Well that they had quitted the wheel when they did. The solid secondary flood of the denar tide swept over the vehicle, churned, eddied, and pounded onward again unchecked over the flattened scraps of metal and resilient durnb.
And now the other wheels suffered a like fate. They too pulped and disappeared. Besan Wur's square face brightened. He shouted something against the all-pervading din of the stampeding lizard horde.
"Relsa Dav!" he shouted into Nard Rost's elongated ear cup.
He had glimpsed the trembling slim form of the girl clinging to a massive horizontal branch a scant three feet above the tossing green crests of the lizards. Now he hurried along a higher branch interlacing with those of the other three where the girl had found refuge.
A moment later he had pulled her to the safety of a higher limb and the girl was sobbing against his tunic's soft brown cloth, her arms about his neck.
He caught a suggestion of moisture in the violet eyes of the older man as he joined them. Nard Rost's mate, Ilva, had perished up ahead there. And with her had died the twenty-four other students and their three instructors bound for a four month's course of practical study in the tin and copper mines of the Durlu Hills.
Only they three had escaped because of the temporary check of the hill and now the sheltering trees. How long the battered lower boles, massive though they were, would remain upright, was doubtful. And the unending flow of squealing whistling denars might continue unchecked for more than two or three days!
As Besan held the soft warmth of the terrified girl in his arms a great gladness fought with the despair in his heart. Relsa Dav, whose least glance in the classrooms of Rhilg University made him more aware of his hopeless love, was alive.... And he was an Earthman, a renegade son of an alien race who could never hope to mate with a Garro!
The System that ruled Terra, and a score of other lesser and greater worlds, was responsible for their exile. The System's rigid code of controls over all the activities of its citizens—even to what they ate, and wore, and what they thought—inevitably produced a diminishing handful of rebels with every generation.