Suddenly the thing shifted its soft weight and drove his feet hard, hurling him face down behind a fallen girder an instant before Hogan's manmade lightning clanged along the girder and flushed sparrows of dust into the sky. Behind the dust the Captain's body leaped to a new location and bobbing from its cover fired, not blindly as if dust-veiled eyes had aimed but deliberately, with the slow-squeezing aim of its organic radar. But its batsense was too late, for it quivered angrily on his neck.
As his body burst through the dust, the Captain's good eye caught the faroff glint of sun on moving steel where Hogan fled into a jungle of girders. The Captain's long legs drove hard in pursuit, but after a few hundred yards they began to stagger.
Bloodsucker, his thoughts rang, you are as stupid as a man. Keep driving me this fast and you'll have a dead horse. And what will you be without me? Black gunk frying in the sun!
Perhaps I'll die soon, he hoped as his quivering legs rebelled and the city misted before his good eye.
Angrily it jabbed his thumb into his blinded eye. But it could not spur fresh activity from his legs. No pain could do that now.
It let him walk awhile. Soon he crossed the blurry tracks his men had left when he led them into the dead city, unsuspecting.
Single file they had threaded among the collapsed dome-structures and overthrown cylindricals, a segmented worm of men probing within a vast and withered corpse. First the Captain, then Grimes, then Ives, Kwatahiri, Spencer with his hog-snouted prisma-reflex camera, finally Hogan, the worm's rear end. Six of them. The Captain had left Templar to "guard" the spheroid.
In the last city, where as in the preceding five they had found no sign of life except a scum of dried protoplasm thirty feet up on the sides of the buildings, Templar had begun to see "them". The Captain winced every time he saw Templar's dark blue eyes superimposed on the wreckage ahead, eyes widening with unspeakable horror at something no one else could see. Templar had been too good a soldier to scream, but the Captain was an old hand at spotting "symptoms", so Templar sat this one out. And the Captain had made the long-awaited decision: after this city they were going home.
Orders are orders, but a good captain will not interpret them so narrowly as to expend his men for no purpose. There is room for judgment. He had been sent to ascertain if there were life on this seared planet. After reasonable search he had found none. They were going home.