Dark Of The Woods

and Leah out of this mess. When that was done, he turned to the girl, rolled her over, and examined the progress of the black line up her delicate arm. It was growing quite near her armpit. In another fifteen minutes, she might very well be dead. Perhaps sooner. Her breathing was shallow, birdlike, and the beat of her large heart was fast, much faster than it should be even for a Demosian.
    "Do you have a speedheal kit around here?" he asked Matron Salsbury.
    "No," she said.
    He knelt, slapped her twice across the face. "He thought I couldn't hurt him. Don't make the same mistake." He held the rep's gun at her neck. He had not acquired so much of a violence drive that he could kill a human being, but as long as she did not know that, it was an effective threat.
    "There's an infirmary on the ground floor here," she said. "That door, the green one. There should be a speedheal equipment racked in the open."
    He patted her cheek, smiled, and raced into the infirmary where he located and brought back a speedheal kit inside of two minutes. When he returned to the lounge, Matron Salsbury was whispering to the rep, trying to wake him. He was moaning a little, but still fairly well out. "Save your breath," Davis said, enjoying the way she snapped her head around to look at him, frightened and confused. After being terrified, for weeks, of what the Alliance would do to him if it discovered his indiscretion, it was nice to see the Alliance people doing the cowering.
    He lifted Leah and placed her on one of the comfortable sofas, which dotted the floor of the lobby, on her back so that he could keep close watch on her respiration and the vitality of her heartbeat. Opening the medical kit, he began extracting the tools he would require to work on her and was soon absorbed by the job of stopping the advancing line of poison before it was too late to contain it and destroy it. For a while, he thought he was going to lose the race against the infection, but then he had the foreign element on the retreat, eliminated it, and was nearly to home base. He applied the speedheal bandages, set the circuits into operation, checked the power level of the microminiature battery attached to the yellow cloth, and settled back, feeling as if a ton or two of steel had been lifted from each shoulder. She was going to be all right.
    "Very touching," the rep said from behind him. He whirled, but the Alliance man was still tied properly. "Very touching, but foolish. Now you have a third charge against you: molesting an officer of the Alliance. Damn, I'll bet that charge hasn't been leveled against anyone in this century. How did you do it, Davis? How were you able to hit me?"
    He didn't want to explain that the antiviolence taboo had shattered and died in that gas shelter when he had had to resort to violence to save a girl he loved from the claws and teeth of a rat—or watch her die and be torn apart. He didn't want to explain that such a thing might not be strong enough stimulus to push every modern Alliance citizen into violence, but that it was plenty for a man who had been seeking love all his life and had never found it until he had met that girl. So he didn't explain. And refusing to explain to an Alliance officer made him feel even tougher and more of a man than he felt now—and he felt better at this moment than he had in all the rest of his life.
    "Look," he said to the mustachioed rep, "you're going to be my hostage to see that I get public notice. Otherwise the Alliance might stick me in a back room somewhere and no one would ever hear of me. If I'm to have a fair chance, I have to be allowed a trial. If it's splashed all over the statsheets on the next news hour, the Alliance won't dare try to railroad me without due process. And all I want is a chance to fight the miscegenation laws."
    "Go to hell," the rep snarled.
    "You'll call your boys off if they—"
    "I'd rather," the rep hissed, his voice tight and whispered, "order them to shoot to kill, whether or not I'm liable to be shot also. You've ruined a career I've worked years to build. They won't ever advance me within the diplomatic corps. And I won't be permitted back in the army. That means their going to condemn me to a civilian position, and I couldn't stand that. I'd rather die first."
    "I believe you," Davis said soberly. "Without power of some sort, military, or governmental, your type of pest can't survive."
    The rep spat on him.
    "That hit home, didn't it?"
    "Go to