Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

Two warriors were descending the stairway now and a third was just emerging. The structure grazed the ground, but did not rest solidly upon it. It was necessary to keep the ship in motion, and a grounded stairway could cause unimaginable havoc.

Below there was havoc of a different sort. Two of the men were standing their ground and one had picked up a rifle. But the fourth man was in headlong flight, his shoulders jerking as he ran, his coat flapping open. He stumbled and fell and picked himself up again, stopping for an instant to look back in horror. He did not seem to care that he had stamped himself a craven and cut a woefully pitiful figure, for he added to his shame by crying out hoarsely. He changed his course slightly and headed directly for the grove, moving slowly and awkwardly now, as if fear had begun to paralyze him.

The gaunt, mannish woman was standing very still, shading her eyes with her hands and watching the Martians descend with no pronounced change of expression. But her face was drained of all color. The two stout women were clinging to each other and screaming.

But the girl whom Tragor had seen first by the brook and now saw in a different light, with the sunlight aureoling her hair and a man to defend her, did not appear to be the kind of woman who could be easily demoralized. She stood straight and still by the man with the rifle, her head tilted back in defiance, her lips slightly parted.

All five of the Martians were on the stairway now, and the first to emerge from the ship had been passed by the second, an equally muscular warrior with an even more brutish countenance. With a quick leap he was on the ground, his puckered, heavy-lidded eyes darting toward the four women with lascivious eagerness, the pupils strangely luminous.

The Martian directly above him paused for an instant on the stairway, raised to his shoulder a small, compact weapon that bore a slight resemblance to a sawed-off shotgun despite its technical complexity and took careful aim at the running man, who had almost reached the grove.

The weapon leapt in the Martian's clasp and a sharp crack echoed like a pistol shot across the open countryside, from the hollow, metallic sounding board of the ship's hull to the distant cluster of trees.

The running man screamed, threw out his arms and crumpled at the edge of the grove. The spurt of blood from a severed artery was visible from the ship, a thin, crimson jet that spattered the grass and the foliage and gleamed brightly on the boles of the trees until the crumpled body began to smoke. The smoke spiralling up from the slain man obscured the gleaming, and was blown by the wind between the trees, filling the entire grove with a thin, drifting haze.

One of the stout women swayed, released her hold on her companion's arm and sank to the ground in a dead faint. The other went on screaming, so shrilly and hysterically that for a moment no other sound could be heard—not even the heavy tread of the Martians moving toward the four women and three men with their weapons raised.

The slender girl, who Tragor coveted, gripped the arm of the man beside her in desperate appeal.