“Why don’t you throw that away?” he demanded, “that horrid smell.”
“I don’t smell anything,” she said coldly. “And I need the packing, I told you. But I can’t find my notebooks. I had all these notebooks.”
“Yes, I read them,” he said quietly. “I threw them away.”
She stared at him.
No record now but these specimens. No communication to anyone that this thing lived and breathed and wanted to breed.
At the doors of the hotel, as he arranged for the car to take them to the airport, she gave the bag of medical specimens to the doorman, with a bundle of Swiss francs, and said in German hurriedly that the bag must go at once to Dr. Samuel Larkin. Turning her back on the man immediately, she walked towards the waiting car as Lasher turned and smiled at her and put out his hand.
“My wife, how tired she looks,” he said softly with a little smile. “How sick she has been.”
“Yes, very,” she said, wondering what the bellhop saw when he looked at her, her bruised and thin face.
“Let me hold you, darling dear.” He put his arms around her in the backseat. He kissed her as they drove away. She did not bother to look to see if the doorman had gone inside with the medical bag. She did not dare. The concierge would find the address inside. He had to.
When they reached New York, he realized the medical bag and all the test results were gone. He threatened to kill her.
She lay on the bed, refusing to speak. He tied her up gently, carefully, giving her room to move her limbs but not to get free, the twined tape making the strongest rope in the world. He covered her carefully so she wouldn’t be cold. He turned on the fan vent in the bathroom and then the television at a high but not unreasonable volume, and went out.
It was a full twenty-four hours before he returned. She had been unable to hold the urine. She hated him. She wished for his death. She wished she knew charms with which to kill him.
He sat by her as she made all the arrangements in Houston-yes, two floors in a fifty-story building where they would have complete privacy. It was small in Houston terms, such a complex as this, and right downtown, and Houston had quite a few empty ones. This had been the headquarters of a cancer research program until it had gone broke. There were presently no other tenants.
All kinds of equipment was still on these three floors. It had all been repossessed by the owners of the property. But they could warrant nothing about it. Fine with her. She leased the entire space, complete with living quarters, offices, reception rooms, examining rooms, and laboratories. She arranged for utilities, rental cars, everything they would need to begin their serious study.
His eyes were very cold as he watched her. He watched her fingers when she pressed the buttons. He listened to every syllable that passed her lips.
“This city is very near to New Orleans,” she said, “you realize that.” She did not want him to discover it later and rail at her. Her wrists ached from his dragging her about. She was hungry.
“Oh yes, the Mayfairs,” he said, gesturing to the printed history, which lay in its folder. Not a day passed that he did not study this or his notes or his tapes. “But they would never think to look for you only one hour away by air, would they?”
“No,” she said. “If you hurt Michael Curry, I will take my own life. I will not be of further use to you.”
“I’m not sure you’re of use to me now,” he said. “The world is filled with more amiable and agreeable people than you, people who sing better.”
“So why don’t you kill me?” she said. As he reflected, she did her level best with every invisible power at her command to kill him. It was useless.
She wanted now to die, or to sleep forever. Possibly they were the same thing.
“I thought you were something immense, something innocent,” she said. “Something wholly unknown and new.”
“I know you did!” he answered sharply, infuriated, and dangerous, blue eyes flashing.
“I don’t think you are now.”
“Your job is to find out what I am.”
“I’m trying,” she said.
“You know you find me beautiful.”
“So what?” she said. “I hate you.”
“Yes, it was plain in your notebooks, ‘this new species,’ ‘this creature,’ ‘this being’-how clinically you spoke of me, and you know? You are wrong. I am not new, my darling dear, I am old, older by far than you can imagine. But my time is coming again. I could not have chosen a better moment for my childlike loving progeny. Don’t you want to know what I am?”
“You’re monstrous, you’re unnatural, you’re cruel and impulsive. You cannot think straight or concentrate. You’re mad.”
He was so angry that he couldn’t answer her for a moment. He wanted to hit her. She could see his hand opening and closing.
“Imagine,” he said, “if all mankind died out, my darling dear, and all the genes for mankind rode in the blood of one miserable apelike creature, and he passed it down and down, and finally, to the apes was born again a man!” She said nothing.
“Do you think that man would be very merciful to the lower apes? Especially if he secured a mate? An ape woman who could breed with him to form a new dynasty of superior beings-”
“You’re not superior to us,” she said coldly.
“The hell I’m not!” he said wrathfully.
“I don’t know for sure how it happened, but I know it will never happen again.”
He shook his head, smiling at her. “What a fool you are. What an egotist. You make me think of all the scientists whose words I read now and listen to on the television. It’s happened before, and before and before…and this time is the right time, this time is the moment, this time there shall be no sacrifice, this time we will strive as never in the past!”
“I’ll die before I help you.”
He shook his head wanly. He looked away. He seemed to be dreaming. “Do you think we will be merciful when we rule? Has any superior being ever been merciful to the weaker? Were the Spaniards when they came to the New World merciful to the savages they found there? No, it’s never happened in history, has it, that the higher species, the species with the advantages, has been kind to those who were lower. On the contrary, the higher species wipes out the lower. Isn’t that so? It’s your world, tell me about it! As if I didn’t know.”
The tears rose in his eyes. He laid his head on his arm and wept, and when he finished, he dried his eyes with a towel from the bath. “Oh, what might have been between us!”
“What’s that?” she asked.
He started to kiss her again, to stroke her, and to open his clothes.
“Stop this. I’ve miscarried twice. I’m sick. Look at me. Look at my face and my hands. Look at my arms. A third miscarriage will kill me, don’t you realize it? I’m dying now. You’re killing me. Where will you turn when I’m gone? Who will help you? Who knows about you?”
He mused. Then, suddenly, he slapped her. He hesitated, but it seemed to have satisfied him. She was staring at him.
He laid her on the bed, and he began stroking her hair. There was very little milk now. He drank it. He massaged her shoulders and her arms, and her feet. He kissed her all over. She lost consciousness. When she came round, it was late at night, and her thighs were sore and wet from him, and from her own desire.
When they reached Houston, she realized she had arranged for a prison. The building was deserted. And she had leased two floors very high up. He indulged her for two days, as they acquired various things for their comfort in this high fairy-tale tower amid the neon and sparkling lights. She watched, she waited, she struggled to seize the slightest opportunity, but he was too wakeful, too fast.
And then he tied her up. There was to be no study, no project. “I know what I need to know.”