"You stay here. What's your name?"
"Ama. Daughter of Rohm, the Senza. He my father. He very good fren' of
the Captain Roberts--good fren' of all the Earthmen. Like you? You are
Earthman?"
"Yes. Now Ama, listen--I came here with another Earthman--with two
others, in fact. One of them is over there by the Roberts' ship.... You
wait here--"
"No!" she gasped. I had dashed toward the tunnel entrance, but I found
her with me. "No--no, I stay with you."
From the entrance the gully showed dim and silent. Over the little rise
of ground, just the top of the Roberts' spaceship was visible.
Ama clung to me. "I stay with you," she insisted.
Cautiously we picked our way across the gully, up the small ascending
slope. No sound; nothing moving. But now there was a pungent, acrid
chemical smell hanging here in the windless air.
"The fire-mime!" Ama whispered. "You smell the fire? Then he was angry,
ready to fight--"
"He fought," I retorted grimly. "I saw it--"
"Look! Look there--"
* * * * *
Her slim arm as she gestured tinkled with metal baubles hanging on
it.... I saw, up the slope, the blob of something lying on the rocks.
Jan! My heart pounded. But it wasn't Jan. The body of one of the weird
oblong animals was lying there. Lying on its side, with its six legs
stiffly outstretched. Ugly hairless thing, like a giant dog which had
been skinned. I could see now that the grey-green flesh had a greasy,
pulpy look. What strange organic material was this? Certainly nothing
like it existed on Earth. Impervious to heat, as the human stomach
tissue is impervious to the action of its own digestive juices.
Evidence of the thing's flaming oxidation was here. Wisps of smoke were
rising from the ground about the slack body.
Had Jan killed it? The ring of eyes above the long muzzle snout bulged
with a glassy, goggling dead stare. The jaws were open, with a thick,
forked black tongue protruding, and green, sticky-looking froth still
oozing out. The teeth were long and sharp, fangs like polished black
ivory protruding from the jaw. The cause of its death was obvious. A
knife-slash had ripped, almost severed its throat in a hideous wound
where green-black viscous ooze was still slowly dripping, with smoky
vapor rising from it.
For a moment, with little Ama clinging to me, I must have stood
appalled at the weird sight of the dead fire-mime. If Jan had fought
and killed it--then where was he now? And where was that other Org,
companion of the clumsy savage I had killed when it had tried to
attack me?
And where was Torrence?
"Your fren'--he did this?" Ama was murmuring.
"Yes, I guess so." I raised my voice cautiously. "Jan--Oh, Jan, where
are you?"
The dark shadowed rocks mocked me with their muffled, blurred echo of
my call. There seemed nothing here alive, save Ama and me. The wrecked
spaceship lay broken and silent on the rocks, with the gruesome, strewn
bodies of the Earthmen in it. And the body of Roberts still lay here
outside, near the bow.
"Jan--Jan--"