I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for
Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't
mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?"
He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly.
Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide
I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.
"Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow
in my boat."
Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only
alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to
a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard
Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?
Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like
one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of
the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and
mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.
Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.
Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking
over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after
him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a
natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the
throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now
beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions,
all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.
Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free
and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to
death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest
that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.
It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that
something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and
the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into
a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly.
It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only
have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant.
In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the
cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in
diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through
which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in
and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my
eyeballs felt paralyzed.
Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.
persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than
any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.
Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a
window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was
fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking
up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the
airlock.