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time in purely academic explorations. Now an
even more urgent mission precluded such
studies.
Grag suddenly stopped, his giant metal hand
also halting Gaa. "Eek's getting nervous
already," he said doubtfully. "Yet it can't be
that we're near the Roons yet."
Carlin looked skeptically at the moon-pup.
Eek had begun to shiver.
"Probably he's scared of some animal he
senses in the forest," suggested the botanist.
"Maybe, but--"
Grag never finished. At that moment, Gaa
wrenched suddenly from beside them and
started running forward along the trail.
"Get him!" yelled Grag. "Don't use your
gun--we can catch him!"
Carlin had whipped out his atom-pistol, but
he refrained from firing as he and Grag
plunged down the trail after the escaping Roon.
Gaa, his arms bound, could not run fast
enough to escape. Carlin wondered fleeting-ly
why the Roon had made the hopeless attempt.
Gaa looked back over his shoulder at them,
then slackened speed. But now they were
within reach of the frantically stumbling
tribesman. Grag's great hand reached
vengefully for him.
At this moment Carlin felt the ground cave in
under his boots, and plunged downward. He
struck a soft dirt surface in jarring fall, and
heard two other heavy bodies thud beside him.
Carlin picked himself up, feeling dazed. He
was standing at the bottom of a conical pit,
whose floor was the base of the cone. The pit
was ten feet across and its dirt sides sloped
steeply upward more than twenty feet to a
small, ragged hole through which they had
fallen.
Grag was picking himself up, and Eek, who
had clung to him in the fall, seemed frantic
now with terror. But Grag turned with a roar
on Gaa, who like themselves had been unhurt
by his fall to the soft dirt floor.
"You dirty red son of perdition!" roared the
robot, grabbing their bound captive. "I'll twist
your head right off your shoulders."
"Wait, Grag!" said Philip Carlin. "Don't hurt
him."
"Hurt him?" retorted the wrathful robot. "I'll
reduce him to atoms! He led us right into this
hole."
"What is this place? A pitfall built by your
tribe?" he asked Gaa.
Gaa stood, coolly surveying them without a
trace of fear on his parrot-beaked red face.
"No, this is a hunting-worm's pit. I saw the
traces of a chain of them as we came along the
trail, and knew there'd be another ahead."
"A hunting worm?" roared Grag, looking
around. "Where is he?"
Gaa nodded toward two six-foot round
tunnels that opened into opposite sides of the
conical pit, just above the floor.
"He will come," said the Roon. "Hunting-
worms hollow out many such pits, in a
connected chain. They leave only a thin mask
of dirt above, not sufficient to support an
animal's weight. They go through their pits
regularly, looking for prey. When he comes, he
will kill and devour us all. Then you star-men
will never reach my village to spy on my
people."
"You block-headed lummox, he'll devour you,
too, in that case!" bellowed Grag.
Gaa nodded. "Yes, I will die, too. But I am
not afraid of death."
At another moment, Philip Carlin would have
admired the Roon's loyalty to his people.
But now he had too imminent a sense of
danger for such reflections.
"We've got to get out of here!" he exclaimed.
"I've heard stories of the size and ferocity of
these hunting-worms."
Grag looked upward. "Blast me if I see how
we're going to climb out of this hole."
THE dirt of the pit sides was soft. But the
inward slant of the high, steep walls made it
impossible to dig out steps,
"This is what I get for not paying attention to
Eek," Grag went on ruefully. "He wasn't scared
for nothing, I should have known."
"He's certainly plenty scared now," Carlin
observed.
Eek was in a very frenzy of fear, clawing at
Grag's legs, dashing to the wall, then running
back to the robot. Eek, it was easy to deduce,
wanted nothing more than to leave the pit.
"The hunting-worm is coming," Gaa
explained calmly. "It will be here soon."
Carlin reached instinctively for his atom-pistol.
Then he remembered, appalled, that he had had
it in his hand when he crashed into the pit. It
had been jarred from his grasp when he fell.
Hastily he searched the pit floor.
The weapon was not there. It had fallen on
the trail above.
"It's all right, I've got my gun," Grag said.
"We'll make short work of the beast when it
comes."
Grag reached into his haversack and drew out
his atom-pistol. Then he uttered an
exclamation of dismay.
"Devils of space, look at this gun! Eek's been
at it!"
The hard metal of the atom-pistol barrel was
gnawed away. The gun would back-blast if it
was fired.
Grag uttered a groan. "I might have known
Eek would start chewing on it when he was in
the haversack with it. He can't resist metal. It's
my fault for putting him in there."
Carlin heard a faint, faraway rustling. It
seemed to come from one of the tunnels that
opened into the pit.
His heart hammered. The fantastic
predicament loomed now with a brutal horror.
It would be a messy way to die, he was
thinking.
"We can't get out, and we have no weapons,"
he said. "What can we do?"
"If the hunting-worms are as big as Gaa says,
I couldn't kill the beast with just my hands,"
Grag muttered. "The thing would be sure to
kill you and the Roon, in this narrow hole."
Grag suddenly turned. "There's a chance, if
we can get your atom-gun. It must be lying
right up there beside the mouth of the pit."
The robot picked up Eek and showed him the
gnawed atom-pistol. Eek, even in his terror,
cowered a little, expecting reprimand.
"You want a nice gun to eat, Eek?" Grag said.
"All right, there's one up there on the trail. You
bring it back and you can have it."
"How can he understand when he can't speak
or hear?" said Carlin.
"He doesn't hear my words but he senses my
thought," Grag explained hastily. "Here you
go, Eek--get the gun and bring it."
With the words, Grag tossed the moon-pup
accurately up through the hole twenty-odd feet
above. They heard Eek fall with a thump on
the trail.
They heard also, more loudly, the ominous
rustling from the tunnels. Carlin felt an icy
chill along his spine.
Eek reappeared above, peering down at them.
Carlin could have kissed the moon-pup. For in
his jaws, Eek held Carlin's atom-pistol.
Grag held up his arms. "Jump, Eek! Grag will
catch you."
Eek very definitely did not want to jump.
Eek's hesitation showed he'd had quite enough
of the pit.
Grag cajoled him. "You jump, Eek, and I'll
give you a nice big piece of copper to eat. All
the copper you want."
Eek seemed to be drooling mentally over that
inducement, but still was restrained by an
overpowering terror of the pit.
Gaa uttered a low exclamation. Carlin turned
and froze as he saw, far back in one of the
tunnels, two cold, glittering, lashless and
enormous eyes that advanced softly like twin
pale fires.
He could sense, rather than see, the enormous
looping, rippling white worm body behind
those monstrous eyes. He heard Grag yell.
Eek jumped! Grag grabbed him, snatched the
atom-pistol from his jaws, and whirled with
incredible rapidity.
The blunt, enormous head of the hunting-
worm was swaying up as the first ten feet of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]