As he sat, thinking, a tall girl tiptoed to the doorway and looked in at him. Her eyes were soft, but the line of her lips was determined. She was tall, and soft blond hair fell to her shoulders. Her features were regular and perfect. She wore a close-fitting tunic which crossed her breast leaving one shoulder bare. It stopped midway between knee and hip. She wore sandals of gold.
She looked at the back of Jason Blood’s head, and then beckoned to someone behind her. He came through the doorway, stepping as quietly as she. He was a tall Viking, his deep chest bare and symmetric. He looked troubled. He licked his lips and glanced at her. She nodded.
In his right hand he carried a short club made of rubber. He raised it and slammed it heavily against Blood’s head, just over the ear. As Blood slumped forward, the tall young man caught him.
He picked him up easily and. carried him out of the study, back through the house, Carol walking silently behind him. Tenderly he lowered Blood into a chair placed before a small austere machine.
He whispered: “Is the suggestion all set?”
“I did it this morning,” she said.
She took a hypodermic from a drawer of the machine arid with deft, practiced gesture, filled it and injected it cleanly into Blood’s upper arm. She waited a few moments and then slapped Jason Blood’s face smartly. He stirred and moaned. She compressed her lips and slapped him again. He opened his eyes drowsily and looked up at her. His eyes flicked from her face to the identity disk that told him that it was Carol.
“Carol!” he said thickly. “What—”
She flicked the switch on the machine and a brilliant light played on a small metal whirligig, like a toy, set in a frame near the top of it. Jason looked at it, and tried to look away, his face twisting with sudden alarm.
“No!” he said loudly. “No!”
But she ran her fingers through his thinning hair, and even as he spoke his eyes became glassy in the intensity of his stare at the whirling toy.
The voice, her voice, came from the machine. Soothing. Calm. Confident. “Jason. Blood, you are very sleepy, very sleepy, very sleepy, very sleepy, very—”
Carol took the young man’s arm and led him from the room. In the outer hall she said, “Thank you, John.”
“It means that I’m losing you, of course. Just when I’d found you. Carol, I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else.”
“I know that,” she said simply. “But it was the only way I could bring him to his senses.”
“If it doesn’t work, Carol, I’ll... I’ll be waiting.” He turned and left quickly. She stood for long moments in the hallway and then returned to the room where the autocosmeton droned quietly. She took a critical look at Jason, and then, feeling slightly ill, walked out of the room. It was very disquieting to look at the work in process. She took a scented shower and climbed into her wide, deep bed. She fell asleep with a small smile curving the corners of her mouth.
Jason Blood came slowly up out of deep sleep, a consciousness of vitality and strength making him yawn and stretch luxuriantly before he opened his eyes. He froze, his arms extended, his narrowed eyes looking at the dark and silent shape of the autocosmeton in front of his chair.
He had guessed, while awaking, that he had fallen asleep in his study; this was an entirely different part of the house.
What was it? Something about Carol — her fingers touching his hair, the bright revolving toy on the machine — dimly remembered, as something seen in a dream. He slowly lowered his arms, and, glancing down, saw with a touch of horror, that his lean pale arms were longer — thick, bronzed, evenly muscled. They weren’t his own hands. Stranger’s hands. Solid. Square. Well-formed, with long tapering fingers.
Could Carol have been responsible? Of course! He jumped up so quickly that he knocked the chair over. What a foul trick! Somehow, she had managed to get him out to. the autocosmeton. What would Karl say? The strange hand ran over his face, over unfamiliar planes and angles. He remembered that somewhere he had the original suggestion table which he had used four years before. He began to relax. It was simple. Merely give himself a second treatment and return to the familiar face and figure.
He would demand an explanation from Carol. His short tunic was uncomfortably tight. He hurried through the house, found her asleep in the bedroom. He looked down at her placid, sleeping face, feeling the drive of his need for her.
A huge mirror was built into the far wall. He was curious as to what Carol had done to him. He turned toward the mirror and inspected himself. He saw a man in his early twenties, over six feet tall, with enormously broad shoulders, a slim waist and a flat, tight belly. The arms and legs were smoothly and beautifully muscled. He was an even bronze tan. Dark blond hair curled crisply on his heads The face was good, a lean face with a quizzical look about the eyes, a touch of humor in the set of the mouth, slight hollows in the cheeks.
He arched his back arid expanded his chest, admiring the play of muscles, the construction of the superb body.
Young again! Alert and vital and full of the pure joy of healthy existence.
Carol stirred, opened her eyes and looked up at him. He saw the quick admiration after she had checked the identity disk pinned to the tunic which was no longer large enough.
“Darling!” she said softly.
He stood there and suddenly Karl Dane became a very distant and silly man who persisted in clinging to the past. This was the present! The eternal present!
Picking her up in his strong new arms, he walked with her to the wide window. Her head was on his shoulder and they looked happily down into the terraced parks of the city where, in the first gray of dusk, the wandering couples and groups made brilliant dots of color against the cool green.
“You’ve been away so long, my darling,” she said gently.
“I’ll never leave you again.”
