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I want you to stay here and marry me, immediately." "Aren't you being a little dictatorial, Nuwell?" she suggested coolly. The warning implied in her remoteness seemed to trigger a polarized reaction in Nuwell. The furious dark eyes melted suddenly, the stubborn anger of the face altered on the instant to a sentimental, wistful smile of appeal.
"I mean, one of them wanted in and I let him in, and then he backed up against the switch so I couldn't close it, until the others came in." "I don't know what sort of harebrained idea has gotten into their feeble minds," said Placer. "But I can take care of it in short order." He stepped back into the room, and Nuwell heard him apologizing to the others for the disturbance.
"As you know, the Toughs and Jellies are originally criminals and vagabonds you have smuggled to us for experimental purposes. One major effect of our initial glandular experiments with them, which makes them into Toughs and Jellies, is that they lose all memory of their past." "I don't want a flabby woman, like a Jelly!" exclaimed Nuwell with a shudder.
The others unloaded Dark's coffin and moved with it back toward the building. Nuwell and Maya climbed back into the copter, and shortly they were airborne again and the buildings of the Canfell Hydroponic Farm were receding behind and below them. Nuwell guided the copter almost straight westward now. It passed over Candor and buzzed out over the broad Xanthe Desert. And here trouble developed.
Nuwell fumbled around a wall and found a light switch. He pressed it, but nothing happened. "The electrical system isn't operating," he said. "We'll have to use our marsuit torches." He switched on his flashlight. It cast a long beam down the dusty corridor. Far ahead of them, a small animal scurried across the faint light and vanished into the darkness. Nuwell checked his atmosphere dial.
He was chattering into the radio frantically again. "They're evidently not tuned in on the emergency band, Nuwell," she said to him. "But they're coming almost directly toward us. They're bound to see us soon, if they haven't already." "That's true," said Nuwell, and added sourly: "But they ought to be tuned in. It's required by law." The dustcloud moved closer slowly, too slowly for a groundcar.
I think it would still be slightly higher than that of the Jellies, but you couldn't ever expect her again to get above the intellectual level of a child of six or eight terrestrial years." "I don't care anything about an intelligent woman," answered Nuwell ruthlessly. "If she weren't so proud of her intelligence now, I wouldn't have so much trouble with her.
It had not seemed too great a feat to her to hold Dark captive with her disguised heatgun when she was anticipating Nuwell's arrival within hours. But suddenly she felt like a hunter who has snared a lion in a rabbit trap. "Maya, are you there?" demanded Nuwell querulously. "We'll spell each other at the wheel and drive up without stopping, but it will still take two and a half days to get there."
The shimmering atmosphere, hostile to man, which sealed the red desert was a lens that distorted and concealed by its intervention. The groundcar was a mechanical bug, an alienness with which timorous man had allied himself; allied with it against reality, she and Nuwell were hastened by it through reality, unseeing, toward the goal of a more comfortable unreality.
But then through the open gate there poured a solid mass of translucent flesh, a horde of naked Jellies. Silently, they tumbled into the corridor, filling it from wall to wall, and others behind them pushed to enter as they paused. Wide-eyed, Nuwell stared at them for the briefest of moments. Then he dropped the whip and fled back up the hall, shouting at the top of his voice.
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