I bent down and hit the neck of the champagne bottle against the clay and it just dented the clay and wouldn’t break. I looked around for a rock to hit it on. There wasn’t any rock.
I took out a corkscrew from my pocket and opened the bottle instead. We all had a drink except Johnny, who took only a token sip because he doesn’t drink or smoke. Me, I had a good long one. Then I poured a brief libation on the ground and recorked the bottle; I had a hunch that I might need it more than the planet did. There was lots of whiskey in the ship and some Martian green-brew but no more champagne. I said, “Well, here we go.”
I caught Johnny’s eye and he said, “Do you think it wise, in view of the fact that there are—uh—inhabitants?”
“Inhabitants? ”
I said. “Johnny, whatever that thing that stuck its head over the hill was, it wasn’t an inhabitant. And if it pops up again, I’ll conk it over the head with this bottle.”
But just the same, before we started out, I went inside the Chitterling and got a couple more heatojectors. I stuck one in my belt and gave Ellen the other; she’s a better shot than I am. Ma couldn’t hit the side of an administration building with a spraygun, so I didn’t give her one.
We started off, and sort of by mutual consent, we went the other direction from where we’d seen the whatever-it-was. The hills all looked alike for a while and as soon as we were over the first one, we were out of sight of the Chitterling. But I noticed Johnny studying a wrist-compass every couple of minutes, and I knew he’d know the way home.
Nothing happened for three hills and then Ma said, “Look,” and we looked.
About twenty yards to our left there was a purple bush. There was a buzzing sound coming from it. We went a little closer and saw that the buzzing came from a lot of things that were flying around the bush. They looked like birds until you looked a second time and then you saw that their wings weren’t moving. But they zoomed up and down and around just the same. I tried to look at their heads, but where the heads ought to be there was only a blur. A circular blur.
“They got propellers,” Ma said. “Like old-fashioned airplanes used to have.”