Counting the pilot, five persons composed the party. Director Byrd and Assistant Director
Leyton were completely encased. Deston and Jones, however, had left their hands bare,
as each was carrying a .475 semi-automatic rifle. Magnums, these, of tremendous
slugging power; and all their cartridges-each gunner had three extra fifty-round
drums-were loaded with armor-piercers, not soft-nosed stuff. They went down, talking
animatedly and peering eagerly, until two silent inner alarms went off at once.
“Hold it!” Jones yelled, and Deston’s even louder command was, “High it at max, fly-boy!”
The craft darted upward, but even at full blast she was not fast enough to escape from a
horde of flying things that looked something like wildcats’ heads mounted on owls’
bodies, but vastly larger than either. They attacked viciously; their terrible teeth and even
more terrible talons tearing inches-deep gouges into the shuttle’s hard, tough armor. As
the little vessel shot upward, however, higher and higher into the ever-thinning atmos-
phere, the things began to drop away-they did have to breathe.
Several of them, however, stayed on. They had dug holes clear through the armor; out of
which the shuttle’s air was whistling. The creatures were breathing ship’s air-and liking
it!-and were working with ferocious speed and power and with appalling efficiency.
Deston and Jones began shooting as soon as the first two openings were large enough
to shoot through, but even those powerful weapons-the hardest-hitting shoulder-guns
built-were shockingly ineffective. Both monsters had their heads inside the ship and were
coming in fast. The others had dropped away for lack of air.
“Hercules” Jones, big enough and strong enough to handle even a .475 as though it were
a .30-30, put fifty hard-nosed bullets against one spot of his monsters head and thus
succeeded in battering that head so badly out of shape that the creature died before
gaining entrance. Died and hung there, half in and half out.
But Deston, although supremely willing, simply did not have the weight and sheer brute
strength to take that brutal magnum’s recoil and hold it steady on one point. Thus when
his drum was empty the creature was still coming. It was dying, however, almost dead,
because of the awful pounding it had taken and because there was almost no air at all
left in the shuttle.
Both men were changing drums, but they were a few seconds late. The thing had life
enough left so that as it came through the wall and fell to the floor it made one convulsive
flop, and in its dying convulsions it sank one set of talons into Cecily Byrd’s thigh and the
other into the calf of Lewis Leyton’s leg. The woman shrieked once and, for the first time
in her life, fainted dead away. The man swore sulphurously.
By this time they were almost back to the Rhene. The landing craft was taken aboard
and a team of surgeons tried for a few minutes to get those incredible talons out of the
steel and the flesh; then for a few minutes more they tried to amputate those equally
incredible feet. Then they anesthetized both victims and carried the inseparable trio into
the machine-shop; where burly mechanics ground the beast’s legs in two with high-speed
neotride wheels and, using tools designed to handle high-tensile bar stock, curled those
ghastly hooks back out of flesh and armor. Thence and finally to the sick-bay, where the
doctors put everything they could think of into those deep, but not ordinarily dangerous,
wounds.
As soon as the doctors became fairly sure that no alien germs were at work in the
human flesh, Deston strode up to Cecily’s bed.
“`’We’ll get one thing straight right now, Curly,” he said. “I’m all done suggesting; I’m
telling you. You don’t go down there again until I say so.”
She straightened up angrily; she was not too sore to fight. “Think again, buster. We’re on
the job now, not at HQ. It’s my job and I’ll run it any way I damn well please.”
“At HQ or anywhere else, my curly-haired friend, my authority over-rides on matters of
policy and this is a matter of policy. You’ll take it and you’ll like it.” “Over-rides, hell! I’ll. .
.”
“You’ll nothing!” he snapped. “Did you ever get socked on the jaw hard enough to lay you
out stiff for fifteen minutes?”
Instead of becoming even more furious at that, she relaxed and grinned up at him. “No, I
never did. That would be a brand-new experience.”
“Okay. Much more of this sticking out of your beautiful neck and you’ll get that brand-new
experience. Now let’s do some thinking on what to do next. I shot in an order for a
special elsie. . .
“Can you . . . those kittyhawks went through superstainless like so much cheese. What
plating-neotride?” “That’s right. Here’s the funny-picture.” He spread a blueprint out on
the bed. “I didn’t have much of anything to do with it, though; it’s mostly Lew’s work.
She studied the drawing for a couple of minutes. “That ought to do it; it’d stop a diamond
drill cold . . . it’d hold a neotride drill for a while . . . but what are those monstrosities,
Babe? All that the croakers will give out with is gobbledegook, soothing syrup, and pure
pap.”
“Nobody knows. All the biologists aboard are going not-so-slowly nuts. They can’t do
anything from up here. “All of us. Nice.” She bit her lip.-Without rhenium we can’t work
down there and we have to work down there to get rhenium. Strictly circular progress.”
“It isn’t that bad, Curly. There are dozens of nice big chunks of the clear quill-thousands
of tons of it-right out in the open down there. That’s the special elsie’s job, to go clown
and get ’em and bring ’em out here to us. The chief wants a good mess of it rushed in to
Galmetia, but there’s plenty of it lying around loose to take care of him and build five of
your installations besides.”
“Wonderful! That makes me feel a lot better, Babe I’ll talk to you now until the croakers
throw you out.”
Chapter 10
THE PARTY
Cecily and Leyton were both up and at work, their wounds completely healed, when the
special elsie arrived. This landing craft was special indeed, for the first abortive attempt
to approach that fantastically inimical planet had made it perfectly clear that they would
have to have hundreds of tons of rhenium before they could begin to work.
This little ship was to get it. Her inner layer of armor was four inches thick, forged of the
stubbornest supersteel available. The outer layer, electronically fused to the inner, was
one full inch of neotride, the’ synthetic that was the hardest substance known to man-five
numbers Rockwell harder than the diamond.
The starship carrying the elsie also brought two formally-typed notices-things almost
unknown in a day of subspace communicators and tapes. The one addressed to “Cecily
Byrd, Ph.D., Sc.D., F.I.A.” (Fellow of the Institute of Automation) read in part: “You are
hereby instructed, under penalty of discharge and blacklist, to stay aloft until complete
safety of operation has been demonstrated,” and the gist of Deston’s was: “I cannot give
you orders, but if you have half the brain I think you have, you know enough to stay aloft
until safety of operation has been demonstrated.”
Cecily’s nostrils flared; then her whole body slumped. “He’d do it, too, the damned old
tiger . . . and this is the biggest job I ever dreamed about . . . and I suppose you’ll go
down anyway.”
“Uh-uh. He makes sense. Actually, neither of us should take the chance. Anyway, the
stuff is right out in the open, where they can sit right down on it and grapple it . . . and
besides, my mother told me it isn’t sporting to kick a lady in the face when she’s down. It
isn’t done, she said.”
“She did? How nice of her! Thanks, Babe, a lot,” and she held out her hand.
Thus it was that Assistant Director Leyton and Captain Jones led the down-crew. They
both, and two other big, strong men as well, carried .475’s; but this time the magnums
were not needed. The neotride held up long enough. In spite of everything the rabidly
hostile “animals” could do, the elsie grappled five-hundred-ton chunks of the stuff and
lugged them up into orbit.
In the meantime the metallurgists, by subjecting the teeth and claws of the dead
kittyhawks to intensive study, had solved their biggest basic problem. Or rather, they
found out that Nature had solved it for them.
“The composition at maxprop-to get the best mat of longest single crystals, you know-is
extremely complex and almost unbelievably critical,” Leyton told Deston, happily. “It
would have taken us years, and even then we wouldn’t have hit it exactly on the nose
except by pure luck.”
Well, how do you expect to do in a couple of years what it took Old Mother Nature