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"Not just because I am curious, though I am that also, but because we, too, must have a beginning and an end. Did we come up from the seas, rise to know and feel and think, just to return to such beginning at our end? If your winged people were climbing and your ape-things descending" she shook her head "it would be frightening to hold a cord of life, both ends in your hands.
Or a war in which they used forces beyond our comprehension to alter the whole face of this planet, which did happen the alteration, I mean. Several things could have removed intelligent life. Then such species as the burrowers could have developed or evolved from smaller, more primitive types." "Those ape-things we found on the desert planet."
He remembered the battle he had fought there, he and Ross Murdock and the winged native, standing up to an attack of the ape-things while the winged warrior had used his physical advantage to fly above and bomb the enemies with boxes snatched from the piles.... "And here they went to sleep in order to wait out some danger time or disaster they did not believe would be permanent," Buck mused.
Ross thought back to their first voyage on the homing derelict. "Maybe they had once been men and were degenerating. And the winged people, they could have been less than men on their way up " "Ape-things ... winged people?" Karara interrupted. "Tell me!"
Were they the degenerate dregs of a once intelligent species? Or were they animals, akin to man, but still animals? The ape-things had controlled the night of the desert world. And they had been met again also in the dark in the ruins of the city which had been the final goal of the ship's taped voyage. So they were a part of the vanished civilization.
We were not long in learning. As on the occasion of our trip to the village we were seized by a couple of the powerful creatures and whirled away through the tree tops, while about us and in our wake raced a chattering, jabbering, grinning horde of sleek, black ape-things.
There they had made a pact with a winged people living in the huge buildings of a jungle-choked city. "But you see" the Polynesian girl turned to Ashe when Ross had finished "you did find them these ape-things and the winged people. But here there are only the dragons and the burrowers. Are they the start or the finish? I want to know " "Why?" Ashe asked.
Behind them, streaming through the pass which leads into the valley, came a swarm of hairy men gorilla-like creatures armed with spears and hatchets, and bearing long, oval shields. Like demons they set upon the ape-things, and before them the hyaenodon, which had now regained its senses and its feet, fled howling with fright.
There is an evil there beyond our understanding. I think that this Tatar girl, were she only to stay there a very short time, would be well frightened so frightened that any trained scientist examining her later would know there was a mystery to be explored." "The ape-things could they have tried to run the Redax?" Travis wondered. To associate machines with the creatures was outwardly pure folly.
All at once a pattering rain of darts flickered around them. Stern felt one strike his fur jacket and bounce off. Another grazed the girl's head. But to their work they stood, and flinched not. Now her revolver was speaking, in antiphony with his; and from the branches, two, three, five, eight, ten of the ape-things fell.
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