“Marie,” he whispered, for he was afraid to speak aloud.
There was an indistinct mumble, a thick gurgle. He forced himself to his knees, and his leg felt better. Only a slight cut, the blue color proving to be concrete dust. The entire scene was out of Dante. The fire watts were high, and the wreckage of the theater was mixed with parts of what he recognized as a cybership. Some Sensitive had been used to his limits and had not been able to center the ship into the landing cushions of the Port two blocks away. He had set her down, rather had crashed her into the theater.
“Marie,” he whispered again, feeling the throb of his heart race almost out of control. Then, dragging himself through the dust-choked ruins, he topped a pile of rubble and saw her. . . .
Her eyes were gone.
Her face was blistered and blackened.
And the black sockets of her eyes bled rust water . . .
“My God. Kill me. Kill me,” she screeched at him.
“Marie,” he whispered.
“Mercy. Kill me!”
His stomach fluttered, tumbled. He couldn’t! Not kill her! God please strike them both dead!
He staggered away. He broke into a run. But to the far limit of the fire walls, he could hear her. “Kill me! Jessie, Jessie, please!”
And the worst of it was, he felt no pain. She suffered, and sitting next to her, he escaped.
The fire walls danced.
JESSIE! The scream shook the world, and hands from outside putted him through the fire watts . . .
I woke to the crash of raindrops against the windscreen, and it was the sound of rocks smashing down a mountainside. I threw up my psychic defenses and dulled my cybernetic tendencies.
It was an old dream. Five years old. I wiped the sweat from my brow and looked at the unwinding map. It was an old dream, but nevertheless disconcerting.
Sector three, segment two-ought-two. And while that registered, the car drifted to a halt, was scanned by a private robogateman, and swung again into a tree-lined drive.
In the right mood, I might have laughed. It was Freudian. Positively Freudian that when I wanted to punch a random set of coordinates, I would select those that brought me here. I didn’t laugh, however, my mood bordering on morose.
She said, “Jessie, come in.”
She was wearing a black mini-suit, and her honey hair spilled like wild, sparkling rivers down her slender shoulders. Her eyes were blue, skylike pieces of crystal.
“Fine,” I said. “I’d like to.”
“Should I send the servants away?” She was wealthy enough to afford human rather than robo servants.
“No. Training begins tomorrow, and I must just as well begin denying myself tonight.”
She curled up on the couch, tucking her legs under her. “You’re set on going then?”
“Yes.”
She was everything the newspapers and magazines and Tri-D tanks said she was. Her breasts were high and firm, her belly flat, her legs long. Goddess legs. And her face fairy tale princess’, sugar, and naughty spice. Mandy Morain had been the rage of Modern Hollywood until a year earlier when she startled the filmworld with “I wish solitude to find the man I love.”
She had received four thousand offers overnight.
She could easily have had many more attractive lovers than Jessie Poul, cybernetist. Much more responding lovers too, lovers without my periodic “trouble.”
I had met her on the set of Languish Queen. They had hired me to cybernet a cave to tell them just when to expect a cave-in. I was to scream a warning three minutes ahead so they could remove MM and the other stars to safe ground. We hit it off immediately. We seemed—almost— to fit like two pieces of a puzzle in our own snug corner of the total picture.
She leaned over and kissed me. I felt myself, like fireflies, melting into the darkness of her sheltering night “No,” I said.
“No?”
“Tomorrow is training.”
My eyes seemed to rivet to the leaping flames in the simu-fireplaoe.
“Tomorrow has not yet come.” Her voice was a like a soft summer breeze.
The flames were orange and red and yellow and tinted with green.