It came toward him, lumbering, shambling, bestial.
“Stand back!” he shouted sternly, tension of panic in his voice.
The effect of his sharp command was curious.
For that shambling thing straightened suddenly to military erectness. It came to attention.
Stiffly it raised an unspeakable, green-crusted paw in salute.
But that was no more than a mechanical reaction left over from its forgotten humanity.
It slumped back into the same stooping posture; it lumbered on toward him.
“Attention!” he shouted again.
“Halt!”
A moment it paused, and then came on faster.
Formless, protesting sounds spewed from its lipless mouth.
And John Star stood, faint with horror, trying to understand its cries, until it uttered an abrupt, eager, animal squeal, and broke into a crouched and stumbling run.
He knew, then, that it was stalking him for food.
Swiftly he looked behind him for a path of escape; he realized with a wave of sick apprehension that it had trapped him.
Its animal cunning was not yet gone.
Mountains of broken green glass hemmed him in.
He must face it. True, he had the black thorn.
But he was not so strong, he knew, as he had been before his own long sickness.
And this avid, mewing animal was well over twice his weight.
The green decay, apparently, had not yet greatly wasted away its strength.
He hoped, as they came to grips, that the tricks of combat he had learned in the Legion Academy would make up his disadvantages.
But as one horny, green-scaled paw seized his dagger wrist in a clever, cruel hold, he knew that it had once been another Legionnaire.
Its crazed brain had not forgotten how to fight.
The dagger dropped from his paralyzed grasp.
Foul green arms locked him in a crushing embrace.
Then it tried an old trick of his own. A knee in his back, the other locked over his thighs; his shoulders twisted, twisted, until his back would break.
He struggled vainly in the merciless hold, blind with pain and panic.
The hard green scales were harsh against his body; fetor of decomposition sickened him.
His efforts failed, and he felt a giddy sickness.
Naked fangs slashed at his shoulder; the thing made an eager whine.
It was hungry.
Sheer desperation brought his old cool composure back, then.
Through the mist of agony he imagined himself back at the Academy.
He smelled the reek of leather and rubbing alcohol and stale sweat.
He heard an instructor’s bored, nasal monotone:
“Twist your body, so; drive your elbow into the plexus, so; slip your arm here, so; then lock your leg and turn.”
He did it, as the dry old voice whispered in his memory, hardly aware where he was, knowing only that the torturing pain would cease when he had done it, and he would be free to search for a nail.
Snap!
He rose slowly, beside that quivering mass of greenish decay.
He staggered on again among the shattered Green Hall’s ruins, scanning the battered earth.
He must hurry!
If the black flier came… It was a child’s toy that caught his eye.
A rusty, broken little engine that could no longer move its tiny burden—but might yet save the System.
He tore the shaft out of it, assured himself that it was good gray iron, and hastened back toward the cruiser.
Clambering over a heap of broken green glass, he looked up, and saw the black spider-ship.
It was slanting down, across the red and murky sky, already very near.
At a dogged, weary run, he staggered back into view of the Purple Dream.
Tiny torpedo shape of silver, a pygmy in the shadow of the huge, black-vaned machine plunging down on hot green jets above the dark Sandias.
It was still beyond the yawning crater, a quarter mile away.
Hopelessly, a needle-pain of exhaustion stabbing at his heart, he stumbled on.