Then the two cruisers were racing through their run on the as yet unstrafed portion of the meadow furthest from the mountain. Sturgis's craft bucked as it rode the shock-waves from Greene's rocket blasts. As they shot in a wide curve around the other side of the mountain Pritchard said, "We'd better skip our last pass. Let's just sit down and work in close. I don't want her to get away."
They cut jets and floated in over the jungle, side-slipping to lose speed. With feather-light fingers at their controls, the cruisers skimmed the trampled meadow grass and touched down their wheels. As they rolled, Pritchard and Sturgis flung open cockpit windows and let bright fire from their flamers spew over the ground, while Greene and Kemp sprayed right and left with their snappers.
Things struggled in the crisping, burning grass, crackling and roasting. Even as he turned the nozzle this way and that, Pritchard's face was a mask of disgust. All around the slowing ships, Cornelia's "people" galloped and raced with a vengeful, slaying lust.
"All out," said Pritchard. "Everybody take a flamer. We'll have to burn a path to the girl."
They climbed out and began walking toward the mountain four abreast, flame billowing ahead of them. There seemed to be only dead things in their path.
Then, suddenly, the girl was there, astride a magnificent six-legged equine type of animal, shaggy of coat and rather broad in the head. She had ridden around the wall of fire and her mount was trembling and shaking its head.
They turned off the flamers and stared up at her. Rumbling, whinnying sounds came from the equine's throat. She grunted and cooed back, as if soothing it. Then she turned her eyes on the men below.
"We wish to thank you." Her pale face was drawn and there was a suspicion of tears in her voice. "You came just in time."
She seemed small and absurdly girlish perched on that long back. Those inadequate strips of hide were still her only covering.
Pritchard nodded shortly. "If you'll be so good as to keep your be—people—out of our way, we'll sterilize this island. Just burn off all the cover and see to it there's none of them left. Why don't you herd your—uh—friends over onto what we've already—"
"That won't be necessary," she cut in. "They'll all be gone in another minute."
"What makes you so sure of that?"
"The One is probably calling them off."
"The—what?"
She put her face in her hands. Pritchard frowned his puzzlement. How had so helpless a child managed to survive in a world like this?
"I'd like very much to know what this is all about, Miss Boyce," he said gently. "In fact, the reason we happened along is that we are looking for you. We thought you might be able to explain what happened last night."
As he told her, she lifted her face from her hands and her brimming eyes grew round. Before he had finished describing what they had found in the blower, she was shaking her head in despair.
"This is all your doing. This world was at peace until you came. Now The One is aroused. You see, it was The One that went into your ship—"
"The One?" A crispness came into his voice. "Miss Boyce, I think you'd better start at the beginning and give us a complete explanation. Just exactly what is this 'One' you keep talking about?"
She closed her eyes again. A slight shudder ran through her body and she shook her head dazedly.
"The One," she murmured, "is after us all now. It began by entering your ship. Then It sent Its people against mine—against me. It won't stop until It has destroyed us all, and It—It's something I'd just as lief not describe.
"My people call it something which I have translated as 'The One'. To them, it means 'first', or 'leader', or something like that. It was in control of all the people here on Thisbe when the Survey arrived, and I'm afraid It still is. It wants to remain in control. You see, It's quite intelligent."
"I can believe that," Pritchard said. "It not only figured out how to get into the ship, but it also figured out how to find McManus."
"Oh, no, I don't believe it just went after him. Wasn't his cabin the nearest to the place it entered?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it was."
"Oh, you don't understand The One as I do," she cried. "It would never be satisfied with just one. It came into your ship to feed on all of you. McManus was just the first person It found. From what you tell me, It wasn't even finished with him. There wouldn't be—anything—left...."
"Then why did It go away?"
"I couldn't tell you. Perhaps when your blower short-circuited, it arced a little. The One is very sensitive to fire. But It's not through. It will come back, one way or another."
"I think we can deal with it if it does," Pritchard smiled. "And it sent these unpleasant things at you? How can it do that?" He shot an appraising glance around the torn and bloody meadow with its mounds of dead and dying things.
When he turned back the girl was weeping. Sobs she could not suppress were shaking those nut-brown, rounded shoulders. "It has some kind of mental control," came her muffled voice. "Besides, they fear It dreadfully. Oh, my people, my poor people."
"Well, now, look," soothed Pritchard, "it's all over now. You'd better come back with us. I guess you've learned you can't make people out of all these animals. Besides, you've got an interesting story to tell the Board—"
"D-damn the B-B-Board," she said a little unsteadily. "Then you'll take me with you?"
Pritchard smiled his broadest smile. "But of course!"
"Then let's hurry," she pleaded. "We have so little time."
"Why? What's the hurry?"
"The One! The One!" she burst out in sudden anxiety. "It'll come for us any minute, don't you understand?"
"Okay, okay," soothed Pritchard. He and the others were smiling at her excitement, when her equine suddenly reared so suddenly that she tumbled off. They started to her assistance, but she landed light as a cat on her feet. She stared wildly about her.
The equine uttered a growl and galloped off. The girl remained crouched, her eyes darting in every direction.
"Now what?" said Pritchard.
"The One," she breathed. "It's somewhere near. My sextuped would never have bolted like that otherwise."
"Oh, for Pete's sake," said Pritchard, taking her arm. "Come on—"
"Say, Mr. Pritchard, what's that thing over there?" Kemp pointed off to his left.
"Oh, God, no...." Cornelia's voice was a quavering moan.
Pritchard glanced where the stocky lad was pointing. What appeared to be an exceptionally tall and unusually red grass blade was wavering gently, as if bending to a mild breeze, about fifty yards off.
"Hell," muttered Sturgis, "that face is familiar."
Pritchard started walking toward it, the others following him. "Let's fan out a bit," he said, "until we see what this is."
"Come back, come back," came the girl's agonized whisper behind them. "Don't go near...."
They ignored her. At a distance of ten yards Pritchard halted. They all watched with consuming curiosity.
The slender red thing was growing. Or, rather, it was pouring out of the ground, crumbs of dirt sticking to its glistening scarlet wetness, its delicately tapering tip now some ten or twelve feet in the air.
Pritchard shifted the flamer tank on his shoulders and started to say, "I think—", when a maned gorilla loping across the meadow some hundred yards away gave a sudden scream and broke into a wild, shambling run in the other direction. Another animal gave bellowing voice, and another—and abruptly there was commotion, spreading over the island toward the mountain.
Pritchard cleared his throat. "Get around it, boys. Let it keep coming, but when I say the word give it a lick of fire."
The waving red spire stood some fifteen feet high now. As he circled into his position with the others, he noticed two things simultaneously. Another little scarlet tip was questing up through the trampled grass close to the first one. And, out of the corner of his eye he could see the animals that were Cornelia's people streaming either way along the base of the mountain, in a frenzied rout to get to the river on the other side.
Then Cornelia's hands were clenching his arm, her voice panting hysterically in his ear. "Run, Pritchard! You don't know what you're up against. Oh, believe me," she sobbed, "please, please, please believe me. This is The One."
His eyes focusing on the growing scarlet tips—the second one had grown almost as high as the first—Pritchard smiled indulgently. "We're going to stay for the fun," he said. "What happened to all your friends? Stampeded, didn't they?"
She opened her mouth to reply but her answer was cut off by Greene's sudden scream.
Greene screamed as McManus had screamed last night. Screamed and sank writhing to his knees. Some kind of frothing slime was running down over his shoulders and chest, dissolving the acid-repellent cordron jacket, running down over Greene from what had been his head.
From between the bases of the now thick, tall red tongues, another jet of liquid squirted toward Sturgis. He leaped sideways and it missed him clean. "Holy Damn!" he shouted.
Pritchard gripped the flamer's trigger. "Give it hell!" he roared.
Three streams of fire converged in a ball of flame on the twin red spires. They disappeared in the rippling, booming fire.
"Hold it!" Pritchard shut off his flamer and the others followed suit. Holding the nozzle before him, he walked to the place where the things had been.
There was nothing there, except a hole where the tangled grass had been disturbed, and a kind of pit in the ground, into which loose dirt was still dribbling. He backed a step and turned the flamer on, playing fire into the pit and around it. Then he shut it off.
"You fool," came the girl's voice at his elbow. "You damned fool. You just won't believe me, will you?"
Pritchard lifted his gaze toward what had once been Cadet Greene. Richard Harrison Greene, a rollicking lad from the Cumberland Gap. Thomas Guilfoyle McManus, a man with a red-haired soul. McManus, first, and, now, Greene. The hunter's face was turned to stone.
"Keep your eyes peeled," he said harshly to the others and stalked off to the place where the squirt of liquid had landed after missing Sturgis. Some thirty feet from where it had been ejected, there was no grass but a four-foot smear where the ground bubbled and frothed. The stench hovering over this spot was incredible, even to the man who had encountered it before.
He turned to confront Cornelia who had followed him. "I don't know whether I can get it through your thick head or not," she bit out, "you've simply got to get out of here. You can't—"
"Get this throughyourthick head, Miss Boyce," said Pritchard between clenched teeth. "This thing, whatever it is, has killed two of my men. I'm quite ready to believe it is intelligent, possibly the most intelligent organism on this planet. But it's a killer just the same and we're going to kill it. None of your idealistic theories are going to stop us, either."
She stared at him, beginning to shake her head a little wildly. "You can't kill it! That's what I'm trying to tell you. It can't be k—"
There was a sudden crash. Cornelia whirled and screamed. The three men and the girl stood transfixed.
Over by the river one of the jet cruisers was on its side, resting on a crumpled wing. The other was forty feet in the air, and rising, held in the coil of an impossible red monstrosity rearing its long wet self into the sky.
It was a worm, a very long, thin worm at least a hundred feet long, not counting what remained underground. It towered some fifty feet into the air, about thirty-five feet more of it wrapped around the cruiser. At its tip two fifteen-feet-long feelers writhed and wriggled, as if still smarting from the scorching they had received.
The coil slipped a little. The cruiser, looking more than ever like a beetle at this moment, slid slowly out and fell. And again it crashed into the cruiser on the ground and rolled ponderously off it.
"Good ... God!" came Sturgis's voice shakily at Pritchard's elbow. The Chief Hunter was still too appalled to speak. He stared as the worm's rope-like body came curving down out of the sky, down to the cruisers again. Seeing how that red length alternately thinned to a one-foot thickness and swelled again to three feet and more as it oozed around the cruiser that had remained on the ground, he had a vision of how it had entered theApollo, shrinking itself to a mere six-inch thread that poured through the intake port, seeping along the duct, swelling, bulging at McManus's air-grill ... and coming out of the ground, probably close to the ship, it had evaded the radar field.
Cornelia's agonized face swam before his eyes. He felt his body shaking in the grip of her slender hands. Words—
"—fool, run!Listen to me!It's busy smashing your ships. We have a chance. Run—to the mountain! Oh, dear God...."
At first he was like a sleep-walker. They turned him around and pushed him into a stumbling run, but his head turned back, his eyes large and almost vacant on that scene by the river.
Then he was running. It was a good two hundred yards to the mountain, but the grass was mashed to a springy tangle under their feet and they had only to skirt the thickly-strewn bodies. The girl took the lead, the men not far in the rear, the nozzles of their flamers flapping out behind them.
A crash, followed by a dull roar, came to them. They shot quick glances over their shoulders. The fuel tanks of one of the cruisers had let go and fire was blooming from the now distant beetle. The worm was arching wildly away, and then sinking in a curve to the ground.
"How fast—can it go—on the—surface?" panted Pritchard.
"Much faster—than under—ground!" Cornelia muttered.
VI
She was leading the way to the thin, rough ridge that marched up the mountain between two of its smooth planes of fracture. She sprang to the ridge and began running lightly up it. At twenty feet she stopped.
The men were slower. The ridge was nothing but saw-toothed points of raw rock, hard and glassy and glittering. They had not had the girl's practice with it.
She motioned Kemp past her and called down to Pritchard. "This is our only hope. I've never seen The One on any of these mountains. I'm sure It can't climb the smooth sides—"
"And we can hold It back with our flamers. Good girl."
"But hadn't we better get a little higher?" queried Sturgis.
"Higher!" echoed the girl. "We've got to get to the top!"
Frantically, they climbed, taking insane chances, fantastically insecure holds, scrambling, cutting their hands on the raw rock edges, living a nightmare....
At last Kemp and Cornelia, weak with exhaustion, sank against the ridge, gasping and heaving. Sturgis, next in line, had no breath with which to berate them. He could only crouch there and stare helplessly at them both.
Pritchard braced his feet and dared to look down. The One was a straight red line across the meadow, a gleam of highlight from Its wet side where the afternoon sun struck It. (Unconsciously he thought of It now as Cornelia did, as a person.) It was heading for the foot of the ridge.
They all stared down, sucking in their tortured breaths. Waiting for It to reach the ridge and start climbing, Pritchard found himself studying It detachedly. He realized his courage and reason were somehow reviving.
It was, after all, a worm. It differed from a six-inch Terran night-crawler only in that It measured about a hundred and fifty feet in length, and was proportionately much thinner, like a snake. It also differed in those snail-like tips that probed out into slim, delicate points or contracted into thick stubs scarce six feet long. Those tips were investigating the jagged rock of the ridge now.
And he saw that there were tips at the other end, too. But one was missing. Only a round stump accompanied the other long trailing feeler. It was a fair index of The One's terrible strength, Pritchard thought—realizing where the rest of that tip was now—that, in trying to wrench Itself clear, It had knocked over a hundred-foot, five-thousand-ton space ship.
"It's coming," said Kemp in a shrill, brittle voice. The hunter shot a glance at the stocky youth and saw he was fighting hysteria.
The One was rippling slowly up the ridge. Pritchard guessed Its speed was greater than it seemed at that distance. Like a scarlet river, It poured steadily up.
"After I've used this," said Cornelia in an even, conversational voice, "you gentlemen can have it if you don't mind having to pull it out of me." She held up her long knife, and there was no expression on her face.
Kemp and Sturgis could only stare at her. Pritchard couldn't warn her by asking them to take it away from her, and anyway this was no place for a wrestle.
"And why do you think we would want that?" he asked in as pleasant a tone as he could manage.
"So much better than a flamer or jumping," she replied. "Take my advice and—"
"I wish you would pull yourself together," said Pritchard. "You're frightening Kemp up there."
Startled, Kemp stared back down at his chief, and then he closed his mouth in a firm line. Pritchard congratulated himself that the remark was a stone that had slain two birds.
"You don't honestly think there's a way out of this," exclaimed Cornelia, "with—with—"
"What I wouldn't give for my snapper!" breathed Kemp.
"Or one of those five-inchers," and Sturgis jerked his head at the little tumbled beetles over at the river.
"There isn't a rocket-tube down there I'd trust now," said Pritchard. "They're all bunged out of alignment. Some of the snappers might still be in shape to use...." His voice trailed off. Something was taking shape in his thoughts, something revolving about a word Cornelia had uttered—the word "jump."
"Well, whatcanwe do?" muttered Sturgis tensely. The worm was still well below, but coming steadily up. They could see the little scarlet tips now, questing over the jagged edges. Behind was all humping redness.
"We were very foolish—" Pritchard checked himself. "I was very foolish. I permitted us to be outmaneuvered. The one thing that monster doesn't want is for one of us to get back to the cruisers—"
"I've been thinking," Sturgis cut in. "Why don't we empty all our flamer tanks along the ridge here, climb all the way to the top and then, as soon as it's almost there, spark the fuel and give it a good roasting?"
Pritchard shook his head. "I thought of that. You forget how volatile that stuff is. By the time it gets there—no, I've got a better use for the flamers."
He began unstrapping the tank from his shoulders. "Kemp, pass yours on down. No, hang on to it, just in case. Sturgis, you take my position and hold It off as long as you can—" He glanced at the gauge on the light plastic tank and shook his head grimly. "Okay, children, let's get going—to the top."
The mountain wasn't really much of a mountain, being only some five hundred feet high. Their first frantic scramble up the ridge had carried them almost two-thirds of the way.
Behind them, the worm was flowing steadily upward, like a river of blood, along the narrow ridge.
"Kemp," panted Pritchard as the short young man finally and painfully inched over the knife-edged peak.
Kemp turned, stretching out a hand to Cornelia to help her up and over. "Yes?"
"I'm putting this girl in your charge. She's your responsibility—"
"What are you going to do?" put in Cornelia quickly.
Pritchard looked up into those gray-green eyes so intent upon him. A pang of regret stabbed through him. He was no longer seeing her sweet-lined body. Here was a girl he could have ridden the starways with. A person with enough courage and resource to have held her own in this killer-infested Eden.
"I'm taking a powder, as they used to say back on good old Terra. I'm gambling. Gambling that I can get back to the one cruiser that hasn't burnt up all its wiring, and call the ship." He slapped the leg-pocket of his breeches. Kemp nodded. The pocket contained a ready-packed emergency chute.
Cornelia shook her head slowly. "You'll never make it—"
"He might," said Kemp.
"I'll bet I can," said Pritchard. "I've got to."
"The One will get you," she said. "It can get into one of those things easily. It'll take only a little of Its digestive juice...." Her face puckered and those emerald eyes shone brighter, but she fought for and regained control.
"So?" Pritchard smiled. "You'll be well rid, then, of that notorious big-game hunter, Elmer Pritchard."
"I don't want to be rid of him," she said softly. "I want him with me—at the end."
He bowed. "Thank you, Miss Boyce."
"Call me Cornelia, please."
"And you," he said, "may call me Elmer—a name I permit no one to use—" he bent forward "—but you, now."
Their lips brushed and clung.
"Fine time for love-making," muttered Kemp.
Below them, a flamer squealed suddenly. Sturgis, unknown to them, had lingered behind. Now, a hundred feet down the ridge, he fired a burst at the worm—a warning burst, for the dread feelers hung high above his head on a long, curving tendon of red wetness.
The flamer had an effective range of only thirty feet, but the slimy scarlet rope curved away, dropping off to one side and extending out into the air. The feelers contracted to mere knobs and the end thickened into a club.
A haymaker, drawing back, poised and cocked. Pritchard saw it and howled, "Sturgis! Duck!"
But there was to be no ducking that swing. Sturgis hugged the thin spine of crag and threw up a blossom of fire. But the rope came flailing about, slashing through the flame, and neatly flicked him off.
They watched the body arcing out over the meadow, the spare flamer of Pritchard twisting after it, and saw it sink on down, to stop suddenly against the turf.
Kemp began to curse. Pritchard pulled the emergency chute pack from his leg-pocket and began snapping the light harness about his long frame.
"Cut that out," he said coldly. "Just hang on, Kemp, and watch. If I've got this baby figured out right, It's going to lose interest in you two in about as many seconds."
"Good-bye, Elmer," came Cornelia's voice forlornly.
The worm's first half was recovering from the follow-through of that swing, draping itself back along the ridge yard by relentless yard. Pritchard turned, holding the chute cord in his fist. He forced a grin that he was afraid looked more like a grimace. "So long, kiddies," he said, and jumped.
At this point the leaning peak overhung the ground and he flung himself as far out as possible, trying for distance. The smooth, almost polished wall slanted away from him and the meadow swung upward.
He pulled the cord at the last minute. As the filmy neosilk billowed above him, and the harness seemed to jerk him back up from the onrushing ground, he managed to twist a glance back up at the ridge.
The One was motionless. That was good.
It had seen him.
Then he drew up his knees. The ground slammed into him and he lay there, stunned, letting the filmy folds flutter down over him.
Then he was up, bruised but whole, on his knees and scrabbling out from under the light gray stuff. By crawling under every line he avoided entanglement and in a minute was clear and running, unsnapping the harness as he went.
Not until he was well away from the mountain did he dare a glance over his shoulder. Then he almost stumbled, at the chill terror gusting through him, freezing every muscle.
The worm was a red festoon, drooping from the ridge. Even as he looked, Its whole length came off, to fall writhing out of sight momentarily at the base of the mountain.
He hadn't expected that. He had planned for It to back laboriously down the way It came, giving him a decent margin of time. But it had crossed him up. Now he had seconds instead of minutes.
He put his head down and dug in, pumping his tired, aching legs furiously. This was the worst gamble of his career, against the longest odds. He had no idea how fast the worm could go on level ground.
Suddenly, he was racing a shadow. In the slanting light of Piramus, setting through the afternoon, something like an elongated caricature of a snail's head crept across the grass beside him—two long slivers of tapering purple shadow.
Then he saw his flamer, lying almost dead ahead where it had landed after being catapulted off the ridge. Sobs rasping his throat, he slanted toward it, dove and rolled, to come up clutching it.
There was a spattering sound close by, a spatter that changed to an angry fizzing. Pritchard swung the nozzle up in the very face of the glistening red column swaying toward him. He squeezed the handle-grip.
Through the booming flame, he saw the shape twisting aside and followed it with fire. It went down to the ground, backing away into a swelling body. The worm writhed desperately away from that searing plume of licking flames.
Pritchard wheeled and ran toward the cruiser that had not burned.
Evil-smelling juice slashed across the upturned belly of the ship as he savagely wrenched open the buckled door and tumbled in, dragging the flamer in after him. He stumbled across the roof-struts and lunged for the upside-down radio panel.
The cruisers' radios were on their own battery-powered circuits. He snapped the power on and heard the slow hum and sputter of the warming tubes. He poked in the button labeled AUT. EM. SIG. a standard repeating distress call on a tight beam.
Then he was flung against the opposite wall. As he struggled back to his feet, pressure against them told him the cruiser was rising, and he knew very well it was not doing so under its own power.
A glistening red wall bulged against the door-frame through which he had come. Pritchard realized that once again the cruiser was being hoisted aloft in the worm's coil. It was going to drop him, to kill him quickly, rather than poke inside and face his flamer.
Pritchard snatched the flamer and staggered toward the opening. Jabbing the nozzle into that scarlet slime, he gripped the handles.
Roaring heat beat back at him. He braced himself, ignoring his own singeing flesh and crisping hair.
The cruiser struck ground with a crash. He was flung sideways, threw up an arm, and heard it snap. He dragged himself to the door which now was turned to the ground. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Pritchard hung his head through the opening and peered out.
It was a crazy nightmare. The meadow was a ceiling, to his inverted eyes, against which a giant red riband rolled and writhed in fantastic configurations. Every melting convolution, every arching loop, expressed pain and wrath. And, now and again, a livid blotch appeared along its length, alternately turning purple and yellow, and dripping streamers of drool.
Then came a sound, a great tearing sound in the sky. Pritchard hauled himself back into the ship and crawled to the radio. He switched off the automatic signal and cut in the transmission band.
"—the hell you got down there?" came Captain Savage's rasp. "Is that you up on the rock, Mr. Pritchard? Mr. Pritchard—"
"Captain!" yelled Pritchard. "Step on it! Come down on that monster. I'm all right. Come ahead!"
Then he snatched up a pair of solar goggles and worked his way to a viewport, in time to see theApollo, a magnificent column of metal in the sky, descend on a pillar of incandescence—at the bottom of which lay something that bubbled and cooked, rising in a last great arch of simmering agony.
The snaggle-toothed horizon of Thisbe II was rising across the dull indigo disk of setting Piramus. Pritchard and Savage sat in their gimbal chairs in the Forward Lounge. The old man's wispy white hairs stirred in the evening breeze sucked in by the blowers.
"And every time I wonder if my hunting days aren't over," sighed Pritchard. Experimentally, he worked on the flexicast on his right arm.
"Huh," grunted the captain. "Not you. One week on Terra and you'll be telling yourself the next time it just can't be as bad. Or that this wasn't as bad as it seemed. Anything, you'll tell yourself. Anything to start—"
Cornelia appeared in the doorway. "Good evening, gentlemen," she said coolly. She was wearing cordron slacks and a soft neosilk blouse, that seemed to enjoy clinging to her contours.
"Good evening," croaked Captain Savage. He stood up, and stretched restlessly.
"Oh, don't go," said Cornelia.
"Well, if we're blasting off in the morning, I've got things to do. These days it's the old men who do all the work." He chuckled as he eased past her through the door, and gave her shoulder a little pat. "Good hunting."
The girl watched him go down the passage. "Whatever did he mean by that?" she inquired. "'Good hunting'."
"Oh, it's just an expression," said Pritchard vaguely.
She came over to him and turned about on her bare feet. "No shoes that fit," she said. "How do you like what I managed to scrounge from the men?"
He pulled her down to him with one lazy reach of his good arm. "I'm afraid," he murmured, "that I liked you better the way you were."
"You know," she spoke muffledly against his shoulder, "you're something of a beast."