Her eyes and her voice were challenging, but her words demanded understanding, even pity. Hendley wanted to give them to her, but his own pain pushed and shoved him into a bitter accusation. "What were you doing that day we were together in the sun—practicing? I thought that meant as much to you as it did to me! I thought we'd found something together. I should have known when I found you'd lied to me—when you ran away—that it was all a pretense with you. But I couldn't have guessed that it was just—exercise!"
"Oh, Hendley, Hendley!" Her eyes would no longer focus on his. Their lashes were dark, heavy, and wet. "How could I expect you to understand? Don't you know that day was different? To have someone want me—me, not just a body that other men have gaped at, not just a beautiful ornament, not a prize in a lottery! I never expected to have that. It was wonderful. I'll never forget it—no matter what you think or feel now. But I knew it couldn't go on. We're watched all the time. It was just luck that I was able to sneak away and meet you that one day in the museum. Even then I was late getting back, and I had to make up a story. I got only two days' debit. But we would have been caught if we'd done it again. You'd have been punished, and I was afraid you'd wish you'd never seen me. I didn't want that. I wanted you to remember the way it was that afternoon—"
Her voice broke. She pushed swiftly past Hendley, stumbling blindly toward the bed. Her knees struck the edge of the plastifoam layer and she fell forward face down onto the bed. Her body shook, and her fingers dug into the covering. Her sobs were muffled.
Slowly Hendley's anger drained out of him. He felt dry, exhausted, like eyes empty of their tears. Ann's slim figure seemed smaller lying crumpled on the bed. Her nakedness made her seem merely vulnerable, exposed to abuse and pain and shame. He could not shake out of his mind the image of her on the stage—and especially the projection of the audience's reaction on the huge thought-screen—but she was not to blame. He should have known that, just as he should have known that the honesty of her surrender on the warm sand of the surface outside the museum could not have been simulated.
The rest didn't matter, he thought. She hadn't chosen a way of life for herself. Only that afternoon had she chosen freely.
Crossing the room, he stood over the bed looking down at her. The Organization! he thought savagely. The efficient world of machines, coldly manipulating lives, juggling people as if they were no more than the numbers in which the machines dealt.
He looked down at ABC-331. How much more than a set of numbers she was! He sat beside her. His hand touched a smooth white shoulder. This time he did not withdraw the touch, turning it into a caress. "I'm sorry," he said gently. "Can you forget what I said just now? It was the surprise—the shock of seeing you on that stage. All that's over. Can we go back?"
For a while she didn't move, but she ceased to cry. Her body no longer trembled.
"You're beautiful," he said. "I know you don't like to hear that, but you are. I've never seen anyone like you. You're not just beautiful the way a statue is beautiful. It's a different quality—something soft and warm inside you that shows through, that gives the other things"—he smiled—"a special beauty. It makes them mean something." With a gentle pressure of his hand he rolled her onto her back. Her eyes, dark with lingering tears, stared up at him, huge in her pale face. In the dim light he could not see their color, but he remembered fans of brown laced with green flecks. "You're lovely in the way a computer measures loveliness, too. I can see why you were singled out to do—what you have to do. But being beautiful isn't just having a certain shape or size or texture...." His fingers brushed the swell of her breast and moved down to trace the deep cut of her waist. Roughly, because suddenly he wanted her, he said, "Your beauty is alive. It's real. That's like the difference between a piece of plastic with wires woven through it, and another that looks similar but has a live current that makes it into a glowing light."
"Oh, Hendley," she whispered. Her hands reached up to pull him down beside her. "I never wanted to be beautiful before! If only I didn't have to—"