He began to feel the ascent. Going up the side of the mountain was a terrifying experience - the most terrifying since the actual kidnapping.
The aliens, his night-sharpened eyes perceived, had thick bluish pads on their palms and on the soles of their blunt feet. Suction pads.
The aliens gripped him firmly, at shoulders and feet, and started to ascend the naked face of the cliff. Dawes swung dizzyingly back and forth as they rose. They were climbing the unvegetated rock as if it were a ladder, and with each new upward thrust he canted out over the emptiness, wisely refusing to look down.
Then the upwardness ended, just when Dawes thought his mind would snap from the constant danger of the climb, and the aliens proceeded inward. Into a cave of some sort, that appeared to be hewn out of the face of the rock cliff.
Dawes' fertile imagination worked overtime. He pictured strange alien sacrificial rites taking place in this Haggardesque cave. Or vampire bats lurking in the darkness ahead, grateful for the sacrifice being brought to them.
But none of the dire perils he conceived came immediately to pass. The aliens simply left him in the cave.
They put him down with surprising gentleness, leaving him to lie in cold, moist sand, turned their backs on him, walked away. In the utter darkness he could see nothing at all.
He sensed other aliens moving about; he thought he could tell them by their ape-like shuffle. He wondered if the whole colony was to be carried off and deposited here in this cave. The survey team said the planet was uninhabited, he thought reproachfully. But Dave Matthews was right after all.
He thought about the interrupted kiss. Then, about the interrupted wedding night. Then, lastly, about the interrupted colony.
It had been such a brave start; the rearing of the stockade, the coupling off, the bubble-houses. Everything had been giving so well for the infant colony. But trouble had taken less than a day to descend on them.
He sat quietly in the darkness. The sound of sobbing was coming from a point somewhere to his right. As background noise he could hear the gentle murmuring sound of flowing water, as if there were a stream bubbling inside the borders of the cave.
'Who's there?' he asked. 'Who are you?'
'It's Carol. Is that you, Mike?'
Some of his fear ebbed away. At least, he thought, he was not alone!
'Yes. Where are you, Carol?'
'Sitting in sand, someplace. I can't see. What's going to happen to us?'
'I don't know,' Dawes said. 'Don't move. Stay right where you are and I'll try to find you. Damn this darkness, anyway!'
He looked around, trying to gauge the direction from which Carol's voice had come. But he knew that no vector would be accurate in here. The walls of the caves would have a distorting effect.
A voice he recognized as Noonan's broke in, saying, 'Dawes, is that you?'
It came from someplace deeper in the cave, behind him, highlighted by resonating echoes. 'Yes,' Dawes said loudly. 'And Carol's here, too. Anyone else?'
'I am,' said Cherry Thomas.
Her declaration echoed around the cavern. No other voices entered in. Staring unseeingly ahead of him, Dawes waited a moment, then said flatly when the echoes died, 'I guess it's just the four of us, then, up here in this cave. What the hell do they want with us?'
Nobody answered.
Outside the cavern mouth, somewhere to his right, the endless wind whipped around the mountains, whistling, moaning. Dawes shivered. In the darkness he could just barely see his own hand held before his face - and even then he could not really be sure whether or not it was imagination, not actual sight, that had put the image of the hand there. He had never experienced a darkness of such intensity before.
And he saw another darkness more clearly now - the darkness of a life that yanked a person out of his rightful place and threw him onto a strange world, and then when he had begun to carve some meaning and familiarity into the strangeness yanked him out again and tossed him in a windswept cave. He felt very alone, very young, more than a little frightened, just a little sick.
He started to crawl across the cold wet sands that formed the floor of the cave. Evidently the brook he heard ran not too deep under the sand, close enough to the surface to impart a chill, and came bubbling out a few hundred yards deeper in the cave.
No one spoke. There was steady sobbing, but he had little hint of a direction. He had no idea even of how large the cave was.
'Carol! Carol I' he called out.
On hands and knees he groped in the blackness. After minutes of uncertain scurrying, he felt a warm hand graze his, startling him a little. The hand found his wrist and tightened comfortingly.
Blindly he reached out. Arms gathered him in. He almost felt like sobbing, out of gratitude, out of shared terror.
He clung wordlessly to her in the darkness, gripping tight as if the girl were the one real thing in a universe of cobwebbed nightmares. 'Thank God,' he murmured.
Then he relaxed, and after a while he slept.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The coming of daylight revealed Carol to him. She was lying near him, a pathetic little bundle sprawled on the sand. She was still asleep, her knees drawn up into her body, her hands tucked under one cheek.
And, off to one side, he saw that Cherry also slept her clothes disheveled, her bright blonde hair streaming every which way.
His body ached; every muscle throbbed, his bones were chilled by the damp and cold, and he felt a general lassitude, the weariness of a body not yet accustomed to the hard mattress that was the floor of the cave.
Noonan was awake already. Dawes saw him far back in the cavern, over to the left on the side away from Carol.
He was sitting up, arms clasped in front of him across his knees, looking amusedly at Dawes. With one easy gesture Noonan pushed himself to his feet and ambled down the cavern toward Dawes, who stood waiting.
'These women will sleep through anything,' Noonan chuckled. His eyes narrowed as he saw Dawes more closely. 'Christ, you look awful. Green in the face.'
'I'm - pretty tired out.'
'You getting sick?'
Dawes shook his head. 'I just feel washed out.'
'You look sicker than just being washed out.'
'How am I supposed to feel?' Dawes demanded. 'Who knows where the hell we are? What are these aliens planning to do to us? We may be stew by lunchtime, Noonan', Dawes' voice sounded thin and high in his ears.
'I doubt it,' Noonan said casually. 'But let's take a look.'
Together they strolled forward to the lip of the cavern.
Dawes gasped.
They were at least a hundred feet above the flat, dullbrown surface of Osiris. The cave was inset in an almost vertical rise of cliff. Above and below them were flat walls of black stone, gleaming faintly in the morning sun.
And down below, on the distant ground, a few of the aliens moved in aimless patterns as if standing guard.
Dawes pointed out past the thickly forested area.
'Look there. That must be the colony, in that clearing all the way out there!'
Noonan nodded. 'A good ten miles or so. And we can see it easily. This is the damnedest flat world I ever saw, except for these cliffs.' He gestured downward, at the aliens. 'Nasty bunch down there.'
Dawes looked out and down. The aliens, at this distance, appeared to be nothing but yellow-brown splotches against the deeper brown of the soil. They were heavily furred, he saw, neckless, thick-bodied. He thought he could make out the bluish-purpleness of the suction-pads on the palms of their broad hands.
Dawes stepped back from the rim of the cave mouth, remarking with a levity he hardly felt, 'It's a long drop.'