The woman arose from the couch, unfastened the hem of her sleeping garment and let it fall to her feet. She stood completely naked before him, her body gleaming white, her red lips slightly parted.
"Come here, and stop being a fool," she said. "I demand that you come."
The Chief Monitor shook his head and turned back to the window. In all his life he had never felt quite so angry or experienced at the same time so strong a stirring of desire.
He could not take his eyes from the woman's reflection in the window pane, but he did not want to turn and go to her.
He was still staring when he saw it—a tiny red flare in the distance, in the very heart of the sleeping city. It did not alarm him at first, for there were many ways of explaining it, even though he had never seen anything precisely like it before.
It did not alarm him until it grew swiftly larger and brighter and another flickering red flame appeared on the outskirts of the city and still another close to the first, and a darting streak of fire ran along the roof of one of the nearer buildings and lit up most of the sky.
Even then he might have managed to maintain almost complete mastery over his nerves, if the flares had not been accompanied by a far-off murmur, as if many voices had suddenly broken in upon the stillness of the night and were shouting in anger or in overwhelming fright, and converging toward some central point to join with other voices in producing an even greater volume of sound.
"What is it?" the woman demanded. "What are you staring at? Does the city at night fascinate you so that you forget that there are women out there whom even your power could not seduce? They are asleep in the arms of their lovers and might not find you as attractive as I do. There are some women—"
The blasts cut her off in mid-speech, five, evenly spaced blasts that shook the bed and rattled the windowpanes. The Chief Monitor's control broke completely. He swung about and crossed the room without even looking at the woman, who was staring in dismay at the red glare that was creeping into the room from each of its three tall windows.
The tele-panel set in the wall hummed when the Chief Monitor clicked it on, and a moment later the small screen lighted up and a face that he had never seen before stared at him out of the radiance.