Dard went on until he was in the stone-and-pebble strewn border of the river. It was not a large stream, four strides might take him across it. There was a ripple of current but the water was opaque, dull rusty red, and it left a reddish rim about every stone it lipped in passage. He went down on one knee and was about to dip in a cautious exploratory finger when a voice called a warning:
“Don’t try that, kid. Might not be healthy.” Rogan came down the stony bank to join him. “Better be safe than sorry. Learned that myself on Venus—the hard way. See a piece of drift wood anywhere about?”
Dard searched among the rocks and found what appeared to be a very ordinary stick. But Rogan inspected it carefully before he picked it up. The stick was lowered into the flood and as cautiously withdrawn, an inch or so of it now dyed red. Together they held it close for examination.
“It’s alive!” If he had been holding that test branch, Dard thought later, he might have dropped it at the realization of what the red stain was. But Rogan kept a tight grip.
“Lively little beggars, aren’t they?” he asked. “Look like spiders. Do they float—or swim? And why so thick in the water. Now let’s just see.” He knelt and using the stick along the surface of the water skimmed off a good portion of what Dard secretly considered the extremely repulsive travelers. With the layer of “spiders” removed the water changed color becoming a clearer brownish fluid.
“So they can be scraped off,” Rogan observed cheerfully.
“With a strainer we may be able to get a drink—if this stuff is drinkable.”
Dard swallowed hastily as Rogan tapped off on a convenient boulder the greater number of creatures he had fished out of the stream; and then together they followed the water to the sea. Several times they detoured, quite widely on Dard’s part, to escape contact with patches of red marooned on shore. Not that the “spiders” appeared uncomfortable on the firmer element for they made no attempt to move away from the spots where some sudden eddy had deposited them.
A stiff breeze came in over the waves. It was heavy with the tang Rogan now identified for Dard.
“Natural sea—that’s salt air!” What he might have added was drowned out by a hideous screech.
Close on its dying echo came a very human shout. Kimber and Kordov were running along the beech just beyond the water’s edge. And above their beads twisted and darted a nightmare, a small nightmare to be sure, but still one horrible enough to have winged out of an evil dream.
If a Terran snake had been equipped with bat wings, two clawed legs, a barbed tail, and a wide fanged mouth, it might have approached in general this horror. The whole thing could not have been more than eighteen or twenty inches long, but its snapping fury was several times larger than its body and it was making power dives at the running men.
Rogan dropped his spider stick as Dard’s hand flew inside his blouse to claim the only possession he had brought from Terra. He threw the hunting knife and by some incredible luck clipped a wing, not only breaking the dragon’s dive but sending it fluttering down, end over end, screeching. It flapped and beat with the good wing, squirming across the sand until Kimber and Kordov pinned it to the shingle with hastily flung stones.
Its eyes gleamed with red hate as they gathered in a circle around it, avoiding the snapping jaws and the flipping of the barbed tail which now dripped oily yellow drops.
“Bet that’s poison,” suggested Rogan. “Nice critter—hope they don’t grow any bigger.”
“What’s the matter?” Cully came tearing down the slope, one of the green ray guns in his band. “What’s making all that racket?”
Rogan moved aside to display the injured dragon. “Native telling us off.”
“Usually,” Kimber broke in, “I don’t believe in shooting first and investigating afterward. But this thing certainly hasn’t any better nature to appeal to—nearly stripped the ear off my head before I knew he was around. Can you shoot it, Jorge, without messing it up too much? Tas, here, probably will want to take it apart later to see what makes it tick.”
The biologist was squatting at a safe distance watching the convulsive struggles of the dragon with fascinated eyes.
“Yes, please do not destroy it utterly. A snake—a flying snake! But that is not possible!”
“Maybe not on Terra,” Kimber reminded him. “What can we say is possible or impossible here? Jorge, put it out of its misery!”
The green ray clipped the top of the creature’s head and it went limp on the sand. Tas approached it gingerly, keeping as far as he could from the tail barb still exuding the yellow venom. Rogan went back down the beach to retrieve his spider collection, and Dard picked up and wiped his knife clean.
“Flying snakes and swimming spiders,” the communications techneer held out his stick for their appraisal. “I’m going to be afraid to sit down out here—anything may pop up now,”
Tas was plainly torn between the now tractable dragon and the water dwellers Rogan had brought him. “All this”—his pudgy hands indicated the world of cliffs, sand and sea—“new, unclassified.”
Gully holstered his gun. He was frowning at the ceaseless waves.
“What do you make of those, Sim?” he demanded of the pilot, pointing to a low bank of clouds slowly expanding up the rim of the sky.
“On earth, I’d say a storm.”
“Might be a bad one, too,” Rogan commented. “And we have no shelter but the ship. At least this is summer—we’re warm enough.”
“You think so?” asked Dard with some reason. The sea wind was rising, to become a wet lash with an icy bite in its flail. The temperature was dropping fast.
Kimber studied the clouds. “I’d say we better get back.”
But when he turned inland his gasp brought them all around.
They had left the star ship on an even keel. Now it listed so that its nose pointed down the valley away from the sea.
A good half hour later Kimber got to his feet, relief mirrored on his face. One of the fins had broken through the fused coating the jet heat had put on the beach. But beneath the splintered glass crust it had found rock support—it would slip no farther. The scarred sides towering above them were no longer mirror bright as they had been in the Cleft, she had too many years, too long a voyage behind her. But she was not going to fail them.
“Rock all right,” Kimber repeated the statement he had made so joyfully a few minutes before. “The ledge slants a little, which is why she canted that way. But she’ll stand. And,” he did not need to draw their attention to the darkness closing in, “maybe it’s some more luck at work again. With her nose pointing away from this breeze, she’s less likely to come a cropper, even if it turns out to be a full—sized blow.”
Dard held on to the rail of the ramp. The wind screamed around them, stirring up devils born of the powdery sand, which filled unwary eyes and any mouth that bad the misfortune to be open. The dust had already driven Kordov inside, his precious dragon in a pair of forceps. He was more interested in that and Rogan’s spiders than he now was in the ship.
“Full-sized blow?” drawled Rogan. “This has the makings of a hurricane if I’m any judge. And unless you fellas want to be buried alive in these marching sand dunes, you’d better run for cover. As long as you’re sure we’re not going to land bottom side up, I think it’s time to adjourn.”
Dard followed him up the ramp just in time to escape a miniature sandstorm through which the other two had to fight their way. There was a brushing-off party in the air lock, but, as they climbed back to the crew’s quarters Dard could still taste grit in his mouth and hear it crunch under his feet.
Kordov was not to be found in the control cabin or bunk room when Kimber and the other two sat on the bunks and Dard dropped down cross-legged on the floor. The ship was vibrating under him. Could the wind have risen to that pitch already? It was Rogan who answered that.
“Like to see what’s happening out there?” He got up and went into the control cabin.
Kimber and Dard got up to follow, but cully shook his head.
“What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you much,” he remarked. “And I don’t see anything exciting about a sandstorm.”
It was true that when Rogan adjusted the visa-screen there was little for them to see. The storm had brought night and obscurity. With an exclamation of annoyance, the techneer clicked off the viewer and they drifted back to find Cully asleep and Kordov climbing up to join them.