My face was set in a grim mask. It looked like life on this planet was going to be a permanent struggle for survival, judging from my first taste of its wildlife—with no way out. I thought of Peg, back on Earth, and wondered what she was doing, what she was thinking of.
I kept going, determined now to keep moving at all costs, determined to beat this world and find my way back to Earth. The fight had set my hormones rolling, apparently; the outpour of adrenalin was just what I needed to galvanize me out of the fit of depression I had been sinking into. Now I was fully alive, wide awake, and wanting out desperately.
Then I glanced up. There seemed to be a fire up ahead; white, brilliant light was streaming through the jungle, illuminating the dark recesses around me. I drew in my breath. If it really was fire, that meant people—savages, perhaps? I advanced cautiously, dying a dozen times whenever I scrunched dawn on a twig.
After about fifty yards, the path swivelled abruptly at a right-angle bend, and I found myself suddenly out of the jungle. I emerged from the thickly-packed trees and saw what was causing all the light. I whistled slowly.
It wasn’t a fire. It was a diamond, planted smack in the middle of a wide treeless clearing—the biggest diamond anyone ever dreamed of, looming ten feet off the ground, lying there like a gigantic chunk of frozen flame. It was cut with a million facets from which the bright sunlight glinted fiercely. All around it, the trees had been levelled to the ground. The great gem stood all alone, in solitary majesty.
Not quite alone, though. For as I stood there, at the edge of the jungle, staring in openmouthed astonishment, I saw a figure come up over the top of the diamond, poise for a moment on the narrow facet at the very peak, and then leap lightly to the ground.
It was the girl—the girl whose beckoning arms had enticed me into this nightmare in the first place. She was coming toward me.
The girl in the diamond had been nude, but I guess that was only part of the bait. This girl was clad, though what she was wearing took care of the legal minimum and not much more. Otherwise, it was the same girl, radiant with an incredible sort of magnetism. In person, she had the same kind of effect that the image in the diamond had had.
I stood there, dazzled.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. Her voice was low and throbbing, with just the merest echo of something alien and strange about it. “It has been so long since I called, and you did not come.”
I just stared at her. Up till this moment I had thought Peg was about as sexy as a girl could be, as far as I was concerned. But I was wrong. This item made Peg look almost like an old washboard by comparison.
She was all curves, but with a rippling strength underneath that was a joy to see. Her hair was deep blue-black, with glossy undertones, and her eyes were deep and compelling.
“My name is Sharane,” she said softly. “I have been waiting for you.”
The sunlight kept bouncing down off that colossal diamond, and Sharane stood there, brilliant in its reflected light. Her skin seemed to glow, it was so radiant. She took another step toward me, arms outstretched.
I moved back a step. So much glamor in one body frightened me. The last time I had listened to this girl’s call, it had drawn me across space and brought me to this planet. Devil only knew what might happen this time.
Besides, there was Peg. So I backed off.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “Why have I been brought here? Where is this place?”
“What does it matter?” Sharane asked lightly, and from the tone of her voice I started to wonder myself. “Come here,” she urged.
I started to laugh, I’m afraid. It was all so preposterous, this whole business of diamonds that make people shoot off to some world in space, and this lynx-eyed temptress coming toward me—I dissolved in near-hysterical laughter.
But I was laughing out of the other side of my face a moment later, when Sharane stepped close to me and I felt her warmth near me. She looked up at me, with the same expression on her face that the image in the diamond had had. I was defenseless.
Peg, I thought. Peg, help me!
She put her arms around me, and I started to pull back and then stopped. I couldn’t. She came close, enfolded herself around me.
Somehow at that moment the distant Peg seemed pretty pale and tawdry next to Sharane. I forgot her. I forgot Peg, I forgot the Chief, the Bureau, Earth—I forgot everything, except Sharane and the blindingly brilliant diamond in front of me.
She drew my head down, and our lips met. The contact was warm, tingling—
And I felt myself grow rigid, as if I were rooted to the ground.
Sharane pulled her lips away, and took a step back, She looked at me, strangely, half triumphantly and half sadly. I saw her sigh, saw her breasts rise and fall.
I strained to move, and couldn’t. I was frozen!
“Sharane!”
“I am sorry,” she said. Her musical voice seemed to be modulated into a minor key, as if she were really sorry. “This is the way things must be.”
And then she lifted me up, slung my stiffened form over her shoulder as easily as if I were an empty sack, and started walking away!
I struggled impotently against the strange paralysis that had overcome me, and cursed bitterly. A second time, Sharane had trapped me! Once, when she called from the depths of the crystal; now, when she betrayed me with a kiss.
I rolled my eyes in anguish, but that was as close as I could come to motion. Sharane carried me lightly, easily, around to the other side of the gigantic diamond. “You will have friends here,” she said softly.
I looked around, and blinked in surprise. For half a dozen other Earthmen lay, similarly frozen, behind the great diamond.
Sharane very carefully laid me down in their midst, and left me.
She had put me between two other frozen prisoners. Further away, I saw four more. All six were gripped by the same strange force that held me.
“Greetings, friend,” I heard the man on my left say. “The name is Caldwell—Frederic Caldwell. What’s yours?” It was almost as if we were meeting in a cafeteria, he was so casual.
“Les Hayden,” I said.
“My name is Strauss,” said the one on my right. “Ed Strauss. Glad to meet you, Hayden. Join our merry band.”
Strauss—Caldwell—those were two of the names on that list of sixty-six vanishers. And I’m Sixty-Seven. Welcome to the fold, I thought.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Ten days,” said Strauss.
“A week,” Caldwell said. “But you’d never know it. When you’re frozen like this, you don’t need food or anything. You’re out of circulation, period. You just lie here, waiting for the next sucker to be deposited in the vault.”
“Yeah,” said Strauss. “There were about forty guys here when I came, but one day a ship came down and some huge things packed most of them up. That made things pretty quiet for a while. We’ve just been lying here, those of us that are left. Every once in a while Sharane catches someone new.”
“Did both of you get snagged the same way?”
“I found a diamond on my desk one day,” said Caldwell. “Came out of nowhere. I started staring at it—and I guess you know the rest of the story.”
“It’s Sharane’s kiss that does it,” Strauss said. “I think it sets up some kind of force field that freezes us. And we stay here, and wait for the alien ship to come pick us up and take us away.”