The Venusian's gun fairly leaped to his shoulder. But instead of firing, he stared stupefiedly.
"Devils of space, look at it! The thing's coming apart!"
The second slith that Sual Av had glimpsed was a hundred yards away among the fungi. It was an even bigger creature than the first, and its treat gray mass was grotesquely different in shape, consisting of a large mass with the cold, bright eyes and wide, lipless mouth, and a smaller attached mass with eyes and mouth also.
The smaller mass was detaching itself from the main body of the creature. Soft gray flesh stretched and snapped. And instead of one slith, there stood two, a large one and a little one. A moment later, both of them charged toward the Planeteers.
The shells of three atom-guns exploded together around the onrushing monsters. Both lay dead when the flares died.
"Am I seeing things or did that creature really divide into two?” demanded the Venusian.
"Planetary zoology must be a closed book to you,” Gunner Welk told him dourly. “If you knew any, you'd know that the aboriginal animal life of Saturn is asexual, and propagates by fission."
"Come on, we'll get the teeth out of these carcasses,” Thorn said. “It's lucky we've killed a few, for slith hunters going back to town without any teeth might arouse suspicion."
They advanced to the torn dead bodies, feeling with this first locomotion the powerful drag of Saturnian gravitation. Only the fact that that gravitation was partly neutralized by the centrifugal force of the planet's rapid spin made it tolerable to men. The space-trained muscles of the Planeteers quickly began to adjust themselves to the greater load, though they felt very slow and heavy.
With their keen knives of Earth steelite they hacked and slashed at the repulsive bodies of the sliths, dig ging the huge white fangs out. Those teeth, the hardest and most perdurable organic substance in the system, were in high demand on all worlds for carving into jewelry and for certain industrial processes. The system wide demand for them was responsible for the fact that slith-hunting was a profession on this world.