They began to run, away from the wrecked ship and toward the row of houses, bunched together and looking warily over their shoulders. One of the globes in particular seemed to have decided to follow them—probably it had been ordered to after the ship crashed. Now Wyatt could see a circle of round shuttered ports around its top, and one of them had opened. A large sort of gun or projector was rising from the hole on a flexible mount, bobbing about in an inquisitive fashion like the head of a bird on a long neck. Suddenly it made a point directly at them and a brilliant white beam shot toward them. They leaped for cover between the houses, but the beam was short. Where it hit the ground it erupted into a shower of green sparks.
"Heavy-duty stunner," Makvern said. "When one of those hits you you stay down till the battle's over."
They ran again, ducking and dodging between the queer round-roofed houses.
"Don't they kill?" Wyatt asked.
"Not often. The very old, little children, invalids. It's humane, as weapons go."
Another white beam sizzled down close behind Whitfield, bursting green where it hit. The red globe towered over them against the sky, grotesquely like a huge round-bodied quadruped with a ludicrously small head on that bobbing little neck.
"I don't reckon," said Burdick, "that we're going to outrun that for long."
Thurne turned a slitted panther look on the globe and said, "I can lead you by safer ways, if you can run very swiftly ahead of it for a little time."
"We can run," said Makvern.