Chapter III

He awoke as a boot caught the side of his head. He rolled across the ground, the pain exploding inside his head. The boot found him again. Another time, above his eyes. He moaned, trying to make his muscles work, but it was as though he were still caught in a nightmare.

"Filthy damned swine," he heard, and his eyes watched a fist come out of the misty air to smash against his cheek. He rolled again, burying his face against the ground, trying to hide, to protect himself until he could find his senses and his coordination.

"You'll kill him." It was a woman's voice, saying this, a lilting feminine voice that was very, very familiar. Caine tensed himself, waiting for the next blow.

"Get up," a man said.

Caine felt the boot against his legs. He turned over slowly and pulled himself to a sitting position. He shook his head, but the thick mist that was in the morning air seemed to have gotten into his brain. His arms and legs felt as though lead had been poured into his veins.

Slowly it came back to him. The woman. The Scotch. He searched the fog-filled area in front of him. Fairchild, his mouth an ugly line, watched him and in his hand was Caine's pistol. The woman was behind Fairchild, still in the black gown, and Caine could see that it was torn.

"I'd kill you right now," Fairchild said, his voice hoarse with rage, "but I want that gem. Get up."

"Darling," the woman said to her husband, while her eyes danced at Caine. "He's such a mess."

Caine tried to swallow and even that was difficult. Every part of his body had been taken hold of by the drug that had been put into his liquor, and each movement was a task he was certain he couldn't complete. He raised a hand slowly to his face and his fingers came away sticky.

"Get up!" Fairchild growled, his eyes vicious thin slits.

Caine got to his knees and fell flat again. He clutched at the ground, waiting for the crushing boot. It came, and he tried again. He got to his knees the second time and then, inch by inch, he stood up. For a moment it seemed as though his head were floating away from his shoulders, and he looked down at his body, thinking that what he saw surely belonged to someone else, a limp, ragged body, cut and bruised with no clothes. He was falling again.

Fairchild caught Caine's arm and jerked him upright. "I'll give you two minutes to get your damned clothes on, Caine, and get behind the controls of that ship."

He looked at Fairchild stupidly. The man shook him. Caine turned around and searched for his clothes beside the dead fire. He staggered and groped, and twice, blackness covered his eyes and he went to his knees.

Finally, he stood, weaving, clothed haphazardly, and he was vaguely aware that blood was sliding down his chin, dripping onto his jacket. He touched the blood with a finger and it didn't mean anything to him.

The man turned to his wife. "The same goes for you. Get into the cabin!"

"Charles," she pleaded. "He made me drink so _much_."

"Go on!" Fairchild said, waving the pistol.

She smiled crookedly and walked toward the ship. The mist lay over the jungle so thickly that the ship, not more than ten or twelve yards away, was barely visible. Caine heard the door of the cabin opening and closing.

Fairchild pointed the gun at Caine's stomach again. "You'd better watch every damned step you take," he said. "This gun is going to stay on you until I get that Screece gem, and the only reason you're alive, you bloody louse, is because I have to have it. Do you understand?"

Caine searched for his voice, and it came out thick and strained. "Won't fly you...." He watched the man's face whiten, and the gun trembled in Fairchild's hand. Then the gun was swinging through the air and Caine watched it coming until it struck him above the eyes.

* * * * *

Water dripped from his face and his chest, and he fought for air. His brain was a singing maize of pain, and the numbness in his arms and legs kept him riveted to the ground. He opened his eyes, finally, as he felt himself being dragged across the clearing. The rungs of the ladder leading to the ship's cabin were against him. He moved his head and his teeth struck silver metal. His coordination was gone and he couldn't tell what his movements were going to be.

"Up the steps," he heard Fairchild say behind him.

He lifted his hands, fitting them around the rungs of the ladder, and he began to pull himself up. It was an inching effort. Blood got in his eyes, and his head whirled into far-away spins that had nothing to do with the movement of his body. He hung onto the ladder and climbed one rung, then another. He teetered near the top, and Fairchild pushed him into the cabin where he sprawled.

He could hear Fairchild coming up behind him, and the door slammed shut.

Caine rolled onto his back and looked up. She was standing over him in fresh white shorts and blouse. Her hair now was very neat and groomed, and her pink skin was radiant. She smiled at him, her teeth showing very whitely. "You're a pretty thing, Mr. Caine."

He knew he should have felt the rage then, the instinctive fury for what she had done to him. But the drug had left him with nothing but enough reaction to try to fight for consciousness and strength.

"Clean him up," Fairchild said. "Fast. Then we're leaving."

The woman got soap and water from the rear of the cabin. She washed Caine's face, her fingers cruel against the cuts and swellings. She raked the cuts with stinging medicine, and Caine lay unmoving, trying to let time feed him new strength. She stood up, finally, looking at her husband.

"All right," Fairchild said. "Let's go, Caine."

Caine looked at the man's face, at the set of his mouth. He looked at the gun and then at the man's boots. He pulled himself up and staggered into the seat behind the controls. His movements on the controls were slow and rough. He looked at Fairchild once, as the jets fired into the fog-ladened air. "Can't fly this way. No balance, coordination. Visibility's rotten, I...."

The man moved the pistol into Caine's side.

Caine faced the instrument panel, trying to keep from weaving. He moved his hands and felt the ship rising. He tried to keep the rise steady and gradual, but his hands jerked. The ship tipped and swung toward the side of the clearing. Thick vine-trees came out of the fog, and Caine forced the ship straight up, the jets roaring. The silver jetcopter swung back and forth, climbing, slipping, dropping. He couldn't move the controls properly.

The sound of the waterfall was in their ears then, and Caine jambed the ship to the opposite side. They touched the tops of the trees, and finally he brought it up enough to be over the jungle and the rocks.

Instinct gave Caine vague direction, and he kept his altitude exaggerated to insure against his faulty senses.

"Some say the Screece gem is a diamond," the woman said, dreamily. "Some say it's an emerald. Some say it's a ruby. What do you say it is, Charles?"

Fairchild sat motionless, silent, in the seat beside Caine. He still held the pistol so that the muzzle pointed into Caine's side.

"Don't try anything, Caine," he said. "I'll smash us all to hell before I'll give up."

Caine flew the ship.

"It's romantic, isn't it?" the woman said, from behind Caine. "The most valuable gem in the world, deep in the Venusian jungle, protected by the long, long cats, and my sweet Charles is going to get it for me. Bless you, Charles. You are an extraordinary husband. I hope the cats don't get you."

Caine heard the words, but his brain was too slow and thick with the drug to understand the sharpness of her words. He only moved the controls, feeling the gun Fairchild held against him. In this condition, he knew that if he tried to fool Fairchild, the man--his nerves tightened the way they were--would not hesitate to pump the pistol into Caine's body.

Caine worked his fingers numbly. If only he could find his control, his response....

They were approaching the area where Caine thought the temple should be. "Somewhere," he said, and his tongue was clumsy as he tried to speak. "Somewhere."

* * * * *

The mist was like layers of soft tissue around the ship. The visibility was not much more than the length of the wings. He eased the ship down, slowly, foot by foot. A golden pike-shaped object appeared beside the right wing. Caine brought the ship up.

He grinned, a sly sudden grin. "Temple," he said foolishly. "Couldn't have hit it closer sober." He thought about the cleverness of what he had just said, laughing over it inside, noticing with a queer detachment how his words came out as though he had been drinking. The damned drug, he thought, but the laughter came up through him and it echoed through the cabin.

Caine felt the gun go hard against his side, the steel bruising his ribs. His laughter was cut short, as though a gag had been slammed across his mouth. "Can't help ..." he began.

But Fairchild's face was close to his own. "I'll make you laugh, Caine," the man whispered furiously. "I'll make you laugh over what happened. You think about that, eh? You think about that, you bloody...."

Vaguely, Caine knew the pistol had been pulled away from his ribs and was whipping toward his arm. He tried to shift out of its way, but he caught it squarely. The pain paralyzed him and even the sound of his cry was caught by his teeth snapping together. The ship wavered and slid downward.

"You stupid fool!" the woman screamed at her husband.

Caine felt himself sliding out of his seat, the pain throbbing. He caught himself and reached for the controls with his good hand. But he only half-balanced the ship before he saw the tip of a vine-tree. He cut the jets. The trees were all around them, enveloping them. He listened to the snap of the wings, heard distantly the splinter of glass, then nothing.

He was looking at the shape of his arm, when he found his vision again. It was bent peculiarly.

Whose crazy damned arm is that? he thought.

Somehow his brain wanted him to laugh, to slap the comic twisted arm, lying in front of his eyes. The laughter was in his mouth and through his teeth and he raised his good hand.

"Oh, Lord," he said, suddenly sober and feeling the blinding pain. He caught his good hand around a broken metal shaft, and the pain drew tears to his eyes.

I think I'll just go to sleep and die right now, he thought, wondering vaguely where his will and his strength had gone. Did they bleed out? he thought. Did they fall out when the man struck him? Did the woman draw them out last night, like a vampire draws out blood?

Good night, he thought, dimly, dropping his hand from the shaft. Good-by. He closed his eyes.

He was screaming, he knew, and somewhere he heard a man's voice say, "The gauze. The gauze." It was a grating sound, like a metal wheel turning over gravel. He opened his eyes, and Fairchild was wrapping the gauze around his broken arm, splinted from a part of the cabin panelling.

Fairchild looked at him. There was a thick growth of gray whiskers, stubbling the man's chin and cheeks, Caine noticed, and the man's eyes were not sad any more. They appeared to burn, like his wife's. He grinned at Caine and it was a humorless grin, his teeth set tightly together. "You're lucky, Caine," he said. "I set it instead of cutting it off."

Caine watched the grinning stubbled face. He felt a shudder trembling through his body, and the sweat on his face turned cold. I'm not Nic Caine, he thought. Surely not. I'm just a frightened, chilled man with no guts or reason. I am a rubber puppet, that's who I am. Pull the strings, Mr. Puppet Master.

"Get up," said Fairchild.

"That's right," Caine mumbled, smiling crazily.

He pushed himself up and stood swaying in the cabin of the broken ship. He looked around, his eyes suddenly fierce. "Is this twisted wreck my pretty silver ship?" he asked loudly. "Oh, no!" he said, and tried to kick at a splintered panel.

He felt himself pitching forward, and he caught out his good hand, steadying himself. The drug, the pain, he thought deep in his brain, my damned arm.

But he was like two people, watching each other, shifting back and forth from one identity to another. Rational, irrational, laughing, crying.

He looked at the woman. She was huddling near the rear of the cabin. Blood spilled in a thin line down the side of her face from a cut above her eyes. "We'll never get out," she said. Her voice was a high-pitched sound with no change of tone in it. "We'll never get out."

"Why don't you dance for us?" Caine said, blinking with the brightness of his suggestion.

"Move, Caine," the man said, prodding Caine's back. "She'll dance when I give her the gem."

Caine crawled slowly out of the cabin. The undercarriage had been smashed, and the cabin was level with the ground. It was like going into a sea of vapor when he got out of the ship.

How long? he thought, looking at his splintered arm. How long would the drug hang onto his brain? This was not himself. This was a weak spinning scarecrow who was drunk on dope.

Then the pain smashed into his awareness. It disappeared as suddenly. He was in agony, then there was only the foolish whirling of his brain. He turned slowly, like a limp mannequin, searching the blankness of the mist.

"Where am I?" he said aloud.

"About one mile from Heaven," said Fairchild behind him, holding now a rifle from Caine's cabin rack. "Janet?" the man said to the cabin. "Take one of those damn rifles. Mr. Caine is going to lead us to his happy end. The gem first," he said to Caine. "Then you. I'll let you touch it before you die."

The woman came out of the cabin, a rifle in her hands. She pointed it at Fairchild. "We'll never get out of here," she repeated, in her sing-song tone.

"Not without me," Fairchild said quietly, looking at the pointed rifle. He turned his back to her.

The woman's face had lost its pink radiance, and it was white except where the blood trickled.

"Let's go, Caine," Fairchild said.

"I don't know where to go," Caine said stupidly.

"Up," Fairchild said. "Just lead the way up. I don't need you to know where the temple is now. You got us much closer than we'd planned, you know. You're just bait now, Caine. Bait for the cats. Remember the cats?"

"I won't go through that," the woman said, staring at the mist around them.

"All right," Fairchild said. "Stay here and meet the cats alone. I'll bring the gem back to you, if there's anything left of you. But, by heck, you're going to get it, do you hear me?" He faced her again. "You're going to get that gem if I have to kill seventeen cats, and Caine, and even you. Dead or alive, you're going to get it, do you hear?"

The woman was pale, sick-looking, and Caine tried to remember how she had looked the night before. It was too much effort.

"Move," said the man, prodding Caine. "Move, Mr. Caine."