Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/12

12 dred. Dane could go back to prison. And when he'd paid the price of assaulting a leader, he would return to Chemistry House, where he was a Superior, and fool with his acids and test tubes and take orders from The Hundred.

But at least the agony was over. There would be no more scenes like that in Biology Station One this morning. A man can stand to lose a woman. What he can't stand is being tortured with the thought of losing her. Dane had so long feared that they would take Brooke from him, that now a strain of relief tempered his grief and fury.

THEY HAD STOOD ALONE on the top floor of the Biology Station this morning, the girl's eyes shining with eagerness, Dane's dark with a brooding bitterness. He had watched Brooke go near one of the globular incubators and stare at the embryo within, her lips parted and hand clasped against her throat.

"It's wonderful, Dane!" she breathed. "To think—that one of these incubators hold the man who will be the ruler of all the Americas some day! Doesn't it take your breath away?"

Her eyes reflected the shining columns of glass globes, each with its tiny atom of pulsing life within. The pumping and bubbling of a thousand artificial hearts throbbed in the room.

"With disgust—yes," Dane muttered. "Thank God I had a woman, not a fishbowl, for a mother. I can remember when having a baby was considered something sort of sacred. Now people go to Biology Stations to look at the embryos of their future offspring like a lot of sightseers at an aquarium."

Brooke turned on him, her eyes dark and angry.

"For that matter, I was artificially born myself. Most of the great men in this country were, too. It's been proven the best way from every angle."

"I suppose I should apologize for being normally born myself," Dane grunted. "But somehow, I'm proud of it! Brooke, I'm sick of all this! Sick of the Houses of Science, The Hundred, the Vedette, the Biology Board." His voice raised, and he tossed a hand at the ranks of gleaming incubators. "I've been told what I could and couldn't do for so long that I feel like asking permission every time I take a breath. And, Brooke—I'm through with it!"

"Dane Cabot, are you crazy?" Brooke said that in a tense whisper, her glance darting nervously to where an attendant had stopped in the act of reading the dials on an incubator to stare at them. "You could be executed for what you've said. If that workman heard—!"

Dane stared belligerently at the man, and the attendant's gaze dropped. But the young leader in Chemistry House had the good judgment to lower his voice.

"Let's get out of here," he grunted. "I only brought you because it was the quietest place I could think of where we could talk. The whole reek of the place nauseates me."

Brooke let him take her arm and guide her to the elevator. But there was resentment in the set of her features and the stiffness of her slender form. As they slipped down the long silver tube, Dane stared at her.

"I meant what I said," he clipped. "One fine day I'm going to get out of all this. That day isn't far off. The Hundred have given me their last order."

"How can you talk like that? You—a Superior in Chemistry House!"

"Superior to what?" Dane's laugh was harsh. "To the unthinking drones in the labs who drowse away the years