He turned back to the scarecrow, who was staring in white-lipped horror at what must have seemed to him an unbelievable occurrence—a man attacked by lamprenes when he had been talking about lamprenes only an instant before.
But Corriston knew that it was a common enough occurrence, not to be in any way coincidental. No one who slept in the desert for any length of time could hope to avoid an attack if he failed to take the necessary precautions. And even with precautions the death toll was high; almost as high, perhaps, as cobra fatalities in India.
Corriston turned abruptly, his lips white. "If a man is attacked by just one lamprene, and it's pulled off quickly, how much chance has he?"
It was Drever who answered him. "Not much, I'm afraid. The poison gets into the blood stream and acts quickly. You can't get it out with a suction disk the way you sometimes can with a snake bite. It's a nerve poison and it spreads very fast. And there's no way of neutralizing it, no serum injection that does any good. Of course, there have been a few recoveries."
Corriston swung about and stared out across the desert again. The two colonists had reached the stricken man now and were attempting to tear the lamprene—or lamprenes—from his flesh. They were bending over him, and it was hard to tell for a moment whether they were succeeding or not. Then, abruptly, one of them rose and made a despairing gesture, unmistakable even from a distance of five hundred feet.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare that has no clear beginning or end. They brought the man back and laid him down on the sand. The man was Stone.
It was Drever who got the lamprene off. He did it with an electric torch, taking care to manipulate the jet of fire in such a way that it scorched only the head of the creature and not Stone's exposed flesh.
Corriston bent then, and gripped Stone firmly by the shoulders and shook him until a look of desperate pleading came into his eyes. He forced himself not to feel pity, seeing in Stone's closeness to death a threat that could have but one outcome if the man refused to speak at all.
"Where's Helen Ramsey?" he demanded. "Where is she, Stone? We're not likely to do anything more for you if you don't tell us."
"I—I don't know," Stone muttered. "Saddler ... double-crossed Henley. I guess ... he wanted her for himself. I don't know where he's taken her. I'm telling you the truth. You've got to believe me."