Dark Of The Woods

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…

Chapter Two
    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 typewriter over