As he explained Ysanne said, "Earl! You're crazy! We-"
"Have no choice." He was curt, impatient. "Once it drives us from the ship we'll be helpless."
They'd be left to starve, unprotected from the elements, the prey of other, similar creatures eager to feast. Dumarest narrowed his eyes as he checked distances. The door spilling the fan of light was twenty yards from where he now stood. The creature was about thirty yards from the vessel-and its whiplike tendrils had left scars on the hull.
A race; unless Dumarest reached the door and passed through it before the creature could strike he would be dead.
"Ready?" He sucked air as Ysanne answered in the affirmative, hyperventilating his lungs. "Now!"
She fired, aiming at the head, the invisible eyes. A moment of distraction which Dumarest used as he threw himself toward the port. A step from it and he heard the whine of parting air. As he reached it something rasped against the metal above his head. As he dived into the opening a slashing blow hammered across his back, hurling him forward to roll in agony on the deck as fire surged in his kidneys. Pain he set to one side as he lunged at the row of newly filled tanks.
They were four feet tall, squatly round, fitted with a standard valve. Dumarest grabbed one, tasting blood as he heaved, feeling sweat bead his face and neck as he dragged it to the port. The opening swam before him as he lifted the weight, holding it poised in his hands. Before him, blotched by his shadow, the alien creature waited in watchful immobility.
"Now!" yelled Craig. He threshed at the vegetation. "Now!"
The noise attracted the beast, and the motion caused it to spin, tendrils lashing. As it moved, Dumarest lunged through tide port, arms swinging beneath the weight of the tank, muscles exploding in a burst of energy to send it hurling through the air. A brightly colored container which hit and rolled and came to rest close to the creature's bulk.
The thing froze. It became a nightmare shape of blurred configurations then, after an eternity, it moved with cautious slowness, inching toward the container, touching it, a claw rolling the cylinder.
Opening to grip it, to lift it closer to the masked head. The invisible eyes.
"Ysanne!" Dumarest threw himself toward the rifle. "Hit it!"
She fired before he had landed, the beam of her laser impinging on the tank, its heat causing the paint to fume and vanish. The pulse-beam allowed vapor to dissipate so as better to heat the metal. Softening the prison containing the trapped gases.
Dumarest lifted the rifle, aimed, fired at the glow of heated metal. The claw dipped, the creature backing as if it scented danger. The first bullet whined in a ricochet. The second slammed home with the dull echo of a direct impact. The third hit to point fuming beneath the beam of the laser.
The tank exploded as he fired again.
Metal yielded to become a hail of jagged shrapnel driven by the fury of expanding air. A bomblike explosion which filled the air with a lethal rain. Dumarest heard the whine and impact as missiles hit the hull above his head. Heard another as something lanced through the open port and into the ship itself. A twisted scrap which tore into another of the tanks, rupturing the metal, releasing the force held within.
A gush of energy slammed him with invisible hands, driving his face into the dirt, filling his head with stars.
When he'd blinked them away the clearing was empty.
And Craig was dead.
He lay sprawled on the dirt, his head at an impossible angle, blood edging the grinning rictus of his mouth. In the starlight his eyes were scraps of flawed and frosted glass.
"He was hit as he tried to run," said Ysanne. "His back broken, his neck. A hell of a way to end."
"He was lucky." Batrun was curt. "He died quick and easy."
"What?"
"He sabotaged the ship," said Dumarest. "He wanted us to land on Aschem." Where he would have collected his reward, a new face, a fortune-the Cyclan could be generous. "He destroyed the air-plant and bled the tanks. The alarms should have sounded but didn't. They had been fixed."
"An accident?"
"No. In any case he should have read the monitors."
The routine duty of any engineer. She said, "You knew. From the first you must have known yet you said nothing. Did nothing. Why?" She supplied her own answer. "The Chandorah! You needed him." She added, bitterly, "We still need him."
"We can manage."
"Have we a choice?"
"No." Dumarest moved toward the ship. "Let's check on the rest of the damage."
A row of tanks had exploded, one setting off the others in a chain reaction, filling the compartment with a rain of shrapnel which had ruined the pumps.
Batrun helped himself to snuff. "Bad," he said. "But it could have been worse. We can travel but not too far." The lid of his ornate snuffbox closed with a sharp snap. "The point is-to where?"
"Ysanne?" As she hesitated Dumarest said, "We've twice the air we had when entering the Chandorah and one less to breathe it. Find a world we can reach."
She found two; Weem and Krantz. Dumarest delved into a pocket, found a coin, named each side. Tossing it he watched it fall.
"Krantz," he said. "We go to Krantz."
Chapter Three
From her window Eunice could see the distant haze rising from the Purple Sea, the mountains to the west, the dull pattern of fields to the east. These things held little interest against the crescent-sweep of the town, which rested in the curve of jagged hills; the down-sloping mass threaded with a maze of narrow streets, the whole touched with shifting, vibrant color.
It was a good view and Eunice was proud to command it; many high in the hierarchy of Krantz had to be content with less. Proof of the importance of the Family to which she belonged-the Yeketania took care of their own. And Vruya was kind.
Thought of him turned her from the window to face the room. It was one she had made her own; high-roofed, circular, decorated with abstract symbols learned from ancient tomes. Seated on a long bench a row of bright-eyed dolls regarded her with unwinking attention. Facing the window a mirror held the subtle distortion of a limpid pool. A plume of scented smoke rose from a container of hammered brass. A clock measured the hours. A bowl held a fluid as black as liquid jet. An ornate box held bones marked in an elaborate pattern.
These things reflected her personality as did the drapes, the chair and table, the thick books adorned with scarlet ribbons.
One lay open on a desk, the pages held by a skull set with ruby eyes.
Ignoring it she turned to the dolls. Vruya held the place of honor, small, wizened in his ceremonial robe, the thin, peaked face holding the whimsical expression she knew so well-she had seen it often as a child.
Impulsively she picked up the doll and kissed it, breathing into the mouth, transferring some of her strength and vitality into the replica and so into the man it represented.
"Live, Vruya," she said, replacing the doll. "Live and grow strong."
Her movement disturbed the next in line; Mada with her sour face and bitter mouth. A bitch, but she had influence and so was capable of harm. She had little patience with those of the Family who had yet to prove their worth.
A situation soon to be changed; once married and a mother Eunice would be entitled to preference. Even Sybil who despised Urich would have to defer to her then; a dozen years of barren waste would provide no bastion for the woman once she had laid her child at Vruya's feet.
The phone rang as she straightened from the dolls. It was Helga with her usual spite.
"Eunice, my dear!" In the screen the woman's face creased and puffed beneath its paint, betrayed a sadistic pleasure. "I simply had to call and let you know about Myrna. Such fantastic news!"
"She's pregnant?"