"Security Alert," came in a troubled voice. "There are fires and explosions taking place all over the city. We do not yet know what is causing them. An aerial attack is one possibility. Most of the fires are in the vicinity of the mating centers. And people are assembling in the streets. Most of them are armed and they are shouting threats."
The Chief Monitor clicked off the panel and the radiance dimmed and vanished. He had an impulse to rush from the room and take steps which would bring all of the Monitors together in emergency session. But he forced himself to think calmly. He had to be sure first and two or three minutes was not a very long time to wait.
He paced the floor for five full minutes, deciding that the more he knew the more swift and certain would be his mastery of the situation when he was in full possession of the facts. He completely ignored the woman who lounged on the couch, the luscious curves of her body deliberately exposed to his eyes.
It was necessary, he told himself, to know exactly what was happening. He could not afford to blunder, for the slightest mistake in a situation as unbelievable as this could destroy him. An armed uprising? A rebellion of the non-love-privileged? Or a rebellion in the mating centers? A rebellion of security guards? Who had launched the aerial attack, if it was an aerial attack? Was it a revolt or a counter-revolt? Perhaps a revolt had started somewhere in the city and immediate steps had been taken by Security Alert to counter-attack from the air.
No, no, that had to be ruled out. He had just been in communication with Security Alert and if they had ordered a counter-attack they could hardly have remained in ignorance of it. Unless the operator he had talked to had not been as fully informed as the Alert's emergency command.
It was just barely possible.
He had stopped pacing and was turning to click on the tele-panel again when a blinding white glare filled the room, and a sheet of flame wrapped itself around him, burning the flesh from his bones and causing his face to shrivel and blacken until its lineaments dissolved in a weaving spiral of fire.
SEVENTEEN
It seemed to monitor 6Y9 that an eternity had passed since she had picked herself up from the floor of the sterile-crib nursery and found herself alone. She could remember how she had felt at that moment—the red blaze of fury that had danced before her eyes, the sickness at the pit of her stomach, the waves of nausea which had made her reel and almost fall to the floor again. She could remember all that very clearly. But the search that she had ordered conducted through every room in the center, that futile and fruitless search was a hazy blur in her mind. Her emotions had been so overpowering that they had almost blotted the details of that terrible failure from her waking mind at least, and if she remembered them at all it would be only in dreams, dreams from which she would awaken screaming and bathed in cold sweat.