He isn't going to get away with this.'
He became uncomfortably aware of Cherry's mocking eyes on him, and Noonan's. Carol stood at the water's edge with her hands uncertainly shielding her body from view. 'Get into the water,' he ordered the girl brusquely.
'I don't want him looking at you that way.'
Silently, she obeyed him. Dawes walked downcavern to where Noonan waited, still leaning against the wall.
The older man seemed to tower two or three feet above him, even leaning.
Dawes said sharply, 'Are you trying to make it worse in here? You didn't have to look at her that way. There was no call for that.'
'I'll put my eyes wherever I damned please, sonnyboy. And I'm tired of your niceness. This isn't any private hotel we got here.'
'You don't have to go out of your way to make life tough here,' Dawes returned. 'I don't want you watching Carol when we bathe, from now on, Noonan. Do you understand that? We can at least pretend we're civilized - even if some of us don't happen to be.'
Noonan hit him. This time, Dawes expected the blow, and was ready for it. He rolled agilely to one side and in the same motion directed an open-handed slap at Noonan's face.
The big man took it like the brush of a gnat's wing, laughed, and tapped Dawes sharply in the pit of the stomach. Dawes felt his knees start to buckle. He caught himself, sucked in his breath.
He swung wildly at Noonan, missed his face by a foot, and swung again. This time Noonan opened one big hand, grabbed Dawes' flailing arm, and twisted it.
Yelling, Dawes tried to break loose. He succeeded in clawing at Noonan's throat with his free arm, distracting the big man's attention for a moment. Dawes ripped loose from Noonan. He danced back a couple of feet, panting, feeling the excitement of combat even though he knew he was yet to score a telling point in the contest.
He darted forward and flicked out a fist. Noonan clubbed his hand aside, stepped forward, hit Dawes almost gently on the point of his right shoulder. The impact stunned him; he felt the surge of pain ripple down his arm to his fingers. Desperately he tried to land a blow, but once again Noonan caught his wrist.
This time there was no breaking loose. Noonan inexorably forced him to the ground.
'I'm gonna put my eyes wherever I please,' Noonan said quietly. There was no malice in his voice, nor anger; just a level affirmation of victory. 'You hear that, Dawes?
You ain't giving any orders inside here. If I want to look at your girl, I'll look at her, and you ain't gonna tell me I can't do it. Understand that, Dawes?'
'For God's sake, Noonan - act like a human being,'
Dawes whispered harshly.
As if in answer, Noonan tucked both of Dawes' wrists in one massive paw and slapped him a few times with the other, until Dawes' head reeled.
Cherry said, 'That's enough, Ky. He's only a kid. You want to kill him?'
'I want to show him he can't go telling Ky Noonan what to do!'
The big hand ground Dawes' wrists together, while the other descended, whack-whack, quick stunning backhand and forehand blows across Dawes' cheeks. Finally Noonan tired of the sport. He released Dawes, scooping him up and throwing him sprawling back upcavern.
'You didn't need to do that to him, Ky,' Cherry said reproachfully.
'Shut up!' Noonan snarled. 'You trying to tell me what I should do, too?'
Dawes lay where he had fallen, not making any effort to get up. His wrists ached painfully where Noonan's grip had pressed them together, and his cheeks were raw and hot, partly out of shame and partly from the impact of Noonan's angry blows. He hadn't even stood a chance in the fight. It was worse than Don Quixote tilting off at windmills; Noonan could have killed him with two swings of his arm.
Carol had remained upcavern by the stream during the entire fight. Now she came over to him. She looked down at him without speaking, without smiling, without offering a word of sympathy. Dawes could not tell whether the grave look in her eyes was one of pity or of contempt.
After a while she walked away, back to the stream, and began to dress.
Dawes elbowed himself to a sitting position and massaged his wrists. Downcavern he saw that Noonan had stretched out for a nap. Cherry was drawing sketches in the sand. The cave was very silent.
He walked slowly back to the stream, knelt by it, and sloshed water over his face; the shock of the sudden coldness eased some of the pain of Noonan's slaps. Shaking himself dry, Dawes went downcavern, past Cherry and Noonan, to stare out of the mouth of the cave. The clearing below was packed with aliens. He wondered if they had enjoyed the performance.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After that, there was a strange realignment of the tense relationships between the four prisoners in the cave. The incident of the beating was a sort of dividing-point, separating what had been from what now was.
Dawes suffered the most; he had acted foolishly, rashly, in deliberately inviting Noonan to trounce him, and he had lost status in Carol's eyes. That was clear. The only sort of respect she could have for him would be based on his intelligence - and he hadn't acted intelligently toward Noonan. Further, Carol really wanted a man who could take care of her, who could protect her from the tensions and rigors of existence in a frightening world - and Dawes had not at all proved himself that kind of person.
But sympathy came from an unexpected quarter from Cherry, who glared at the invincibly self-sufficient Noonan, and offered soothing words to Dawes. Noonan glared back at her angrily. His possessiveness was obviously beginning to irritate Cherry. Dawes wondered when the open split between them would come.
The swirl of conflicting emotions tightened. Both women half-loved and half-pitied Dawes. Cherry was physically drawn to Noonan, but was repelled by his dominating ways, his assertion of ownership. Noonan claimed Cherry as his own property, but quite clearly he was interested in Carol as well. Around and around it went, while the aliens gathered outside, and the hours slid toward sundown and the moonless darkness of Osiris' night.
Dawes sat bitterly by himself, feeling that he had fallen into total disgrace. Cherry softly sang her old nightclub songs, muffling their stridencies to avoid touching off some new dispute in the cave. Carol did nothing. As for Noonan, he bathed, slept for a while, woke, and went to the front of the cave, flattening himself strangely at the mouth, poking his head out and staring down for a long time as if measuring some distance.
After a time he came back and spoke with Cherry for a few moments. Then, moving on, he went to Carol as she sat quietly against the cave wall, and nudged her.
Dawes glanced up from his brooding. Noonan was saying something to her. He strained his ears to catch their words; but the expression on Noonan's face told him all he really needed to know.
Cherry crossed the cave, taking a seat at Dawes' side and putting her hand on his wrist as he began to clench his fists.
'Don't pay any attention to it,' she murmured. 'It was bound to happen sooner or later. Don't make him have to hit you again.'
'Is she going to listen to him?'
Cherry shrugged. 'I don't know. But she may. You never can tell.'
'I hate him,' Dawes said darkly. 'I hate both of them.
If he wasn't twice my size—'
'Well, he is,' Cherry said. 'So you might as well just relax.'
She shook out her long blonde hair. It was getting stringy from lack of combing, and it seemed to Dawes that it was darkening at the roots. It didn't surprise him much to find that Cherry's blondeness was synthetic.
He tried to relax, to ignore the fact that elsewhere in the cave Noonan was successfully taking Carol away from him.
After a long silence Cherry said, 'You know, Noonan thinks he knows a way out of here.'