"Gregg, no!"
"I must. If we can bring him to consciousness, make him tell us where
the _Star-Streak_ is...."
I flung off her restraining hold. The wind had eased up. I leaped out
into it, swimming. The rocks slid by close under me in a swift
sidewise drift. In a moment I would be carried out over the river. It
was a chaos of green, windswept darkness. But there was bursting light
now overhead and rumbling claps, like thunder.
I saw Molo's body where the wind held him pinned against the side of a
flat, ten-foot rock butte, and dove for him, swimming down frantically
until I struck against the rock with a blow that almost knocked the
breath from me. Molo was still obviously unconscious.
How long it took me to get back to Anita, floundering with Molo's
body, I do not know. I managed to keep against the ground; was blown
back, and struggled forward again. The wind came with strange puffs.
In one of the lulls, I hauled Molo through the air and into the cave.
"Gregg!" Anita held to me, her arms around me. "Gregg dear, you were
gone so long!"
I was battered and bruised and breathless. The cave's mouth was like a
ten-foot tunnel leading downward into blackness.
"Gregg, I put Venza and Snap here."
They lay side by side, like two dead bodies, here in the greenish
darkness. We placed Molo with them. Together Anita and I crouched
beside them, clinging to each other, listening to the wild sweep of
the wind outside. The storm had burst into full fury now. It would
whirl us away like feathers, outside there now. The lightning and
thunder hissed and crashed. Stones and boulders were being flung like
hailstones.
This flimsy, weightless world! It seemed as though the rocks here on
which we were crouching would be shifted and carried away.
"Gregg! Gregg, is this the end?"
A mass of rocks fell at the opening, closing it, so that we were
buried here in the darkness. "Anita, my darling, I will never stop
loving you."
Darkness, with her arms around me and a shuddering world outside. But
here, only Anita and her soft arms.
"Gregg!"
Horror was in her voice. Then I saw what she was seeing. It was not
just Anita and I buried here in the darkness with the bodies of Snap
and Venza and Molo. Something else was here.
From the blackness of the cave, two green, glowing eyes were staring.
Their radiance showed me the outlines of a distended head. An insane
thing? But it was not another of the forest insects. This seemed to be
an animal. The glow of its distended head disclosed a lythe,
horizontal body, seemingly solid and muscled. A chattering, insane
animal, here in the dark with us! We heard mouthing, mumbling words,
and an eerie, cackling laugh as it came padding toward us.
The thing in the cave stared at us as we clung together in the
darkness, transfixed for a moment by horror. The distended head,
ghastly of face with its green glowing eyes, wobbled upon a long,
spindly neck. The eyes seemed luminous of their own internal light.
The radiance from them faintly lighted the black cave so we were able
to see its tawny, hairy body. It was long sleek, the size of an Earth
leopard. A muscled body, with ponderable weight, it was moving toward
us, padding on the rocks.
I recovered my wits and shoved Anita behind me. I crouched on one
knee. There was no escape, nowhere to run. This tunnel was blocked by
a fallen rock mass behind us, with the wild storm raging outside. The
thing was some twenty feet away, where the tunnel broadened into a
black cave of unknown size. Beside me Snap and Venza lay inert, the
still-unconscious Molo with them.
There was nothing to do but crouch here and protect Anita. I waved my
arms, shouted above the outside surge of the storm; my voice
reverberated with a muffled roar in this subterranean darkness.
"Get back! Back! Back, away from me!"
It stopped. Round ears stood up from the bloated head. Then it laughed
again. I felt Anita shoving a rock at my hand, a chunk of rock the
size of my head. "Its face, Gregg! Aim for its face!"
The rock felt like a ball of cork. I flung it and hit the thing on the
body. Its laughter checked abruptly; it crouched, as though gathering
for a spring.
And then I thought of my gravity projector. I flashed on the repulsive
ray to its full intensity.
The tawny body leaped. It came hurtling, but my beam met it in
mid-air. For a second I thought that I had been too late. The thing
was clawing the air; its momentum carried it against the push of my
ray. For an instant it hung, snarling, and then laughed that wild
laugh.
The ray forced it back. It receded through the air, back across the
blackness of the cave, gathering speed until, in a moment it brought
up against the opposite wall some forty feet away. There it hung,
pinned as I held the ray upon it. The body had struck the rocky wall
but the head was uninjured. It was writhing and twisting: the cave was
filled with the reverberations of its screams.