Invaders Of Space by Murray Leinster

Invaders Of Space by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster [Leinster, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-18T07:26:18.084000+00:00


Chapter SIX

PRESENTLY he saw a moon, and in glimpses of it between tree branches he saw it move swiftly across the sky. It was particoloured, one section vastly brighter than the rest. It would rise as a crescent in the west and wax as it moved, until it set as a full moon at the east, into the shadow of Carola. Speckles of surprising brightness appeared where the moonlight trickled through leaves. There were other speckles, at first brighter, from the glaring lights outside the Theban. where a blaster still rasped occasionally. But those light patches faded as Horn thrust his way on. It was necessary for him to get far enough from the ship to have a good start if Larsen led crewmen in pursuit of him.

He heard rustlings, and froze. Something moved slowly in the jungle. It was huge and it smelled of slime, but the rustlings of its passage were relatively trivial. When it was gone, towards the white light fog of the ship's floodlights, Horn pressed on to find the trail the unseen large beast had followed.

He found it, a small game trail. He'd had to force his way between treetrunks and underbrush till now, but this trail was clear to head height. Even fumbling along it, he could move at a reasonable pace.

Presently he was just barely able to see the glare of the Theban's floodlights behind him. He pushed on. A long time later he saw the moon again. It was the same one he'd seen before, passing through all its phases as it raced across the sky.

Presently he smelled swamp, and realized that the game trail he had followed had seemed to trend slightly downwards. Nobody should attempt a swamp in darkness! Horn climbed a tree; not far up, but high enough so animals using the same trail would not find him disputing the way. He braced himself to try to sleep, but inevitably his mind suggested that in this world there must be climbing carnivores, and that some things that in the darkness seemed treetrunks or branches might be something else--something deadly.

He thought of Ginny, and was comforted by the fact that she and the other castaways had realized there was a connection between the disabling of the Danae and the destruction of the stores they should have found on Carola. They'd fled when the Theban descended. There was a good possibility that, when they hid the treasure from the lifeboats, they'd hidden some foodstuffs too.

He dozed awhile, and awoke suddenly. There was a greyness overhead, and small, tentative, unfamiliar noises in the jungle. In a sense his situation was horrifying, though being afoot without food or water, and practically unarmed, in the jungle of an uninhabited planet was his own doing. The castaways he must join, too, would be deeply suspicious of anybody who'd arrived on the Theban. Any of them but Ginny, in fact, should try to kill him on sight because the nature of the Theban's errand was shown by Larsen's behaviour with the lifeboats.



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