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The Throg leader clicked into his translator: "You call ship!" Shann was thrust down into the operator's chair, his bound arms still twisted behind him so that he had to lean forward to keep on the seat at all. Then the Throg who had pushed him there, roughly forced a set of com earphones and speech mike onto his head. "Call ship!" clicked the alien officer. So time must be running out.
"And never have you talked mind to mind?" "Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no communication between us, neither of mind nor of voice." "This one you name Throg is truly not as you," she assented. "And we are not as you, being alien and female. Yet, star man, you and I have shared a dream."
As I stood for a moment looking at the gruesome havoc Woola had wrought, there recurred to me the memory of that other occasion upon which I had masqueraded in the wig, diadem, and harness of Sator Throg, the Holy Thern whom Thuvia of Ptarth had slain, and now it occurred to me that it might prove of worth to utilize Lakor's trappings for the same purpose.
The Terrans worked in partial shade below a cliff overhang, not only for the protection against the sun's rays, but also as a precaution against any roving Throg air patrol. Under Thorvald's direction the curious shell dragged from the sea if it were a shell, and the texture as well as the general shape suggested that was equipped with a framework to act as a stabilizing outrigger.
If the claks were announcing a Throg scouting party, he wanted to know it. Lying flat, with branches forming a screen over him, the Terran gazed out on a stretch of grassland which sloped at a fairly steep angle to the south and which must lead to a portion of countryside well below the level he was now traversing. The clak-claks were skimming back and forth, shrieking their staccato war cries.
He wished he had the Terran animals now with Taggi and his mate to tease and feint about the monster, as they had done with the Throg hound for he would have a better chance. If only the animals were here! Those eyes red-pitted eyes in a gargoyle head following his every movement perhaps those were the only vulnerable points. Muscles tensed beneath that scaled hide.
They dropped their hold on him, returning at a trot. The officer clicked an order. Blasters were unholstered, and the Throg in the field shriveled under a vicious concentration of cross bolts. Shann gasped. He certainly had no liking for Throgs, but this execution carried overtones of a cold-blooded ferocity which transcended anything he had known, even in the callous brutality of the Dumps.
"We don't take that away from here." Thorvald made the weapon his with a quick twist. To Shann's utter astonishment, the Survey officer walked back to kneel beside the dead Throg. He worked the grip of the blaster under the alien's lax claws and inspected the result with the care of one arranging a special and highly important display. Shann's protest became vocal. "We'll need that!"
Perhaps it was only his impaired sight, but it appeared to him that the Throg followed an erratic path, either as if the pilot feared to be caught by a second shot, or because that ship had also suffered some injury. Acid smoke wreathed up from the valley making Shann retch and cough.
Walled in by stone and knowing that no Throg flyer would attempt to fly in the face of the coming storm, they dared make a fire. The warmth was a comfort to their bodies, just as the light of the flames, men's age-old hearth companion, was a comfort to the fugitives' spirits.
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