Read Galaxies Like Grains of Sand for Free Online Page B

said to him. Her white face carried pink in its cheeks now.
    “I have been resourceful for a whole year to get to you,” he said. Now that his resources had brought him face to face with her, they failed, and left him standing helplessly. He was a thin young man, thin and sinewy, his clothes worn, his beard unkempt. His eyes never left Ployploy’s.
    “How did you find me?” Ployploy asked. Her voice, unlike the wild man’s, barely reached Smithlao. A haunting look, as fitful as the autumn, played on her face.
    “It was a sort of instinct — as if I heard you calling,” the wild man said. “Everything that could possibly be wrong with the world is wrong. Perhaps you are the only woman in the world who loves; perhaps I am the only man who could answer. So I came. It was natural; I could not help myself.”
    “I always dreamed someone would come,” she said. “And for weeks I have felt — known — you were coming. Oh, my darling...”
    “We must be quick, my sweet,” he said. “I once worked with robots — perhaps you could see I know them. When we get away from here, I have a robot plane that will take us away — anywhere; an island, perhaps, where things are not so desperate. But we must go before your father’s machines return.”
    He took a step toward Ployploy.
    She held up her hand.
    “Wait!” she implored him. “It’s not so simple. You must know something... The — the Mating Centre refused me the right to breed. You ought not to touch me.”
    “I hate the Mating Centre!” the wild man said. “I hate everything to do with the ruling regime. Nothing they have done can affect us now.”
    Ployploy clenched her hands behind her back. The faint colour had left her cheeks. A fresh shower of dead rose petals blew against her dress, mocking her.
    “It’s so hopeless,” she said. “You don’t understand...”
    His wildness was humbled now.
    “I threw up everything to come to you,” he said. “I only desire to take you into my arms.”
    “Is that all, really all, all you want in the world?” she asked.
    “I swear it,” he said simply.
    “Then come and touch me,” Ployploy said.
    At that moment Smithlao saw a tear glint in her eye, bright and ripe as a raindrop.
    The hand the wild man extended to her was lifted to her cheek. She stood unflinching on the grey terrace, her head high. And so his loving fingers gently brushed her countenance. The explosion was almost instantaneous.
    Almost. It took the traitorous nerves in Ployploy’s epidermis but a fraction of a second to analyse the touch as belonging to another human being and to convey their findings to the nerve centre; there, the neurological block implanted by the Mating Centre in all mating rejects, to guard against just such a contingency, went into action at once. Every cell in Ployploy’s body yielded up its energy in one consuming gasp. It was so intense that the wild man was also killed by the detonation.
    Just for a second, a new wind lived among the winds of Earth.
    Yes, thought Smithlao, turning away, you had to admit it was neat. And, again, logical. In a world on the brink of starvation, how else stop undesirables from breeding? Logic against logic, man’s pitted against Nature’s — that was what caused all the tears of the world.
    He made off through the dripping plantation, heading back for the vane, anxious to be away before Gunpat’s robots reappeared. The shattered figures on the terrace were still, already half-covered with leaves and petals. The wind roared like a great triumphant sea in the treetops. It was hardly odd that the wild man did not know about the neurological trigger; few people did, barring psychodynamicians and the Mating Council — and, of course, the rejects themselves. Yes, Ployploy had known what would happen. She had chosen deliberately to die like that.
    “Always said she was mad!” Smithlao told himself. He chuckled as he climbed into his machine, shaking his head over her lunacy.
    It