"Maybe the experts from Terra can figure it out from our color pictures," Mrs. Carver said. "I'm taking a lot of extra ones, with the variable focus lens."
"That new metal's down there, though, whatever it is. Since those other people mined it, our miners'll figure out how to get it, too, I'll bet."
"I wonder." Jak was suddenly diffident. "Don't laugh now, but do you suppose maybe those flames could be some sort of life, and that they're feeding on the metal, which you said was highly radioactive?"
"Now who's nutty?" Jon asked witheringly, while Mrs. Carver gasped at the daring concept.
"Well, some of those flames are coming higher and aiming for us." Jak tried to defend his position. "We'd have said such crystal-creatures as we found on Four were impossible, but we know they aren't and that they have some sort of—well, intelligence, from the way they tried to get our ship. So why not flame-beings?"
"Do you think they're dangerous?" Their mother's voice held a frightened note as she saw in her plate those swiftly approaching flames.
"Don't see how they could possibly hurt the ship, or us." Jon tried to speak calmly ... but he tilted the nose and the space-yacht was soon nearly ten miles high, although it still continued circling.
"Man, oh man, they're certainly beautiful!" Jak was enthralled as those bright, shining tongues of flame grew taller and taller. "There ... there does seem to be a ... a purpose in the way they act, though." His tone changed to a more anxious one.
The flames were now high above the storm of fire that constituted the main ... body? Now these tongues broke loose, and as they continued rising toward the ship they became more spherical in shape—were no longer simply extensions of the planet-based fires. And as they rose ever higher and faster, they seemed to the anxious watchers to be really thinking, intelligent entities.
"Let's move away from here," their mother pleaded. "I'm getting the feeling that they are actually pursuing us—and for no good purpose, either."