It did not cease till morning. After starting back to his ship, Gordon mentally rehearsed the report which he and Sonya had agreed to send to their respective headquarters. It described briefly how they had been captured and released, but discreetly made no reference either to the wedding ceremony or to the rain. They had unanimously agreed that the situation was complicated enough without complicating it further.
He had gone less than half a mile when his collar began to press against his throat. Thereafter the pressure increased with every step he took, till finally he came to a semi-strangled stop. It was as though he had reached the end of an invisible leash.
The pressure lessened after he backed up a few paces, went away altogether after he backed up a dozen more. There was only one explanation. The metal from which his and Sonya's collars—as well as those of the Venusians—had been forged, possessed magnetic properties unknown to terrestrial metals, and the attraction between objects fashioned from it grew progressively stronger as the square of the distance between them increased. Either the Venusians had disciplined this attraction so that it was limited to objects fashioned from the same stock, or the ore from which the metal was processed was naturally subdivided into small magnetically independent veins. Gordon did not know which was the case, but there was one thing he did know; when the Venusians married you, they meant business.
He began retracing his steps back to Sonya's ship. Halfway there, he saw her running toward him. Her white face told him that her collar had been giving her a hard time too, and that she had arrived at a conclusion similar to his own. "Gordon, what are we going to do?" she gasped when she came up to him.
"We'll get them off someway," he reassured her. "Come on—I've got the necessary tools in my ship."
He tried all morning before he gave up. The collars were impervious to his best shears, and his hardest file failed to scratch their surface. Using his acetylene torch was out of the question.