"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 the _Apollo_, 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."