teleman's distraught face to the slumped form of her lover and then toward the door, as if she dreaded what the darkness might hold even more than she feared the man who had come out of the darkness to put an end to her happiness.
Suddenly she moaned aloud and covered her face with her hands.
The words came then, words which Teleman had not intended to speak. He did not quite understand why he abandoned all caution, and spoke as he did, freely and without restraint, keeping nothing back, baring his inmost thoughts. It may have been her great beauty, which had held him so entranced for a moment that it had placed him at a disadvantage and endangered his life. Or it may have been the overwhelming sympathy which he now felt, seeing her so pitiful and broken and despairing.
"I am a fugitive like yourself," he said. "There is a woman with me, and we are both in great danger. We are not fugitives for a night, as you are, for we have never known the freedom of the mating centers, a freedom which you found incomplete and love-destroying. We are not sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be death.
"We cannot hope to escape the death penalty. We offended one of the Monitors, a frustrated old woman who will never forgive us for telling her the truth about herself. And I fought with a para-guard, disarmed him and left him bound and helpless in the forest a few miles from this dwelling.
"We thought this dwelling deserted and took refuge here because we hoped to find here a few metal utensils or household tools which I could use to construct some kind of hastily improvised mechanical device powerful enough to misdirect and mislead the scanners. My specialty is bridge-building and I have enough technical knowledge to construct such a device if I can get my hands on a coil of wire and a few utensils of pliable metal.
"It was a desperate hope at best, the odds against it overwhelming. Even if I had succeeded the Monitors would have located us in a few days, possibly in a few hours. But it was the only hope we had until—"
The woman had uncovered her eyes and was staring at him with a little of the fear gone from her gaze and he paused in relief, hoping that she would not let her thoughts stray from his words to the limp and still unconscious man on the floor. He was almost sure that the man had not been seriously hurt, but if her thoughts returned to him too quickly, if memory of the struggle came flooding back, nothing that he could say would convince her that he spoke with complete sincerity. The shock would be too great. She would give way again to panic and stark terror and his words would fall on deaf ears.
He went on quickly, keeping his eyes on her face, his words taking on the eloquence of a deeply moved man who speaks only the truth with no attempt at evasion.
"We did not think we would find anyone here. We were quite sure that we would not be taking a great risk, or deliberately walking into danger, for the place, as you know, looks abandoned. But I came upstairs to make sure.