The Beast of Space | Page 5

to his shoulder, slipped out his heat-rod. Quickly the tentacle
was severed. But now others took their place; he continued firing at
them, making each bolt tell, but the numbers were too great.
Digger sprang into action, rending the globes with those claws that
were capable of tearing the hulls of spaceships. But tentacles lashed
around him from the rear, snaked about him so that he was helpless.
The girl was slipping off Nat's shoulder. He could not raise the stump
of an arm to balance her; it was stiff and useless. He stopped firing long
enough to make the shift, even as the spheres attacked again. The bolts
had put out the lights in fully half of the marauders but the others came
on unafraid.

Nat straddled Digger's writhing body, held the spacehound motionless
between his legs. At short range, he seared off the imprisoning tentacles,
knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to damage the
well-nigh impregnable creature. He swooped the dog up under his good
arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking nameless
deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats. The spheres
rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jump; so long as he was
above them, all was well, but by the time the weak gravity permitted
him to land, they were waiting for him. He tried zig-zagging. Good! It
worked. He eluded them up to the mouth of the cave, then jumped for
the door of his ship's outer airlock.
* * * * *
Nat placed the girl in his bunk, removed the cumbersome spacesuit.
Her eyes blinked faintly, then sprang open. But they did not see him;
they were staring straight ahead. Her mouth opened and shut weakly as
though she were speaking, but no sound issued from it. He brought her
water, but when he returned she had fallen asleep. He returned to the
kitchen to prepare some food.
"You're still running around in that pillow case," he remarked to Digger
as he extracted the spacehound from it. "Attend me, now. We know
why and how those people disappeared. It would take the Space Patrol
ship at least a month to arrive here; I don't intend to perch on the back
of this devil as long as that. And if we leave, old thing, it'll just lure
other chivalrous fools to very unpleasant ends.
"And we've got to get this kid back to civilization. She needs a doctor's
care, preferably a doctor with two arms."
Digger's vibrations were one of general approval.
"We could poison it," he went on. "Only I'm not a chemist; even if I
knew the compounds contained in that reeking stomach I wouldn't
know what would destroy them. Might blow it up, but we haven't
enough explosive.

"No, we'll have to get down into the thing's insides again. In fact--" He
paused suddenly, mouth open. "Congratulate me, Digger! I have it!"
The smell of burning vegetables cut short his soliloquy. He fed the
starved, half-blind girl, then left her sleeping exhaustedly as he
squirmed into his suit.
No sooner had he entered the mouth of the cave than a half-dozen of
the singing sensory organs rolled quickly, yet not angrily, toward him.
The beast was apparently optimistic, for the globes sang in their most
soothing, seductive tones. They tried to herd him into the first cave on
the right, but he had remembered the squeaker; they could not distract
him.
Effortlessly he leaped over them toward the mouth of the cave on the
left. That was where the spaceships lay, pointing in all directions like a
carelessly-dropped handful of rice.
All the ships were in running order. Good; had there been one vessel he
could not move, then all was lost. The fuel in several ran low, but after
a few moments of punching levers and pulling chokes, the under
rockets thundered in the big room.
Taking care not to injure the motor compartments of the other ships,
using only the most minute explosion-quantities, he jockeyed each ship
around until all their noses pointed in one direction. The exhausts
pointed out through the wide doorway. It was well that the beast had
formed curved corners in the room, otherwise the scheme would not
have worked. The exhausts which did not point toward the door,
directly, were toward the curved walls which would deflect the forceful
gasses expelled doorward.
When he emerged from the ship, the spheres attacked. He seared off
their tentacles throughout what seemed to be eternities. His body was
becoming a mass of bruises from the lash of their tentacles. He burned
his way through the swarm on to ship after ship.
As he stepped from the last vessel there was a rumbling beneath his feet.

Did the monster understand his intent?