It was, he saw, like the creature that Giles Habibula had once battled for his bottle of wine.
He caught his breath, startled by its strange and wicked beauty.
The frail wings were blue and translucent; they glittered like thin sheets of dark sapphire.
Ribs of scarlet veined them.
The slim, tapered body was black, oddly and strikingly patched with bright yellow.
The one enormous eye was like a jewel of polished jet.
A single pair of limbs stiffened under it; cruel yellow talons spread to clutch the girl’s body.
And its tail, a thin yellow whip, scorpion-like, armed with a terrible black barb, arched down to sting.
John Star leaped straight in the path of it, swung his club for the jet-black eye.
But the brilliant wings tilted a little, the creature swerved up; it struck at him instead of the girl.
His blow missed the solitary eye; the thin, pitiless lance of its sting came straight at him.
He flung his body down, twisting his blow to fend away the stabbing barb.
He felt the impact as his club struck the whipping tail; the venomed point was driven a little aside, yet it grazed his shoulder with a flash of blinding pain.
Scrambling instantly back to his feet, nearly blind with searing pain, he dimly saw the creature rise and turn and glide back again, on translucent blue-and-scarlet wings.
Again it dived, talons set.
This time, he saw, the barbed tail was hanging; his club had broken it.
Staggered with agony, he aimed his blow again at the bright jet disk of the eye. And this tune the creature did not swerve.
It plunged straight at him, yellow talons grasping.
In the last instant, dizzy with pain from its venom, he realized that the talons would strike him.
Fiercely, he sought to steady his reeling world; he put every ounce of his strength behind the heavy piece of driftwood, felt it crush solidly home against the huge black glittering disk.
Then his senses dissolved in the acid of pain.
Vaguely, he knew that it was not flying with him.
Dimly, he knew that it was floundering on the sand, dragging his body still locked in its talons.
His last blow had been fatal.
Presently the death-struggles ceased; the furry body collapsed upon him.
The yellow talons, even in death, were set deep in his arm and shoulder.
One by one, when the blinding pain began to ebb a little, he strained his fingers to open them, and he came at last to his feet, fault and ill and bleeding.
Even dead, the thing was beautiful.
The narrow wings, spread unbroken on the black sand, were luminous sheets of ruby-veined sapphire.
Only the reddened talons and the broken sting were hideous— and the head of it, pulped under his last blow.
Weakly, he reeled away from it, too faint even to pick up Ms club.
He sank down beside Aladoree, still quietly breathing hi the dead sleep of exhaustion, peacefully unaware of the death that had been so near.
Sunk in a hopeless apathy of new fatigue and pain, at first he did not even move when he saw three tiny figures toiling along the flat black sand. They must be Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula; he knew they must have come alive, by some miracle of courage and endurance, through the drains and out of the yellow river. But he was too deep in exhaustion to feel any hope or interest. He sat there, by the sleeping girl and the brilliant dead thing, aimlessly watching them come wearily over the black bar, out of hazy red distance.
Three strange, haggard men, each of them with a few tattered bits of cloth still clinging to a worn, exposure-browned body.
Bearded men, long-haired, shaggily unkempt. They walked close together.
Each of them carried a club or a thorn spear.
Their sunken, gleaming eyes peered about with a fierce alert suspicion.
They were like three dawn-men, hunting hi the shadow of some early jungle; three elemental beasts, cautious and dangerous.
It was strange to think of them as survivors of the crushed and betrayed Legion of Space, the last fighting men of the once-proud System, left alone to defend it from the science of an alien star.
Could these shaggy animals decide an interstellar war?
John Star at last found spirit to stand, to shout and wave.
They saw him, hurried to him over the bar.
Hal Samdu still carried the black mechanism from the tripod, slung about his great shoulders by its connecting wires.
He had dived with it into the drains; burdened with it, he had fought the yellow river.
“Aladoree?” he rasped, hoarse, weary, anxious, stalking up ahead of the others.
“Asleep.”
John Star found energy for the one word, the gesture.
The giant dropped beside her, eagerly solicitous, a smile of relief on his haggard, red-bearded face.
“You carried her out?” he rasped.
“And killed—that?”