John Star could only nod.
His eyes had closed, but he knew that Jay Kalam and Giles Habibula were coming up.
He heard the latter wheezing weakly:
“Ah, precious life!
It’s been an evil time, a fearful time!
Washed through the stinking sewers like garbage, and flung to die amid the wicked horrors of the fearful yellow river.
Ah, poor old Giles Habibula!
It was a mortal evil day———”
His voice changed.
“Ah, the lass!
The lass has not been harmed.
And this wicked glittering monster! John must have killed it… Ah, old Giles knows how you feel, lad!
A mortal bitter time, we’ve all been through!”
His voice brightened again.
“This dead creature—the flesh of it is good to eat.
‘Tis like the one I fought so mortal hard for my bottle of wine—that precious wine I never got to taste!
We must have a fire.
I’m fearful weak from hunger.
Ah, poor old Giles, dying of hunger———”
John Star drifted away, then, a second time, into blissful sleep.
It was colder, when he woke.
His body was numb and stiff, though a sheltered fire of driftwood blazed beside him.
Dread night was coming apace; the sun’s angry disk now completely gone, the sky a low dome of baleful murky twilight.
Bitter wind blew across the river, toward the jungle.
Giles Habibula was by the fire, grilling meat he had cut from the dead flying thing.
John Star felt gnawing hunger; it must have been the fragrance of the roast that awoke him.
But he did not eat at once.
Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu were beside Aladoree, beyond the fire.
The little machine that the giant had brought so far, they had taken apart.
The pieces of it were spread out before them, on a flat slab of driftwood.
Coils of wire and odds and ends of metal and black plastic.
He stood up, hastily, despite the stiffness of his body, and hurried to them.
In their absorption, they did not look up.
Before Aladoree was an odd little device, assembled from the black metal parts, from rudely carved fragments of wood.
She was fingering the remaining bits of metal, anxiously, one by one, rejecting each with a little hopeless shake of her head.
“You’re setting it up?” John Star whispered eagerly. “AKKA?”
“She’s trying!” breathed Jay Kalam abstractedly.
John Star glanced across the black jungle-top, toward the towers and machines of the black metropolis, remote in the red twilight.
It was sheer impossibility, he felt, that the crude little device on the sand should ever do injury to those colossal walls.
“I must have iron,” said Aladoree.
“A tiny bit of iron, the size of a nail, would do.
But I must have it for the magnetic element.
Except for that, there’s everything I need. But there’s no kon here.”
She laid down the tiny device, hopelessly.
“We must find ore, then,” said John Star.
“Build a furnace, smelt it.”
Jay Kalam shook his head gravely, wearily.
“We can’t do that.
No iron on the planet.
The Medusae, you know, first promised to conquer our System for the Purples, just for a shipload of iron.