Part 26 (1/2)

”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 b.u.t.te, 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 s.h.i.+fted and carried away.

”Gregg! Gregg, is this the end?”

A ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 m.u.f.fled 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.