Stevens stared at her. "You mean--?" he asked.
"I mean that in a matter of hours the world will be down on you. Sheer force of numbers will make you yield to them. Oh, Clark, can't you see that you're _wrong_?" Her eyes suddenly widened with dread as she saw his hands work convulsively.
"Get out," he ordered, and she obeyed, thinking wildly of a dash to safety. Safety among the trees? Without a man to help her for perhaps hundreds of miles! Meekly she stood, waiting for what might happen. She could not believe that her life was to end at the hands of a madman. She found it hard, indeed, to believe that Stevens was mad. Confused, rather, by the overdose of the Regulator to which he had been subjected.
"Brave woman," he said. "I see you do not fear my madness. _That_ is well. You are to be my mate--no, my wife."
"Wife?" she replied calmly. "But marriages are no longer customary. And, even when they do happen, it is only through consent of the bride."
"All this," he said slowly, "must be changed. There is no life in this world, no struggle." He thought further. "Men must fight--if not each other, as I did in England, then something bigger. We must fight now to bring life to this silly paradise we're in. Even if it means the spilling of blood."
She, the nurse, shuddered at the thought of blood. For radio-knife surgery had made incisions a dry affair, without confusion or infection. Accidents were few; many lived their entire lives without seeing their own blood. "Can you do it alone?" she asked.
"I can start alone," he decided. "I shall find my warriors in the mad-houses and the clinics. Many of the inmates of these institutions are no more mad than I; they've merely been put away because they saw clearly, as I do."
"But they'll find us. They'll find you!" she cried in sudden anguish. "They'll find you! Kill you!" Suddenly sobs choked her.
"They will forget me after awhile. They will think I was a fool and drove my plane into the ground or a hillside. So I shall wait. And then, when it is clear, and they have grown weary of looking, or expecting an attack from me, I'll go out after my men and women. We'll place them where best suited; some in transportation; some in utilities, and some in communication. And some with the Psycho Regulators. Then we strike, strike _there_, and the world is free again!"
Markett grew white as she realized that this dream of power could be more than a dream. She looked up into his face, quiet now. What had happened to him? Would he become more and more obsessed, more violent? Perhaps if she could persuade him to wait--to stay there quietly with her while he worked out plans--the influence of the Regulator would begin to wear off.
Over the course of some two hundred years the white man of North America had lost what backwoods 

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