Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

For an instant his fingers tingled and he felt a sudden, very acute stab of pain, as if he had touched an open electric circuit. It was followed by a burning sensation, and a distinct mental shock, a feeling of blank bewilderment verging on horror. Suddenly the room became very real again, and he remembered that it was Janice's room, Janice's bed. A sickening sense of guilt and self-reproach swept over him. But only for the space of a dropped heartbeat. The obstruction beneath his hand was too mysteriously strange for even guilt to obliterate as an immediate, impossible-to-ignore threat to his sanity.

The object was metallic and unmistakably disk-like. Beneath his exploring fingers its configuration dispelled all uncertainty as to its shape and it had the smoothness, the coldness, and the general feel of a metal object. It was about three inches in diameter and seemed to be embedded in the flesh of her thigh. There were no wires or prongs projecting from it. The shock had come from the disk itself, but there was no further shock as his fingers rested upon it.

He found himself tugging at it, without quite knowing why he felt such a compulsive need to find out all that he could about it except that it filled him with alarm and foreboding.

The woman in his arms was still clinging to him, her arms tight about his shoulders, her body moving with the slow, voluptuous amorousness that kisses could distract but for an instant. She seemed unaware that he had found the metal disk, so entranced was she by the soaring breathlessness of a moment from which the mechanical was by necessity barred and kept at bay by love's physical rapture in a temple of love's own choosing. She was breathing heavily now, her eyes glazed, a deep flush suffusing her face and throat.

But Loring's pulses were no longer pounding. Her kisses were feverish and had to be returned, but he returned them now without enthusiasm, a cold fear constricting the muscles of his heart. A dozen frightening questions clamored in his mind for answers that did not satisfy him, and did nothing to lessen his dread.

Was the disk a surgical device of some sort? If it was, what was its purpose and function? A metal plate inserted in a man's skull could protect his brain from damage, if natural suturing failed. But why should a metal device be embedded in the flesh of a woman's thigh, just above her right knee? What possible purpose could it serve?

Had some unusual and tragic accident left her partially paralyzed? Was the metal disk a surgical device designed to restore the circulation or correct the impaired muscular flexibility of an injured limb? An electrical device? It seemed probable, since touching it had given him a shock. But the rest of it was hard to accept. The shock had been more than physical. Momentarily it had done something to his mind, chilling him to the core, and making him remember something that he had once read—that a man in the grip of stark fear can lose all sexual drive.

But why had his discovery of the disk so profoundly alarmed him? Why had he experienced such sharply mounting apprehension? It was merely an electrically charged metal appliance, small, flat and circular and—yes, not unlike a hearing aid. Could it be a hearing aid? He would have liked to believe so, but it seemed unlikely. No woman, however vain, would wear a hearing aid on her right thigh.

Her hands were moving back and forth across his back, and she was moaning a little and pressing her lips against his throat. He knew that he could not maintain the pretense of desire much longer, that she would begin to suspect he was responding like an automaton, with the desperate clumsiness of a man whom heated kisses and the most fervent of body movements could no longer arouse.

He felt detached, remote in some vital part of himself, with a cold objectivity growing in his mind which he could neither explain nor understand. There was a pain in his heart also, an agony of indecision. He was backed up against the bed now, his arms still tight about her, but love's culmination would now be a mockery and something deep in his nature rebelled at carrying pretense that far.