Dark Of The Woods

had become his only contact with people, and without it he would have been shallow and incomplete. He realized now that he had been searching for love, searching for what two dead parents had never given him, had denied him in their bitterness and their determination to destroy one another no matter what the cost. Stauffer, Stauffer, Stauffer… Wife against husband, both of them against the son. When he had grown and they could not live to see his accomplishments, to see that he had made it despite them, he had turned to the masses, opened his heart and wrote for their pleasure and their praises. That had become so important to him that the true love of a winged girl had been momentarily displaced, lost in the greater need for acceptance. But not now. Not any longer…
    He drove faster.
    Proteus gurgled noisily.
    Snow bulleted the windscreen, danced whitely across the hood. It covered the leaves along the road, began decking the trees in soft shrouds…
    What would he say to her? Could he make her reject her winged angel to come with him? Could he convince her that he would love and cherish her more than her Demosian lover? He would have to. There was nothing else he could imagine now. There could be no going back to the reading clubs for a hint of love, admiration, appreciation. He knew the phoniness of that, at last, and it was not going to be possible to delude himself with the same routine any longer.
    The gyros whined to keep the car as stable as possible while he poured the stress power from the grav plates into the propelling mechanism.
    They swept past the towers of the aviaries and onward toward the Sanctuary. The twin breasts were the breasts of a fair maiden now, frosted with snow. He turned toward the ugly black block of the "orphanage" and accelerated. He was afraid she would say no, would stay with the winged boy, leaving him without anything but his loneliness and longing. He constructed arguments as sound as those required to breach the gates of Hell or Heaven, repeated them to himself to get them perfectly in mind. Somehow, they all sounded like pieces of broken glass dropping off his tongue.
    He swung the car in front of the steps of the main promenade before the huge double doors of the Sanctuary. He got out, rushed up the steps, through the portals and into a well-lighted lobby.
    Proteus hurried behind.
    Davis crossed the carpeted floor to where a woman sat behind a reception desk, a gray-haired matron with enormous fallen breasts. "I'm looking for Matron Salsbury," he said, panting.
    "You've found her, then," she said, smiling. "I'm Matron Salsbury. And you must be Mr. Stauffer Davis." She rose, trembling visibly with excitement.
    Before his encounter with the League rep at Alice Bunter's house, he would have held Matron Salsbury's hand, talked of his books, charmed her with his tales of writing and publishing. Now, all of that was behind him. To engage in any of it would have driven him quite mad. Instead, he snapped, "The girl. Leah. The one who was my guide. Could I see her, please?"
    "I'm sorry, but she's not here at the moment."
    The alcohol was gone, but he was drunk with fear, fear that she had gone off for an idyllic holiday with her smooth-skinned young angel and that even now they were tangled in love.
    "Her husband," Davis said. "Could I speak to him?"
    She looked at him blankly. "What?"
    He was enraged by her inability to understand so simple a request at so urgent a moment. "Her husband, woman! I want to speak to her husband!"
    "I don't understand," she said, looking a bit frightened. "She has no husband. There are only sixteen winged people left. They are all women."
    He felt his mouth unhinge.
    Exterminated…
    He closed his mouth, licked his lips with a tongue that felt swollen and dry. She had known what he felt! And to save him the pain and the loss of public respect, she had cunningly offered him this out. If they were married, they were better apart. And each had been lying to the other. She had known it, but he had been ignorant. She had taken steps to insure his career and his ego. To hell with those! he thought.
    "Where has she gone?"
    Matron Salsbury looked flustered. "I don't know. She sat here in the lobby for two days. She even took her meals here, slept here. She watched those doors as if she were waiting for someone or—" She stopped as if understanding had struck like lightning inside her head. "And then, just an hour ago or so ago, she left without saying where