Light! With all the blinding suddenness of an atomic explosion, there was light. Wentworth had a moment's awareness of sunshine on the brittle stalks of skit-trees, and then of upward acceleration so fierce that it was like a blow. The atmosphere-flier hurtled skyward with all its lift-jets firing full blast—and there was the Galloping Cow lumbering ungracefully through atmosphere at ten thousand feet, some twelve or more miles away.
And McRae's voice came out of a communicator which now picked up no static whatever.
"What the devil?" he boomed. "We saw something that looked like a big metal tank, and it vanished and you went skyward from where it'd been like a bat out of hell—"
"Suppose you follow me," said Wentworth grimly. "The skit-tree planters on this planet, anyhow, don't want us around. By pure accident, I got a line on where they were. They lured me away from their place by projecting a city. I went to look—and it vanished. I played hide and seek with it until they changed tactics and let it stay in existence. Maybe they thought we'd land on it, high up, and get out of the flier to explore. Then the city'd have vanished and we'd have dropped a mile or two—hard. But we landed on the ground instead, and they clapped a jail around us. I don't know what they intended, but you came along and they let the jail vanish to keep you from examining it. And now we'll go talk to them!"
The flier was streaking vengefully back to the embankment, to where only that morning, before sunrise, Wentworth had seen something he still didn't like to think about. The Galloping Cow veered around to follow, with all the elephantine grace of the animal for which she had been unofficially christened. She'd been an Earth-Pluto freighter before conversion for this expedition, and she was a staunch vessel, but not a handy one.
The flier dived for the hills. Wentworth's jaws were hard and angry. The Galloping Cow trailed, wallowing. The flier quartered back and forth across the hills, examining every square inch of ground. . . .
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The search went on. The communicator boomed McRae's voice:
"They're playing possum. We'll land and make a camp and prepare to hunt on foot."
Wentworth growled angrily. He continued to search. Deeper and deeper into the hills. Going over and over every bit of terrain. Then, quite suddenly, the communicator emitted babbling sounds. Shouts. Incoherent outcries. From the ship, of course. There were sudden, whining crashes—electronic cannon going off at a panic-stricken rate. Then a ghastly crashing sound—and silence.
The flier zoomed until Haynes and Wentworth could see. They paled. Wentworth uttered a raging cry.
The Galloping Cow had landed. Her ports were open and men had emerged. But now a Thing had attacked the ship with a ruthless, irresistible ferocity. It was bigger than the Galloping Cow. It stood a hundred feet high at the shoulder. It was armored and possessed of prodigious jaws and incredible teeth. It was all the nightmares of mechanistic minds rolled into one and then magnified. It must have materialized from nothingness, because nothing so huge could have escaped Wentworth's search. But as Wentworth first looked at it the incredible jaws closed on the ship's frame and bit through the tough plates of beryllium steel as if they had been paper. It tore them away and flung them aside. A main-frame girder offered resistance. With an irresistible jerk, the Thing tore it free. And then it put its claws into the very vitals of the Galloping Cow and began to tear the old spaceship apart.
The crewmen spilled out and fled. The Thing snapped at one as he went by, but returned to its unbelievable destruction. Someone heaved a bomb into its very jaws, and it exploded—and the Thing seemed not to notice it.
Wentworth seized the controls of the flier from Haynes. He dived—not for the ship, but for the space between the ship and the mountains. He flung the small craft into crazy, careening gyrations in that space.
And then the communicator shrieked with clacking static. The flier passed through the beam, but Wentworth flung it back in. He plunged toward the mountains. He lost the beam, and found it again, and lost it, and found it. . . .
"There!" he said, choking with rage. "Down from the top of that cliff! There's a hole! A cave-mouth! The beam's coming from there!"
He plunged the flier for the opening, and braked with monstrous jettings that sent rocket-fumes blindingly and chokingly into the tunnel. The flier hit and Wentworth scrambled to the forepart of the little ship and leaped to the cliff-opening against which it bumped, and then ran into the opening, his flame-pistol flaring before him.
There was a blinding flash inside. The blue-white flame of a short-circuit making a gigantic arc. It died. The place was full of smoke, and something small ran feebly across the small space that Wentworth could see, and fell, and kicked feebly, and was still. A machine came to a jolting stop. And Wentworth, crouching fiercely, waited for more antagonists.
None came. The fumes drifted out the cave-mouth. Then he saw that the thing on the floor was a weirdly constructed space-suit, and that the thing in it was not human and looked very tired. It was dead. Then he saw an almost typical tight beam projector, linked with heavy cables to a scanning device. He saw a model—all of five feet high—of the city he and Haynes had tried to reach. The model was of unbelievable delicacy and perfection. But the scanning system now was focused on a metal object which was a miniature Thing with claws and jaws and armor. . . . It was two feet long, and there was a cable control by which its movements could be directed. A solidity which was controlled by that ingenious mechanical toy could dig canals, or gather the crop from the tops of skit-trees—when enlarged in the projection to stand a hundred feet high at the shoulder—or it could tear apart a spaceship as a terrier rends a rat. . . .
There was more. Much more. But there was only the one small inhabitant, who wore a space-suit on his own planet. And he was dead.
Haynes called from the flier at the cave-mouth:
"Wentworth! What's happened? Are you alive? What's up?"
Wentworth went savagely out. He wanted to see how the Galloping Cow had withstood the attack. What he had seen last looked bad.
It was bad. The Galloping Cow was a carcass. Her engines were not too badly smashed, but her outer shell was scrap-iron, her frame was twisted wreckage, and there was no faintest hope that they could repair her in the field.
"And—I'm engaged to be married when we get back," said Haynes, white-faced. "We'll never get back in that."
Less than a month later, though, the Galloping Cow did head for home. Haynes, unwittingly, had made it possible. Examination of the solidity-projector revealed its principles, and Haynes—trying forlornly to make a joke—suggested that he model a statuette of the last inhabitant to be projected a mile or two high above the skit-tree plantations now forever useless. But he was commissioned to model something else entirely, and in his exuberance his fancy wandered afar. But McRae dourly permitted the model to stand, because he was in a hurry to start.