The Vestoian pygmies were all running now. Not into their houses, nor the palace, but away down the tree-sheltered streets, a mindless stampede, weapons tossed away with an agonized crying of tiny voices.
Paul's eyes found it, held it, saw the white flame change to a vast outpouring of brilliant green like the burning of copper. "Charlesite!" Spearman cried. "They've found how to use charlesite for braking! No radioactivity."
The ship must be aiming for the open ground twenty miles away. They could hear the roaring now, almost gentle with distance.
Arek's red arm became a warmth over Paul's shoulders. She said, "I'm afraid."
3
The gap in the leaves was blank, the green flame gone. Edmund Spearman gazed at the spot where the descending ship had been, unaware of his sons, unaware that his pygmy followers had been scattered by fear as swallows are scattered by a storm; unaware, Paul guessed, of the two men who had been friends and now were strangers—but these he presently saw again. His gray eyes measured Paul and Wright, the unspeaking giants, the small shaken figures of Pakriaa and Nisana and Miniaan, as if they were rocks or tree stumps and his only problem how to step around them. Addressing Wright and Arek, whose big arm was still warm around his shoulders, Paul said carefully, "It will come down on the meadow ground about twenty miles from here. They must have seen Vestoia from the air; they probably made sure there was no settlement in the open land."
Wright whispered, "It may not even have been from Earth."
"Oh!" Mijok's black lips smiled. "It is, Doc. I forget our eyes are better at distance. You didn't see the letters? Black on silver, reaching halfway up the body of the ship. J-E-N-S-E-N."