David Loring had not turned, but now the door was slowly opening behind him and someone was coming into the room. On the bright and flickering screen Loring's image seemed a little larger than life size, the planes of his face a little sharper than when he had first stepped into the room. Even his shadow on the floor seemed to lengthen as Tragor stared, and Tragor found himself wondering—the thought, of course, was absurd—if that shadow might not continue to lengthen, slowly and relentlessly, until it filled the world and brought the Martian Plan crashing down in ruin.
Had they taken too great a risk? Was it not highly dangerous to use a man as a guinea pig? No, no—not a guinea pig. Only Earthmen used guinea pigs in laboratory experiments. Had he lived too long on Earth, two years that seemed like a lifetime. It was outrageous the way Earth terms sprang naturally to his lips, both outrageous and disturbing. He must try not to think in such terms. Loring was a guinea pig only in the sense that he could be destroyed if he failed. But Martians did not really use men as guinea pigs. They used them as pawns.
FIVE
The woman who had come into the room stood silently staring at him for a moment, her lips slightly parted, her young breasts taut and pressing tightly against the silken constriction of a dress that did full justice to their voluptuous roundness. The dress was pale blue, with a plunging neckline, and its semi-transparency seemed to accentuate her beauty beyond the scope of Nature's design. Absolute nudity could hardly have enhanced her loveliness at that moment, for she seemed more than unclothed to the inner eye, wrapped in a splendor so revealing that for an instant Loring could scarcely breathe.
Her femininity was so extreme as to seem unbelievable. She was all woman, her very stillness a male-stirring miracle. It excited him instantly and overwhelmingly, so that all of his thoughts became centered on her, and he forgot that he was in love with another woman. He forgot even that there were strict physical limits to any one man's capacity to experience desire.
He felt himself to be not one man but ten thousand, each from a different age, each bursting with an uncontrollable urge to clasp and hold, and satisfy to satiety the most primal and compulsive of human needs.
The wonder of her, and the strangeness, the voluptuous softness and sweetness enticed him away from reality and then drew him back to the throbbing, pulsating core of Nature's supreme reality, and held him captive there, caught up in a web of time-obliterating instinct which reason and all of Man's higher faculties had made the opposite of blind.
She seemed both a wanton and a wanton's opposite: a virginal and tender creature, shy and withdrawn. Her very breathing seemed to whisper: "I could be to you mistress and wife, dear companion and seductive enchantress, mature woman and girl-child, first love of the boy you once were and still are in dreams of youth which will never fade. I could be your lady in ermine, a goddess of fertility rites, a Paleolithic woman with great breasts swelling, and a Grecian Venus rising slender-limbed from the foam."
Even as he heard the whisper deep in his mind, the whisper of a voice that was hers, surely, though it seemed to float through his consciousness like a feather blown about at random by the slow rise and fall of her breathing—even as he heard the voice her physical attributes seemed to change.
She became a woman of woodland enchantment, a slender nymph darting in and out between the trees of an autumn-colored forest, her skin berry-stained. She became a woman pirouetting on a stage, clad like a Russian ballet dancer. She became a dancer in flowing robes, moving in slow, sensual rhythm under the spell of a weaving baton. The baton rose and fell, gleamed and swayed and the music became tumultuous, and then, abruptly, the baton ceased to move and there was only silence and darkness on the stage.