The Eye seemed loose in its socket. Larsen turned down the torch. Cautiously, he grasped the cement. The Eye came away in his hand. He was used, by now, to the low gravity of Triton, but the lightness of the stone surprised him. It seemed as light as pumice.
Larsen looked up just in time. The Tritonians were stirring! The wind, so cold to him, was warm to them; it meant air to them. Those great pale eyes—one to each Tritonian—were fixed on him, glaring with a phosphorescent luster. There was no expression on their gargoyle faces. Their cavernous mouths gaped open; toothless, but rimmed with razor-sharp horn, like the jaws of a snapping turtle. The snow dropped from them; their lobster-segmented shells were dull black, like the bort of the statue. They were closing in on him. He could not tell their numbers; behind those visible, more kept crowding out of the shadows.
As the Tritonians neared him, he saw that they turned their heads away. Those enormous eyes, adapted to the faint sunlight of Triton, could not bear the glare of the torch. An ax rose over a helmeted head, grasped by four tentacular arms. Larsen put down the Eye, and turned up the torch, aiming it at the dragon's head, looming behind those arms. It shriveled, turned from black to red. Its owner slumped to the floor, its limbs still writhing feebly.
Larsen picked up the Eye again, and started for the door. He moved deliberately, spraying death around him. The Tritonians could not face the blazing heat of the torch, or its blinding glare. Some fled in panic, some retired more slowly, some stood, as if bewildered, in his very path, until he burned them out of it. At the door, he wheeled to face them, turning down the torch. They started to close in again, and he turned it up, sweeping them at close range. Half a dozen fell, the others broke.
The torch was flickering now, as its fuel ran low. In frantic haste, Larsen unsnapped its carrying strap, dropped it, and plunged into the hole he had blasted. In utter blackness, he clawed through it, expecting, every instant, to feel monstrous jaws or talons seize him from behind. He emerged into the blinding white smother of the dawn blizzard. Thin as the air was, the force of it hurled his light body back against the door as he tried to rise. He dropped on all fours, and crawled forward, dead into the freezing wind, the Eye still clutched in one hand. The twenty yards to the Wolf Cub seemed twenty miles; he had about given up all hope when suddenly he bumped into it.
Larsen groped along its smooth side until he found the air-lock door. As he opened it, the light inside went on automatically.