Enormous they were—and unutterably terrifying with their great, many-faceted eyes fastened in brooding malignance upon us.
Joan and I arose simultaneously, drawn to our feet by a horror such as we had never known. A sense of sickening unreality gripped me, so that I could neither move nor cry out.
Dawson alone remained articulate. He raised his arm and pointed, his voice a shrill bleat.
"Look out, sir! Look out! There's another one coming through the wall directly behind you."
The warning came too late. As I swung toward the quartz port I saw Joan's arm go out, her body quiver. Towering above her was a third gigantic shape, the tip of its abdomen resting on her shoulders, its spindly legs spread out over the pilot dais.
As I stared at it aghast it shifted its bulk, and a darkly gleaming object that looked like a shrunken bean-pod emerged from between Joan's shoulder blades.
Joan moaned and sagged on the dais, her hands going to her throat. Instantly the wasp swooped over me, its abdomen descending. For an awful instant I could see only a blurred shapelessness hovering over me.
Then a white-hot shaft of pain lanced through me and the blur receded. But I was unable to get up. I was unable to move or think clearly. My limbs seemed weighted. I couldn't get up or help Joan or even roll over.
My head was bursting and my spine was a board. I must have tried to summon help, for I seem to remember Dawson sobbing: "I'm paralyzed too, sir," just before my senses left me and I slumped unconscious on the dais.