His body made a sucking sound as he drew himself from the self-dug grave. He reached back in and tapped Waltk. The big Jovian virtually erupted from the ground, the weight nothing to his mighty thews.
Carefully they replaced the spongy earth. Then, with Jarl Gare in the lead, the pair walked upright, but quietly, to the great power-charged fence.
It went up twenty feet and down the same distance underground—Jarl Gare had learned this depth from a prisoner who had tried to dig his way out but failed and nearly drowned as liquid seeped into the hole he was digging.
The big Jovian, his thick-thewed body glimmering with sweat in the ground light, bent to pick up Jarl Gare's slight naked body.
"Wait," Jarl Gare warned. "We must wait until one of the river beasts start plunging."
The Jovian grunted. He waited, flexing the great shoulder and back muscles. Then he said suddenly, "I smell guards."
Jarl Gare's thin face jerked up at the seven foot figure of his companion. "Where?" he asked tensely.
The Jovian with a quick movement shoved Jarl Gare to the ground, dropped flat swiftly himself and wriggled away through the short grass.
Jarl Gare waited quietly. The big Jovian whose eyes, trained on his homeworld of darkness, penetrated the steamy fog of Venus almost as well as an infra-red lamp, would take care of the guards his nostrils had scented.
That was the way Jarl Gare had planned it. Waltk's strength, nearly a dozen times greater than that of an Earthling, his hearing developed to a tremendous acuity by the environment of his homeworld, and his eyesight were the tools of Jarl's brain.