John Norman by Time Slave Page A

genuine awe in William’s eyes. She smiled.
    “You are beautiful, Brenda,” he said. He did not address her as Doctor Hamilton. That would, in the moment, have seemed foolish.
    He was a male, confronting a beautiful female prisoner. That was all. One would not address such a prisoner by such a title.
    “Hello, William,” whispered Brenda Hamilton.
    “Stand straight,” said William.
    He walked about her, viewing her. He stopped behind her, some seven feet away, on the other side of the cot. She did not turn to face him.
    “Yes,” he said, “you are a truly beautiful woman.”
    She lifted her head, not turning.
    He ranged about her and stood again in front of her. “Truly beautiful,” he said.
    “Thank you, William,” said Brenda Hamilton. It was the first time in her life that such a thing had been said to her. It was the first time she had acknowledged such a compliment. Deep within her there glowed a sudden, diffused warmth. Startled, she felt, within her, which she would not have admitted, a surge of pleasure.
    A man had inspected her, candidly, as she had stood well displayed before him, as she had stood as a mere prisoner, and had termed her, objectively, with nothing to gain which he could not have taken by his strength, beautiful. Brenda Hamilton, the prisoner, knew then that she was pleasing to a man.
    This filled her, for no reason she clearly understood, with incredible pride.
    She had stood well revealed, captive, before a man, and had been pronounced beautiful. But suddenly she felt very helpless, very vulnerable.
    To her terror she saw William’s hand reach out and touch her shoulder.
    “No!” she hissed. She backed away. “Don’t touch met” she cried.
    William looked at her with fury. He did not advance toward her.
    “I have come to tell you,” he said, “that we are encountering difficulties in completing the second series of experiments. There will be some delay.”
    “I demand to speak to Herjellsen!” said Brenda Hamilton.
    But the door had shut.
    She heard the hasps strike the staple plates, the locking of the heavy padlocks.
    Brenda turned away, agonized. She had wanted William to stay. He seemed the only link with the outside. Herjellsen had not so much as seen her since she had left in the Land Rover with William and Gunther. Gunther had not visited her since her first night in captivity. There had been only the blacks and, from time to time, William.
    Brenda Hamilton regarded herself in the mirror, in the light of the single light bulb under the tin roof.
    Tonight, she knew, she had attracted a man. She lay down on the cot, twisting in the heat, unable to sleep. She got up and walked about the room. She drank water. She desperately wanted a cigarette, but William would not allow her any. “Tobacco must not be smelled on your breath,” he had told her. “A keenly sensed organism can detect such an odor, even days afterward.”
    Brenda Hamilton had understood nothing of this. But she had not been given tobacco.
    Fitfully, in the heat, she slept.
    Once she awakened, startled. She had dreamed that Gunther had taken her in his arms, as she was, as she had been when William had seen her, and forced her back on the cot, his hands thrusting up the thin dress, over her breasts, freeing her arms of it, until it was about her neck and that he had then, with one hand, twisted it, sometimes loosening it, sometimes tightening it, controlling her by it, making her do what he wished, while his other hand had forced her to undergo delights of which she had not dreamed. How she had writhed and struggled to kiss him as he had then, when her body uncontrollably begged for him, deigned to enter her. But then she screamed and awakened, the light of a flashlight in her eyes.
    “Go to sleep,” said a voice from the window, on the other side of the bars, the netting. It was one of the blacks, making his rounds, checking the prisoner.
    She lay terrified on the cot.
    She lay awake. She waited. In what