"Something—aangh—wrong—aangh—with that meat!" he cried, sudden alarm struggling with drowsiness. "I feel doped!"
Drowsiness won. He leaned back against the straw in the darkness and closed his eyes.
Martha's eyelids were heavy but she was still a nurse. She shook him violently. "Sleep in those wet clothes and you'll wake up with pneumonia. Get them off!" she ordered.
Dizzily they undressed in the blackness, wringing out their sopping clothing and hanging it on projecting points of rock in the cave. Before they finished the dog was snoring loudly in the straw.
Martha felt silly and lightheaded. "Gunnar," she said. "Let's call him Frankie. He sings." She giggled.
Then she yawned once more, burrowed into the straw and was sound asleep.
Gunnar had just time to place the two guns and his knife nearby before he too lost consciousness....
... Heat. Cold. Heat again. Violent motion. A ripping shock. The sensations would have been excruciatingly painful to any Martian still possessed of anything so atavistic as a pain sense.
Motion impulses were replaced by vague manifestations of the presence of alien life forms nearby. Two units of alien life. Sensations of Erg becoming the center of some unintelligible, barbaric scene of jubilation, as though he were being received with great joy.