while for contact with a boot. Toes against the ridge, heels against the ridge. A slight shift of the body to keep the feet in contact, then roll again. After each half-revolution she probed with her fingers, seeking the saucer.
After sixteen rolls her fingers found the familiar depression. She had done a complete circle. But no boots.
She sat up, trying to remember her high school geometry.
Something about pi, but what did that tell her? Nothing, which was what she already knew. She remembered protractors and compasses and drawing circles, which she had just done with her body. All right, she had the time, let's continue the geometry lesson. Draw another circle, this time using her hands as the center. With her body as the diameter of the circle-or was it the radius? — she would still come back to this same point with her feet on the ridge and the saucer at her hands. She would not get lost and she would cover more ground. She tried to envision how much more, knowing that some of it would be overlap. Half a circle?
Less, more? She couldn't see it clearly in her mind, but she didn't know what difference it made. She had no other plan.
Aural began to roll again, this time keeping her hands always in touch with the saucer-like depression. She counted her revolutions, knowing that sixteen should put her feet back in contact with the ridge, and became so concentrated on finding the ridge again that she almost forgot what her real purpose was. She nearly rolled over the boots with her hips without realizing what they were.
'Oh, you sweet things,' she said, hugging the boots to her. 'Don't you ever run away from me like that again.'
She reached for the niche in the rock and located the knife quickly and easily. She replaced the knife in its secret crevasse, then tried to put her boots on again. It was very difficult to slip the leather uppers beneath the ankle irons and finally she gave it up. She had better use for the boots off than on, anyway, and if he realized she had taken them off, so what? What did it tell him?
Feeling proud of herself for having accomplished something rather than just allowing herself to descend into self-pity, Aural seated herself back against a cushion of rock and began to think of how she was going to deal with her captor. After a moment of silence, she could detect the steady tick of her water clock counting the minutes. Coming from the other direction, the liquid sound of water washing against the rock was soothing.
For the first time, she realized that she had not slept in a long time, not since being rousted out of bed by Harold Kershaw's arrival.
Blessedly, she fell asleep.
Aural awoke from a dream of bright sunlight to find herself still in utter darkness. The 'brook' still burbled gently in the distance, the water clock ticked on and on, and nothing had changed. And then she heard an alien noise and immediately realized that it was probably what had awakened her. It was a sound of something muted striking stone, a dull thud followed by a scrape, and it came on slowly, very slowly. At first her mind conjured up an image of a large serpent hauling itself dreadfully towards her, its giant tail banging against the rock. It took a while for her to realize it was something being dragged over the rock as she herself had been dragged in the leather golf sack. This time there was something more resonant in the sack than her head and bones, and it sounded clearly if dully from a distance. Whatever he had with him now, he was a long time coming with it. From the moment when she first detected the scrapes that preceded the thuds, Aural noticed long pauses between movements, as if he were resting every few feet. Whatever he was dragging must be very heavy, she thought, or else he's very tired. it took five ticks of her water clock, fifteen minutes, before she saw the first faint light. It wobbled as if the headlight were planted atop a shaky stalk. Was his head moving that much? She thought he must have palsy to be shaking so badly.
With a slowness that became more frustratingly painful to her the closer it came, the beam of light advanced.
Aural realized that as much as she didn't want him to come, she also needed him, and now that he was here, she wanted him to get on with it.
She could do nothing by herself, she required his presence, his light, if she were ever to get out of here.
The light was coming from a hole in the wall and very low to the floor.
It was a narrowly focused beam, as if shining in a tunnel, and as it made its tedious way towards her, Aural could finally see the outlines of the exit he had used. It must have been the same way she was brought in. There was an opening in the vertical rock no bigger than a man's body-and a small man at that. She wondered if he was crawling through the tunnel-it didn't look big enough to negotiate in any other way.
As the beam moved closer she could hear the man himself. He was panting and moaning. He would advance a short ways-she could hear his boots on the stone now, the tumble of something muted against a hard surface then the scraping sound of his progress would stop and she would hear his breath, hard and labored. Just before he'd start again he would groan, as if the effort cost him in pain.
Finally the light, wavering, slumping downwards as he rested, wavering again as he crawled forward, reached the opening of the tunnel, and he came into the chamber, moving on his belly with infinite slowness but determination, like a giant garden snail. Trailing behind him, his own sluglike path of mucus, was the leather golf sack, connected by a rope tied around his waist.
When he and the sack were completely clear of the tunnel, he collapsed, his face falling onto the rock.
'Well, numbnuts,' Aural said, 'you took your own sweet time about it.
You think I got nothing better to do than hang around waiting for you?'
He didn't stir. His body was stretched to its full length on the rock, the light on his helmet pointing down at an angle onto the floor. In the diffused beam that shone off the floor, Aural took her first, oriented look at her surroundings. As she had already determined, she was in a cave, a huge chamber hollowed from the rock by the water flow of millennia. The ceiling was so high above her that she could barely make it out in the gloom. The wall from which the man had just crawled was at least thirty yards away from her and appeared to be solid except for the hole which he had just cleared before collapsing. She had thought she was leaning against a wall herself, but now she saw that it was only an outcropping of rock little more than waist high, and the true wall was at least another thirty yards beyond it. To her left, still farther away than the other walls, a narrow trench split the floor and then vanished completely as it hit the rock face behind her. It was probably the source of the running water she had heard, she thought. Whatever underwater river had formed the lake that had once filled this chamber had continued to flow until it worked its way still deeper into the rock and then through the wall, draining the lake with it on its way still farther underground.
To her right Aural could see a series of darker shapes along the wall that looked like waves at their crest, just bending over before crashing back upon themselves, the kind of waves under which photographers loved to capture surfers, surging just below the crest as the top of the wave curled over them-but these waves were rock, and they ran vertically from the floor, some all the way to the ceiling, frozen in time and space when the lake vanished beneath them. The rock appeared to have bent back on itself, as if shaped when molten, and formed scalloped edges reminiscent of the niche where she had stored the knife, only greatly larger, extending towards the roof.
Interspersed oddly along walls were those pointed mounds that Aural knew were stalagtites or stalagmites, she was never certain which was which.
As she studied the huge room that encased her, the light began to move, bouncing crazily off the walls. She looked and saw the man stirring on the floor, trying to lift his head, then falling back to the rock again as if his neck could not support the weight. Again he was still and Aural could hear his hoarse breath gasping from his throat as if even the effort of lifting his head were a great labor.
He rolled over onto his back and the light and shadows went crazy again, leaping about until they settled in a new configuration. The beam now pointed straight up and Aural could see the ceiling of her cage, a huge dome of rock at least three stories above her. If the space stretched that far up and still didn't break through the earth over their heads, how far underground must they be? She was not only buried, she thought with renewed alarm, she was entombed, tucked away as neatly and as far from the living as a pharaoh in his pyramid vault.
'Come here,' the man said, and the light wobbled when he spoke, drawing forth new shadows on the ceiling and walls.
Aural watched him without moving, trying to judge the degree of his weariness. She could take the knife with her now, use it on him as he lay there-assuming he obliged her by staying exactly where he was. But if he turned to look at her, there was no way she could hide the knife with her hands cuffed together, Thirty yards was a long
