Now Kickaha saw before them some very strange creatures. They were mobile plants-perhaps-resembling nothing he’d ever come across before. In essence, they looked like enormous logs with legs. The trunks were horizontal, pale-gray, with short stubby branches bearing six or seven diamond-shaped black-green leaves. From each end rose structures that looked like candelabra. But as he passed one he saw that eyes, enormous eyes, much like human eyes, were at the ends of the candelabra. These turned as the two moosoids galloped by.
More of these weird-looking things lay ahead of them. Each had a closed end and an open end.
Kickaha directed his hikwu away from them, and McKay followed suit. Kickaha shouted to Anana, who was seated behind him, “I don’t like the looks of those things!”
“Neither do I!”
One of the logoids, about fifty yards to one side, suddenly began tilting up its open end, which was pointed at them. The other end rested on the ground while the forelegs began telescoping upward.
Kickaha got the uneasy impression that the thing resembled a cannon the muzzle of which was being elevated for firing.
A moment later, the dark hole in its raised end shot out black smoke. From the smoke something black and blurred described an arc and fell about twenty feet to their right.
It struck the rusty grass, and it exploded.
The moosoid screamed and increased its gallop as if it had summoned energy from somewhat within it.
Kickaha was half-deafened for a moment. But he wasn’t so stunned he didn’t recognize the odor of the smoke. Black gunpowder!
Anana said, “Kickaha, you’re bleeding!”
He didn’t feel anything, and now was no time to stop to find out where he’d been hit. He yelled more encouragement to his hikwu. But that yell was drowned the next moment when at least a dozen explosions circled him. The smoke blinded him for a moment, then he was out of it. Now he couldn’t hear at all. Anana’s hands were still around his waist, though, so he knew she was still with him.
He looked back over his shoulder. Here came McKay on his beast flying out of black clouds. And behind him came a projectile, a shell-shaped black object, drifting along lazily, or so it seemed. It fell behind McKay, struck, went up with a roar, a cloud of smoke in the center of which fire flashed. The black man’s hikwu went over, hooves over hooves. McKay flew off the saddle, struck the ground, and rolled. The big body of his hikwu flipflopped by, narrowly missing him.
But McKay was up and running.
Kickaha pulled his hikwu up, stopping it.
Through the drifting smoke he could see that a dozen of the plants had erected their front open ends and pointed them toward the humans. Out of the cannonlike muzzles of two shot more smoke, noise, and projectiles. These blew up behind McKay at a distance of forty feet. He threw himself on the ground-too late, of course to escape their effects-but he was up and running as soon as they had gone off.
Behind him were two small craters in the ground.
Miraculously, McKay’s moosoid had not broken its neck or any legs. It scrambled up, its lips drawn back to reveal all its big long teeth, its eyes seemingly twice as large. It sped by McKay whose mouth opened as he shouted curses that Kickaha couldn’t hear.
Anana had already grasped what had to be done. She had slipped off the saddle and was making motions to Kickaha, knowing he couldn’t hear her. He kicked the sides of the beast and yelled at it, though he supposed it was as deaf as he. It responded and went after McKay’s fleeing beast. The chase was a long one, however, and ended when McKay’s mount stopped running. Foam spread from its mouth and dappled its front, and its sides swelled and shrank like a bellows. It crumpled, rolled over on its side, and died.
Its rear parts were covered with blood.
Kickaha rode back to where Anana and McKay stood. They were wounded, too, mainly in the back. Blood welled from a score of little objects half-buried in the skin. Now he became aware that blood was coming from just behind and above his right elbow.