Free In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg Page B

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.”
    “To the slaughterhouse,” said Caldwell dully.
    I pushed and struggled, but it was to no avail. I was efficiently straitjacketed. Above me, the big diamond stared coldly out, its radiant