Left with no other choice, I shrugged off my minor discomforts. I walked barefoot up to the old Wur building and poked around inside.
The place was just as abandoned as it looked. A few ten-legged crabs scuttled away—that was it.
“In case you guys are listening in and recording all this,” I said loudly to no one, “this trip looks like a bust. I’m going to swim out into the sea and drown myself. That’s probably the easiest way to end this fiasco.”
Turning away from the abandoned building, I strode directly toward the waves. The rain was still going. It was coming down a little harder now, if the truth were to be told. I was anxious to get this over with.
When my feet splashed into the waves about knee-deep, I heard an odd sound. It was a thrumming, sort of. An unnatural sound.
Turning around and scanning the sky and the seas, I gazed north, east, west—there it was! Something was up in the air, coming in fast. It was helicopter of some kind, but it didn’t have any visible props.
“You getting this, guys? I hope you are. I don’t know what kind of aircraft that is, or what it’s doing, but I’m gonna have to run to make it to deep water.”
So saying, I picked up my naked feet and started splashing. Unfortunately, the beach was as much rock as sand, and my soles were soon banged up, and I was cursing something awful.
There was a ripping sound overhead. The copter—or whatever it was—had pulled up and was hovering above me. The water was flooding away from me in a circular pattern. I thought about throwing myself into the surf, but there wasn’t any point yet. It was just too shallow. Not even I could manage to drown myself in a few centimeters of water.
Running now for all I was worth, I made it to bigger waves, but they were less than a meter tall. Green World’s ocean wasn’t very turbulent, as it lacked a big moon like ours.
Still, I didn’t give up. I picked up my feet, lifting them up high so I wouldn’t be dragged down by the surging sea. If I could just get to where it was deep enough to dive down…
That’s when everything went dark. Was that helicopter landing on my ass? That was the impression I had, and I dared to glance over my shoulder and up.
It wasn’t landing on me. Instead, it had tossed down a spinning metal net of cables.
“Oh, shit…”
I dove into the waves. I tried to swim like one of ten-legged crabs I’d spotted on the beach, dragging myself over the sand and rocks on all fours. I had to stay low, I had to—
The net closed over me. They hadn’t been fooled or even slowed down by all my efforts. Instead, the net of cables wrapped me up, and I felt a jolt of electricity.
It was nothing to write home about. I’ve been shocked any number of times, and this wasn’t a killing dose. Not by a long shot.
But it did numb the nerves and cause a surprising level of pain to my entire body. Maybe it was worse because I was wet and in contact with the ground. I could only guess.
The long and the short of it was things didn’t go my way. I was scooped up like a mackerel in that net, and I was hauled up into the strange craft that hovered overhead.
Sure, I struggled and cursed and tried to tear loose of the trap. My only thought was to somehow break free and drop into the ocean from a serious height. With any luck, I’d be drowned in that dark cauldron of water.
But I wasn’t successful. Despite my best efforts, I was hauled aboard the strange aircraft.
There, the greeting wasn’t a warm one. Six figures with dog-like snouts huddled around me in my net.
“Hey boys,” I said. “How’s tricks? You want to fetch me a stick, or sniff my butt?”
Either they didn’t like my jokes, or they weren’t the friendly kind of dogs. They lifted black clubs and beat me with them. They struck my ribs, my limbs, my balls—and at last, one of them landed a good one on my skull.
I passed out and knew no more.
-36-
When I awakened, I was mildly worried. I’d kind of hoped they would have killed me while the folks back home monitoring the casting device were watching. There seemed to be little chance of that at this point.
The first clue came when I saw the dawn light coming in all pink and pretty on the horizon. The helicopter-thing had a few windows, and the first gleams of sunlight were unmistakable, and they were coming in at a nearly horizontal angle.
“Oh… shit…” I said, rubbing at my hand.
A dog-man stood up and approached when I awakened. He was fuzzy, if not outright furry. I thought I saw the fuzz on his back lift his shirt a little as he bristled, but it could have been my imagination.
I glanced down at the stick in his hand. It was black, like the ones they’d used to work me over last night. It wasn’t fancy with electric shock capabilities—nothing like that. It was a stick, and this dog liked his stick.
He stared at me, lifting his dark lips
