Chapter IV

The air was getting hot and sticky, and there was the ripe sweet smell that made him sick. At that moment, Caine realized that he hadn't eaten since this trip began and his stomach was like a hard knot.

Ahead was a small dark opening. Caine could see there a large scattering of the purple wild grapes out of which the common settlers had made so much wine. He pushed into the clearing and grabbed a handful of the rich-colored fruit.

He kept his back to the girl who had entered the clearing behind him. He sorted out one of the ripest of the grapes and lifted it to his mouth.

He felt his hand being caught.

The girl was beside him and her tan fingers were around his wrist.

He turned and faced her.

With her other hand, she took the grape from his fingers and held it up to his mouth. Her eyes were deep blue sparkling lights that shone even in the dimly filtered light. Her skin was golden and shiny, and Caine could see the long bare V that ran from her throat to the belted waist. The blue dress was filled with a jutting mound on either side of the V.

She took a breath and the dress drew taut.

Caine slapped the grape from her hand.

She shook her head, her hair soft and rustling. She lifted another grape and held it to his lips. "You can't refuse it," she said.

"The hell I can't," he said, and his hand was an arcing motion that sent the grape whirling across the clearing.

"You can't," she repeated, and she touched her fingers against his chest.

He watched her steadily, seeing the blue eyes narrow to thin sparkling slits, the whiteness of the small teeth as her lips parted.

"I'm paying you back, Driver."

"You're cheap. For all your money and your breeding, you're no better than the ones who walk the streets."

"You're right, Driver," she said, and her voice was soft and husky. "And you want to be so strong and self-contained. You want to rule everything you touch or look at. You worship your own shrine, Driver, only you're not strong enough to refuse this. You can slap dead kids, only you're too damned weak to walk away from me. You hate me for that, Driver, and you hate yourself. But you can't do anything about it because I'm stronger than you are, and you're weak, you're really weak, Driver."

He watched her, and her face was a golden oval that waited for him. He swept her hands from his chest.

She stood there, hands at her sides, and still she waited. He wanted to lash out at her face with his fist but he couldn't. All he could do was stand there, as though he were frozen, locked by her eyes and the white shine of her teeth and the golden smoothness of her skin.

Then he felt his hands and arms moving and he couldn't stop them. His fingers were jerking blue cloth and touching cool skin, and her face was in front of his, the blue eyes glittering, the white teeth shining. He tried to fight it and when she whispered, "You weak miserable coward," he wanted to crack her body in two.

But he didn't and all he could do was know the golden face was coming up to his, her eyes nearly closed, her lips apart--and then all at once he swore and sent her spinning away from him.

He stepped back feeling his heart jumping inside of him. Sweat prickled out on his forehead.

On the ground in front of him were five girls with the tan skin and shimmering brown hair. He heard "Nic ..." and it was a multi-voiced echo. Five faces paled and ten eyes stared in panic. Fifty fingers clutched at five throats. It was a quintuple exposure of the girl he had just held in his arms, and it made his blood thin and chill in his veins.

"For heaven's sake, Nic ..." and the echo of five voices wavered through the jungle.

Caine stood motionless, staring.

Five hands reached out for help. Ten eyes pleaded.

His nerves were like flying charges of electricity along his spine.

Then there was a sudden swift movement and the five figures before him meshed into one jumbled mass and began moving away from him, through the green growth.

He watched, feeling the sweat on his forehead turn cold. This would be the way the Venusians would do it. Not force or violence, but this. A quiet, smooth absorption of the girl through illusion, the deadliest power of the Venusian. A hypnotic lock of his brain and hers so that instead of seeing four green-skinned Venusians and one girl, he saw five girls.

And there was, he knew, no way to break through the spell. The illusion would remain true to smell and touch as well as sight and hearing.

He heard five voices ring out together through the jungle. "Nic, please!"

* * * * *

He started forward. As he moved, he examined himself for one brief moment, asking himself why he was going after a girl he told himself he hated. And there was no answer, except the same pulling force that had made him want her with every fiber of his body only a few seconds ago.

He knew, reasonably, that a loss of a girl who was a daughter of a Colony official would have the same effect as a fired fuse in the relations between the natives and the Colonizers. But even this was, at the moment, unimportant, and it was only an emotion that drove him forward, an emotion that got into his blood and brain. And he hated it and he tried to free himself of it, but it drove him on, and all he could think of was tearing the girl free from the grasp of the creatures.

But how?

He didn't know, and he kept following the jumbled movement of tan skin and blue cloth ahead of him. He couldn't use the gun at his side, because he couldn't tell reality from illusion. He wouldn't know whether he would find his bullet in a green globular head or in the finely shaped head with the shimmering brown hair. He could only follow and think, think of an answer.

The jungle rippled with the movement of the five forms ahead of him, and Caine went on, swinging at the growth, swearing, sweating, driving his brain to find the solution.

The figures stopped, finally, in a short vine-enclosed square. He walked to the fringe of the opening and watched the five faces, pale and frightened, staring back it him. Five hands went up to five mouths and trembled against red lips. "Nic, please do something!" The five voices rang against his ears.

"I'm here, Nic. Here!" The five faces pleaded with him.

He closed his hands, his eyes shifting from one face to another. He couldn't tell. It was like trying to capture an image in a room full of mirrors.

"Oh, God," the voices moaned, and together the figures slumped to the ground.

They were considerate and polite even now, Caine thought. They were letting her rest. They wouldn't hurt her physically, only move her steadily away to the oblivion of illusion. Cultured, quiet, but because of what had been done in a clearing miles back, deadly.

And he would have to fight it the same way. Against everything he had tried to do here, he was finally ending it up, forced to fight the people he had tried to protect and defend. He hated the memory of the boy and he hated the girl, but he was drawn into it as though he were being swept into a sucking, swirling whirlpool.

Caine kneeled down, his eyes watching the trembling figures in front of him, each of the forms precise images of the girl. He was tired, and even in the tenseness of the moment he could feel his hunger. But there was no time now, except to try to break through this armour of hypnotism.

"Cice," he said, listening to his voice saying her name for the first time. "When I say move, put your right hand out in front of you."

Five faces watched him.

"Move," he said.

Five hands extended into the air.

"What's my name, Cice?"

Five voices said, "Nic."

He worked his fingers. It was his own brain creating a mirage, and it was Cice's, too. The Venusians were sitting there, digging into each of their brains, creating this terrible block that couldn't be penetrated.

She was crying now, and the sound of it, magnified five times, ground against Caine's nerves. "Please, Nic," said the voices. "Please do something!"

He struck his fist against his knee, and the movement juggled the camera that was still around his neck. He grabbed it angrily and began to throw the loop off. Suddenly he paused.

He remembered the frantic boy, ripping picture after picture out of the compact black mechanism. He dropped to his haunches, keeping his eyes upon the five images of the girl. They could make illusions of themselves to Caine's brain, but could they trick a camera?

His right hand slowly unloosened his pistol in its holster. Then he began talking to Cice, saying anything, to keep the sound of his voice over the click of the camera's shutter. He drew the camera up against one knee, as though he were making an unconscious nervous gesture, so that the lens pointed at the five figures.

He released the shutter, and it seemed as though the sound of it were magnified ten times.

He lifted the edge of the picture that appeared from a slot in the upper part of the camera, and finally he dropped his glance. He saw in the shiny photograph Cice and four green-skinned Venusians. Cice was the second figure from the left.

His pistol was out of its holster and in his hand, and the jungle screamed with the sound of the explosions and the cries and the ricocheting bullets.

When it was over, four Venusians lay sprawling, visible now to Caine's eyes, their hypnotic spell broken and their brains dead.

The girl, her hands against the sides of her face, was still on the ground, but her body had stiffened with fright and she was trembling all over.

"Oh, Nic," she said, over and over.

* * * * *

Caine stood up and looked at the bodies of the creatures he had just killed. The sweat that had formed while he had carefully trapped the Venusians turned cold on his skin. He unlooped the camera from his neck and dropped it on the ground. Then he stood there, staring at the dead green bodies, his face tight and mask-like.

The girl stood up unsteadily. She walked slowly to his side and touched his arm. He jumped away, as though he had been struck by a needle. A shudder went through the muscles where she had touched him.

"Nic, you...."

"Don't talk to me," he said, trying to keep his voice even and not trembling, "and don't touch me. I don't want to hear you or feel you again. I'll lead you back to the post, but don't come near me or I'll kill you like I killed those poor creatures."

"You can't blame me for this, Nic," she said and there were thin lines of tears on her cheeks. "I wouldn't have asked for this."

"Oh, yes, you would. You did. That's why it happened. You asked for it when you needled me into coming down here. You asked for it when you couldn't remember that an agreement with these people was something valid and honest. You and your sweet dead friend, you're what's the matter with this planet! You can't understand what decency and respect are, so you step on anything that gets in your way, and if that won't work you kick it or shoot it. But you destroy it and you don't really give one simple damn, just so you enjoy yourself and get a laugh out of it. And for me, I'm sick of it, and I'm going to get on the first rocket I can find, so I can breathe again and feel clean and not get sick to my stomach every time I look around."

He hoped she could not keep up with him.

But she did, and he could hear her behind him, gasping now and then, crying once. But she followed him and when the jungle had turned dark and he finally saw the yellow lights of the outpost, she was still behind him, calling him.

He stopped and turned.

She leaned against a thick vine and Caine could see in the yellow light from the windows of the houses, that her hair had been ruffled and matted and that her dress was torn in a dozen places. A thin trickle of blood was coming from a cut above her left eye. She was barefoot, Caine noticed for the first time, and he knew what her feet must be like. But the beauty was still there and the bearing, and although lines of fatigue had been etched into her face, there was still the life and the fire.

"What do you want?" he said flatly.

She clutched at the vine and Caine could see her biting the inside of her lip. "I wanted to tell you, Nic, that I was wrong about you."

He waited motionless, keeping his eyes thin and hard.

"I thought you were strong, Nic. I thought you were the strongest man I'd ever seen. You were a challenge and I wanted to see that strength break. That's why I did what I did in that clearing back there. Only just before the Venusians came I knew you were going to love me, hating me at the same time. I didn't want you that way.

"It wasn't just a challenge then," she said, her white teeth gritting. "It was _you_, because I suddenly thought you were noble and honest and because I thought the strength was real. But I was wrong, Nic."

Caine wiped his palms slowly back and forth against his jacket.

She shook her head. "You haven't got any real strength. And you just carry your nobility and your honesty around like a sign. They're not inside of you. You scream for the rights of Venusians, you swear at injustice. You damn the people who've colonized this planet, and you hold yourself up like you thought you were a god. Only you're not. You're not anything. You're just another cheap screamer with wide shoulders and no guts. And instead of trying to do something about what you're screaming against, you climb into the first ship going out because you can't stand the sight of blood. You're not strong, you're weak. I thought I loved you, only I can't love a weak man, and you're weak." Her hand slipped from the vine and she crumpled to the ground.

Caine stood watching her for a long moment, then he walked slowly back and picked her up. He held her in his arms. With his left hand, he lifted her head so that he could see her face, and he saw the fatigue there that had finally made her collapse and he saw the blood that was still trickling along her cheek.

He bent down and kissed her lips, gently, and then he began to walk toward the yellow light and the warmth and the rest. She was light and soft in his arms, and he liked the feeling of her there. And so he took his time, step by step, because he knew he wasn't going anywhere, not for a long time.