John Norman by Time Slave Page B

she surmised might be an hour, the flashlight again illuminated her body on the cot. She pretended she was asleep.
    When it was gone, she groaned. She had not dreamed they would be so thorough.
    Then she understood, too, the order of entries into her room, during the day, their timing, when the broom was given to her, the water, the wastes emptied, the food brought, the late checking.
    She was under almost constant surveillance.
    She had no tool. She was helpless in the room. She could not pick the lock for the locks were on the outside. She did not even have a fork, or spoon. With her fingernails and teeth she could not splinter through the floor, nor dig through the wall.
    And, even should she gain the outside, there were the blacks, at least one on guard, and the fence.
    And outside the fence there was the bush, the heat, the lack of water, the dryness, animals, the distance.
    Gunther, she knew, was a superb hunter. Tracks, in the sand and dirt, soft, powdery, dry, would leave a trail which she supposed even she, a woman, might follow.
    She lay on the cot looking up at the dark ceiling. I would leave a trail, she told herself, that even I could follow, even a woman.
    She feared Gunther.
    Then she noted that she had thought of herself not simply as Doctor Hamilton, but as a woman. No, no, she wept to herself. I do not wish to be a woman. I will not be a woman! I will not be a woman!
    She twisted desirably, deliciously, in the brief dress, and thought of Gunther.
    Suddenly she said to herself, startling herself, I want to be a woman!
    Yes, I want to be a womanl
    I am a woman!
    No, she cried, I will not be a woman! Never!
    She realized, though she could not understand the motivations, that it was no accident that she had been dressed as she had, that there had been a mirror placed in the room so that she would be forced to see herself so clad, that she had been ordered to adorn herself with cosmetics, and, indeed, most brutally, most unfairly of all, that she had been forced to kneel in the presence of males, and could not rise until their permission had been given.
    “I hate them!” she cried. “I hate men! I hate all of them! I do not want to be a woman! I will never be a woman! Never!”
    But a voice within her seemed to say, be quiet, little fool, little female.
    She rolled on her stomach and wept, and pounded the mattress. Suddenly she realized she had not removed the earrings, the makeup. She removed them, and, too, from her body, washed the perfume. Then she lay again on the cot. She was almost frightened to go to sleep. There was no sheet, no cover. She knew the blacks would, from time to time, during the night, check with the flashlight. Then she laughed to herself. “I am only a prisoner,” she said, “what do I care if they see my legs?” It seemed to her somehow amusing that a prisoner might attempt to conceal her legs from her jailers. Every inch of her, she knew, was at their disposal, if they so much as wished.
    She lay on her stomach on the cot, on the striped mattress, her head turned to one side. The mattress, she sensed, was wet with her tears. Her fists, beside her head, on each side, were clenched.
    As she lay there, helpless, locked in the room, she knew that the men had won, that whatever might be their reasons, their plans or motivations, their intentions with respect to her, that they had conquered.
    She knew that it was a woman who lay on the striped mattress on the small iron cot, in the hot, tin-roofed building in a compound in Rhodesia.
    “I know that I am a female,” she said to herself. “I am a female.”
    In her heart, in her deepest nature, for the first time in her life, Doctor Brenda Hamilton-the prisoner Brenda-the woman-acknowledged her sex.
    She did not know for what reason the men had done what they had done, but she knew that they had accomplished at least one of their goals.
    They had forced her, cruelly and incontrovertibly, in the very roots of her being, to accept the