by Dale Olausen
Elated that she had a shred of real hope at last, Sarah took a moment to memorize the scenery around her as well as she could. The mountain that the Beth was on, loomed in the north. The meandering break in the tree cover which indicated the stream lay towards the west. As long as she was able to walk in an approximately straight line, Sarah thought that she could not miss it. But the sun was disappearing fast - she would have to hurry! Quickly she began to climb back down the tree.
*****
A brown-tinted dusk had settled over the circular plain by the time she broke out of the trees and onto the streambank. Her heart pounding, she sank to the ground, weak with relief. She had made it this far at least! There had been moments when she had wondered if she was not going in circles and would never reach the stream. But she had fought down the panic, even as the shadows under the trees had deepened. And she had been right! Night was falling but now she had a landmark to guide her feet.
She drank the creek's clear water out of cupped hands and wet her face to cool down. She knew she could not linger. Darkness was falling. As the dusk deepened she set off.
While walking along the streambank she had the leisure, for the first time since she had so abruptly run away from Roger's grasping hands, to wonder about his behaviour. Was he an addict of some sort, that he had been ingesting a behaviour-altering drug in the middle of the work day? Or had he planned the rape beforehand - Sarah shuddered at the thought - and the drug was chemical courage? Had the dismantled soil-testing kit been a carefully engineered bait to lure her out where she was defenceless?
But no; having put the soil-tester back together, she did not believe that Roger had either the patience or the perfectionism required to take the machine apart. Especially with the care and meticulousness with which it had been disassembled. Some "little devil" - or "devils" - had done it all right; the biologist had simply taken advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself.
Suddenly Sarah's neckhairs stood up on end. The "little devils" were nocturnal! Roger had been quite certain of that! And here she was with not even a stunner with which to defend herself! What would the creatures do if they happened upon her? Would they try to take her apart too?
"Chin up, kid," she disciplined herself. "Keep on walking. That's all you can do."
Night was falling fast. The brown shadows were turning to black. It was growing so dark that walking became difficult. Sarah glanced anxiously up at the sky expecting to see at least a sprinkling of starlight to aid her night vision. But - what was it that Dav had said about this planet? He had said that there was no moon and that they were so far on the edge of the galaxy that there were very few stars in the sky. It was obvious that he had told the truth; only the odd pinprick of light shone in the black sky. There was not enough light to enable Sarah to see. She stumbled and almost fell. Her heart pounding, she sat down on the turf. It would not do to splash into the water.
"I can't even keep on moving anymore," she whispered to herself. "I'll kill myself if I try to, in this blackness."
She took a deep breath and forced herself to accept the predicament. Using the only sense left to help her, she felt her way up the streambank to where a screen of undergrowth formed the edge of the forest. There she lay down on the ground, curling under the bushes as far as she dared.
"Might as well try to get some sleep," she muttered to herself, refusing to dwell on how vulnerable a target she was for anything that was at home in the darkness.
"I wish I had a fire," she added as the chill of the night began to seep into her body. "But then, I might as well wish for a moon."
The thought had her giggling hysterically for a moment; then she forced herself to be quiet and to try to relax. There really was nothing she could do but sleep.
At some point she succeeded in dozing off in spite of the discomfort and the uncertainty of her situation. Abruptly she found herself startled into tense alertness in the darkness, aware that something had awakened her.
What might it have been? Using all the senses that were left to her, she cautiously tried to explore her immediate environment. Her groping fingers found nothing but leaves and stems and turf. Her nose detected no odours besides the fragrance of the leaves above her. She strained to listen for any unfamiliar noises but heard nothing but the rustling of leaves in the wind.
But - oh no! - suddenly she did hear something! And as the high-pitched whistle stung her ears she understood why it had awakened her; the sound was utterly alien, unlike anything that she ever had heard before.
She pulled herself up into a sitting position and forced herself to wait quietly for the noise to recur. Only moments later it did. She listened to it carefully, intending to determine the direction from which it came.
Upstream! Sarah bit her lip but remained still. She wanted to hear more. The next whistle sounded slightly louder than the one before it had. She swallowed hard to dislodge a lump from her throat. Whatever was doing the whistling, it was coming closer!
Hide! She must hide! But how could she possibly conceal herself when she had no idea what sense the whistling creature used to "see" in the dark? And how could she hope to find a hiding place of any kind when she was quite blind in the planet night?
As it neared, the whistling seemed to change. It grew more continuous, yet, at the same time, undulating. The pitch and the loudness varied, and with a yet further shock Sarah realized that she was hearing harmonies. She was being approached not by one but by a number of alien beings!
Panicking, she dove through the bushes that formed a screen between the streambank and the forest. But where could she run? Nowhere - she was bound to crash against the first tree trunk that she came to! Swamped by terror and hopelessness she threw herself back on the ground on the forest side of the leaf screen. Maybe that would offer her some protection - or maybe not. She curled up into a fetal position, hiding her useless eyes against her knees. All she could do was wait. And hope.
The whistling sounds continued to approach, growing louder as they neared. Sarah crushed her arms against her legs, hoping desperately that the noise would pass as its source travelled on downstream. But no, that was not to be. The sounds stopped their progress only a few feet from her; she guessed that the creatures had got her scent - or whatever. The noise was so loud now that it hurt her ears – she shifted position to clap her palms over her lobes, stifling a desire to scream.
For a small eternity she sat thus, expecting - she did not know what. Suddenly the bushes that she had hoped were hiding her, parted. Furry hands grasped her shoulders and knees, uncurled her from the fetal position and dragged her back to the streambank. At that she did scream, and the high pitch of her scream cut through the whistling like a knife, silencing it for a moment. But of that Sarah knew nothing; her body lay limply in the aliens' hands. Her mind had fled the nightmare.
When, a short while later, she regained consciousness she was still inside the nightmare. Alien hands were touching her, seeming to examine her body and clothing thoroughly.
It was unpleasant, and she instinctively started to struggle. That did not help at all. Instead, more furry hands came out of the dark to twist her arms behind her and to hold her legs still. Thus imprisoned, she forced herself to endure, grinding her teeth as she did so. Mercifully, the end to the examination came soon, and she was allowed to fall limply to the ground.
The respite was short, however. The hands grabbed her again, this time dragging her into a standing position. With a shock she realized that her captors must be erect creatures even as she was.
A crackling sound among the whistles alerted her to something new. Automatically she turned towards it, opening her eyes as she did so. Light! Firelight! In utter amazement, forgetting her fear, she stared as a tall, skinny, white-furred humanoid held aloft a torch! In its eerie light she could see her captors, all of them thin, tall bipeds with elongated heads. They moved about her noiselessly except for the whistling, ghosts or skeletons dancing in the night.
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br /> She focussed on a face and bit back a new scream! A long, narrow oval, flared nostrils, a lipless mouth and pointed ears! And where the eyes should have been in their sockets - nothing! Nothing! Nothing but a smooth expanse of white fur! Her knees went rubbery. She would have fallen except that a deft, long-fingered, white-furred hand caught her firmly by the elbow and held her upright.
She endured the contact until her legs could hold her up again; then just as uncannily as it had come to support her, the eyeless owner of the helping hand withdrew. She understood now the tactile examination: the aliens had been "looking" at her! But then, why the torch?
She was given no time to meditate upon that question. A rough push from behind almost sent her sprawling. Alien hands once again grabbed her before she could fall. It was clear that she was expected to move. She saw that her captors were forming a line on the streambank and the torchbearer was taking the position at its head. She was herded to a place almost at the very end of the line. Two of the humanoids fell in on either side of her, to guard her. The whole procession started to walk, forcing her to go along. Her only consolation was that for some reason the aliens had changed their minds about the direction of their travel.
They had turned to go back upstream and that, of course, was the way that she, too, wanted to go.
Sarah's captors travelled fast. It was hard for her to keep up the pace on the uneven ground. The torch at the front of the line gave off some light, but not nearly enough to help her to find her footing. She stumbled a lot. Whenever that happened a long white arm would reach around her, catch her, and help her right herself. The aliens, on the other hand, strode along gracefully, all the while keeping up their whistling sounds. They seemed not to tire even as time passed.
The torch burned down to a glowing ember and the procession made a quick stop while a new one was lit. Sarah did not have nearly the stamina that the aliens had. She began to stumble more often, but her captors took no pity on her. Her guards righted her immediately whenever she was about to fall, but at the same time the humanoid behind her pushed, prodded and shoved her, to keep her going on.
Sometime during the struggle she discovered that the undulating whistling made a good hypnotic: if she concentrated on the sound and left her feet to find their own way along the streambank she was able to walk along in a sort of a half-conscious state in which she was barely aware of her exhaustion.
More time passed. The second torch died and was replaced by a third. That too burned out, and was replaced by another. Still the procession kept moving.
The halt, when it finally came, was so abrupt that Sarah, in her semi-hypnotic state, bumped into the alien in front of her, and almost fell backwards. Once again, she had to accept help. Weary though she was, she looked around and realized that dawn was breaking. She could see around her a little - directly ahead of her loomed the dark bulk of a mountain. It was the mountain that she had wanted to reach, the mountain on which the Explorer ship Beth sat!
A push from behind prodded her back into motion. The humanoids, and she with them, crossed the brook that they had been following. The leader of the procession stopped to carefully extinguish the torch that he had carried, and plunged into the forest. The others followed him. The faint daylight did not penetrate through the trees and once again Sarah had to travel blind, tired as she was. Would the torture never end? She was stumbling every few steps again while the creatures around her were prodding her to hurry.
Sunlight had begun to seep into the forest when they reached what Sarah, in the dim illumination, took to be a vine-covered cliff. Disheartened, she wondered if she was going to have to do some rock-climbing, when suddenly the first of the white shadows ahead of her pushed aside some of the vines and disappeared into the cliff! Moments later, she, too, was ushered through the opening in the leaves and branches into darkness even more impenetrable than the planet night had been!
Under her feet was a smooth, even surface, completely unlike the ground that they had travelled across. The whistling which still continued was interrupted by the crackling of fire. She looked ahead to see another torch being lit. In its glow she stared about her and her jaw fell open.
She was in a tunnel!
*****
The journey continued.
On the smooth floor of the tunnel Sarah had no problem with her footing but by now she was bone weary, hungry and thirsty. Once again, whenever her pace would flag the humanoid behind her would prod her to speed up. She forced herself to listen to the whistling that was still going on around her, letting its strange cadences draw her into the half-trance in which walking was easier. It seemed like the travelling would go on forever; the only stops were quick ones to light a new torch when the old one died out.
But at long last the procession came to such an abrupt stop that Sarah, in her half-conscious state, stumbled painfully into the back of the white form preceding her. Exhausted, she would have fallen if another of the aliens had not rescued her. Then she nearly lost her balance again when the supporting arm withdrew.
While she stood there stupidly, the humanoids suddenly melted away from around her. She raised her heavy head to look ahead and saw a small bonfire, built where apparently two tunnels formed a crossroads. More aliens, just like the ones that had captured her, moved around the fire casting eerie shadows on the tunnel walls.
The whistling sounded louder than ever, and echoed queerly off the rock surfaces. But Sarah was too tired to pay much attention to any new development. When she realized that her jailers had left her alone she stumbled to the nearest wall, allowing her body to sink into a sitting position with her back against the stone. If only she had a glass of water to drink! She let her body crumple into a heap and, in that uncomfortable position, she fell asleep.
Only moments later, it seemed to her, she was startled awake by furry hands, once more prodding her everywhere. She had hit her head painfully against the rock wall in a futile attempt to pull away before she realized that she was being "looked at" again. Understanding that made it possible to grit her teeth and bear the invasion. Mercifully, once she stopped struggling, it passed. After it was over, one of the aliens stooped beside her for a moment to thrust two objects into her hands.
Food and drink! Even in the dim lighting she was certain of that! In one hand she held a strange looking earthenware bottle, complete with a stopper that was attached to the neck with a string. In the other was a hard, leaf-wrapped bundle which gave off a sweetish odour. She had been given a meal!
Sarah lost no time in unstopping the bottle and downing half of its contents in a few big gulps. Then, her worst thirst slaked, she attacked the bundle, hastily unwrapping it and biting into the unidentifiable loaf within. It did not have much flavour and none that she could identify, but she hardly cared about that. She ate it all; then finished the sour juice in the bottle. Only after she had pushed the empty bottle and the leaves away, and sprawled on the cold stone floor to sleep did the thought occur to her that her body might not be able to digest the fare. Jaff had had no opportunity to run his tests on what she had just eaten and drank; for all she knew it was poison to her system. It was too late to worry about that so she simply closed her eyes to go back to sleep. If she got sick and died - well, she got sick and died.
She did not get sick, but neither did she sleep. The aliens came back to drag her onto her feet, to prod her into motion again. This had been a meal stop, apparently, and not a rest stop.
They had not travelled far when Sarah realized that it simply was no longer possible for her to keep up the pace that her captors demanded. Her legs ached and she was so-o-o tired; she could not even lull herself into the stupor that had enabled her to keep on going earlier. The two guards at her sides were no longer just picking her up when she stumbled but, instead, they were actually dragging her along most of the time. She didn't care.
Unexpectedly they came to a halt, and this time Sarah slid down to the floor out of her guards' grasp. Immediately one of
them kneeled down beside her and grabbed hold of her with both his long arms. Unceremoniously he hoisted her up onto his shoulder and held her there, her head hanging down. The procession began to move again with Sarah being carried thus; her world narrowed down to an awareness of how her body swayed back and forth with each of the humanoid's steps.
*****
How long the trip continued this way she could not begin to guess. There were two more meal stops. The food did not make her sick, nor did it revive her enough to enable her to walk on her own two feet. Instead, she travelled like a gunny sack, on the shoulder of one or another of the alien humanoids.
All things end, sooner or later. Finally the moment came when Sarah's half-comatose body was lifted off the bony shoulder of the alien and was dropped down on something soft.
She roused herself enough to half-open one eye but could see absolutely nothing. The torch which had accompanied them throughout the trip was gone. So was the whistling - surprised, Sarah realized that she had been left alone. For the moment she did not care to wonder in what prison she had been left; she merely eased her aching limbs into a more comfortable position and let sleep - real sleep - overcome her.
Chapter Nine
A hand was shaking Sarah's shoulder roughly. The girl struggled to awaken from a dream and, shoving aside the hand, pulled herself into a sitting position. She groaned as her aching leg muscles protested the action. Her eyes opened but could see nothing in the surrounding darkness. Oh, yes. She remembered what had happened to her.
Precisely at that moment a drink bottle and a food bundle were thrust into her hands. She forced herself to ignore her blindness and concentrated on eating and drinking.
The food was the same tasteless fare that she had been given earlier but at least it was keeping her alive. Alive for what? The hands that held the juice bottle started to shake and she spilled some of the sour liquid on her face.