CHAPTER VIII
Morning on Womar.
The hot winds were flames whipping at Jarl's face, and the driven sand slashed and burned like pelting needles. Slowly, the night died and, off to his right, the sun rose—fiery, incandescent. Venus, to his left, stretched in a great, shining arc as far as the eye could see. Dust swirled about him in smothering clouds. He wallowed through a sea of powdery, ankle-deep grit where rocks shoved up in hidden reefs to trap him. Hollows loomed in his bloodshot eyes like chasms, and hillocks grew to mountains up which he toiled on hands and knees, choking and gasping. His cheeks were rasped raw now, his lips all parched and cracking.
Still he lurched onward—lost and disoriented, without destination.
But not without goal.
A goal—? He laughed aloud—the muddled, drunken laughter of a heat-twisted brain. Yes, he had a goal; but it was the goal of utter madness.
For somewhere in this blazing waste, Womar's primitives lay waiting. He knew; he'd seen them charge before. How they sensed an alien's coming was a secret no stranger had ever fathomed. But sense it they did; so they'd hide and wait, till at last the sun and dust and slashing wind had done their work and the invader fell and could not rise.
Then, and then only, they would come, from whatever dark, hidden maze they came from. Their blood-thirsting screams would rise above the howling wind, and their hideous metal masks would flash like mirrors of madness in the white flame of the sunlight.
And after that ... Jarl choked on his parched, swelling tongue. After that, there would come other things ... things no alien being had survived, rites so awful as to make this blazing wilderness seem a cool Elysium.
What was left, they'd spread out in neat display as their own black warning to other straying strangers.