A choking, helpless horror went through Venard as he saw the bivalve snap open, and then, a snaking proboscis with the filamented mouth whip out and close on Larson's twisting body to jerk him down with lightning swiftness into that pulsating abyss of hungry flesh.
It had happened awfully fast to the toughest little guy in the System.
Too fast for Venard even to try against invincible odds to avert his death. Eaten alive by a clam. He tried to think of things that would compensate as the mollusc spun another cable. He concentrated his eyes and thought on the taut flesh cable the bivalve had spun, the one remaining link with S.S.C. and the fulfillment of Jhongan's unknown plan. First Jhongan, then the Kewpie Doll.... He had to keep on to make their sacrifice seem worth while. Theirs and billions of others throughout the System.
The mollusc had reached the end of the cable. Its unpredictable nerve centers had decided, however, to settle down right there. Its migration was over, maybe for years. And Venard was still about fifty feet from the other side of the moat.
Acting on impulse, Venard hooked his arms over the cable and leaped toward the bank. He slid wildly, with little friction, along the new slickness of the cable strands, plopped into the mud. He crawled frantically up onto the thick vegetation just as a univalvular mouth missed him by inches, tried again. He burned it and the charred snout curled away.
He was across, lying against the mossy slimy uprising shell of S.S.C. But so what? He had two hands. Larson, their entry ticket, was gone. He steeled himself, didn't let himself think about it anymore. He brought the H-gun on down in a quick savage gesture across his left wrist....
He didn't lose consciousness. It was just a quick, jabbing, burning agony. He looked at the charred stub—and then quickly swallowed five para-pills. They calmed him, enabled him to climb to his feet and follow the elevated ramp until he came to the ingress to the scanning chamber.
He stood inside, before the wall, his legality being checked. The chromoplex room was barren except for the telescreen and the opening of the tubecar that would plunge him through the magnetized vacuum tube into the heart of S.S.C.—and to what?
Tendrils of a vague fear oozed insidiously into his mind. He couldn't shake free from a superstitious sensing of evil hidden danger. He heard the faint murmuring of concealed photo-electric mechanisms and relays. He was being thoroughly scanned.