Dark of the Woods

eventual freedom, even if he were given the minimum sentence.

The Supremacy-hired, Supremacy-sympathizing guards would see to that with a joyous, savage brutality…

He could not allow himself such dangerous dreams. It was a silly thing for any man to think of, let alone a, man with so much to lose as he.

He must consider her only a friend. How could affection have arisen so swiftly anyway? He surely wasn't going to try to argue love-at-first-sight, was he? It could only be lust he felt. And lust could be conquered. He would think of her only as a friend, and he would not allow himself to love her.

He hoped…

Later that night, there were dreams:

“Love in its essence is spiritual fire': Swendenborg…

Stauffer Davis tossed through flames. They licked at him but did not consume him. Instead, they exhilarated, shot his flesh through with a contained burning that flowered in him with glowing ash and phoenixed his ancient soul…

“The only victory over love is flight': Napoleon…

But he didn't mean— Oh, well, a Freudian quote. Davis FLEW in his illicit dreams. Still, there were flames all about, all-deep, all-high, all-wide and full. And he flew through them, dancing on the hot air, flying beside her…

“Oh my luve's like a dark-haired rose': Burns and Stauffer Davis…

He flew through the flames beside her, tangling their wings, singing love songs in the crackling air…

But everything abruptly mutated into nightmare. The flames suddenly stung. His wings caught fire, flashed white. He saw hers catch too …

He saw her falling…

And he was falling beside her — down to where thousands of winged men and women waited accusingly. They knew he was not one of them. And standing on the horizon were Supremacy guards with scalpels of steel and diagrams for impotency…

He woke screaming.

Proteus hit the lights, plasti-plasma slopping about in his silvered husk, and restlessly searched the room.

There was nothing, only the ghosts of a thousand winged men and women etched in the ether from another day long gone.

Davis sat on the edge of the bed, head cradled in his hands, thinking of the stupidity of allowing this silly infatuation to grow into something more serious. Impotency under Supremacy surgeons' hands… imprisonment… almost certain death…

But none of these ugly possibilities seemed able to drive out the picture of her ebony hair or the perfect geometrical design of her wings which had been imprinted on the soft gray flesh of his brain. God damn it, he thought. I'm not making the artist's error of falling in love with the symbol of my sympathies, am I?

Infatuation. Nothing more. Please.

Proteus roamed the far corners of the room, searching…

II

During the following two days, Davis's position became even more difficult, for he found that the girl, Leah, was more than a beautiful form and a finely sculptured face. She also possessed a sharp wit and a deep well of inquisitive intelligence that was a delight to feed with more and more knowledge. She had educated herself in the ways and culture of her conquerors, and she could debate cleverly and at length on almost any topic Davis chose. He began to strengthen the emotional interest he held in her instead of whittling at the strands that drew him to her. That first moment he had seen her, he had been spellbound. Now he was enchanted.

At night, lying on the bed that was too large and too soft and too low, he would force himself to remember the punishment for miscegenation. They could insure that he felt no sexual interest in anyone ever again, let alone an alien woman. They could imprison and torture him. They could kill him…

But every morning, when Leah returned, he seemed to forget the vows of the previous night. He could not dismiss her, for he was too fascinated by her. He purposefully acted lost in many cases, only to insure that she would not feel it was time for him to find his own way about.

On the third day of her work as a guide, the bond was struck — at first in his mind alone, later between them and in the open. On the third day, he became a criminal by Alliance law. It started with the rat and culminated in the temple.

The rat…

He asked her, that morning, if there were shelters which the winged people had constructed as proof against the heavy clouds of mustard gas that had been flushed through their cities by the Alliance troops. He knew the stuff rotted rubber and that gas masks would have proven relatively useless after more than two uses.

“There's one half a mile up the lane,” she said. “We can get there in a couple of minutes, except it's mostly demolished.”

“Is there one intact nearby?”

“There aren't any intact anywhere,” she said. “The conquerors found them, one at a time, and destroyed them.”

He had stopped wincing at references to the brutality of the war. She did not make them to embarrass him, but as mere statements of fact. Indeed, he thought she did not even consciously connect the Earthmen civilians who had settled here after the war with the armor-suited power soldiers of the great conflict. “Well, then I guess that has to do.”

He slung his tapewriter over his shoulder, and they walked to enjoy the warmth and the crispness of the morning. On both sides of them, there was an occasional scurry as a woodland animal rushed for a tree or burrow. He remembered having read descriptions of the Demosian city sites immediately after the Alliance troops had landed. They had described the vast numbers of dead birds, and animals that had succumbed to the mustard gas, tens of thousands of them, lying so thickly that they concealed the earth itself for long stretches.

“There's the shelter,” she said. “What is left of it, at least.”

He followed the direction of her slim, tan hand and saw great slabs of concrete thrusting out of the earth, lengths of rusted and twisted steel that punched at the sky as if to rip it open and bring it down. The earth around the debris was charred black and in a few places fused into darkly gleaming glass by the heat of the explosion that had ripped through the underground structure. As they drew closer, he could see pieces of furniture, metal benches, and leather couches all broken, shattered, melted, mashed in among the cross-work of beams and concrete. In the crook of a steel beam, wedged in the tight angle, was a Demosian skull: fragile, tending toward a slight lengthiness, with the oval eye sockets that would accommodate the lovely orbs of a girl like Leah. In a pocket of rubble only a few feet away, as if giving balance to the scene, was a field mouse's nest. The thing hunched in the mass of weeds and grass and string, its two babies in its belly pouch, looking at them with more curiosity than fear. Death and life, side by side.

“You couldn't have had traitors,” he said. “I know that much about the Demosians. They never gave information-even under torture. How did the Alliance know where to drop bombs?”

“They didn't,” she said. “The explosion, you see, came from within the shelter, blasting outward, rather than down and in. The conquerors had a thing we think they called the 'mole.' They dropped them by the hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember now. The things were only as large as a man's arm, packed full of superexplosives. They hit the ground, bored down thirty feet, then leveled out and acted like subterranean submarines, seeking out heat with very sensitive receptors. Drop enough in one area, and sooner or later, one of them is going to hit paydirt. Then it bores through the wall of the shelter and detonates itself,”