Jerry was glad to see that the cub, standing on shaky legs, was drinking, too. It seemed likely to survive its brush with death.
Not a bad life, he thought. Catch a meal, take a swig of wine and then just loaf around in the sun. Nice planet ... if you like sulphur, and have a bright-eyed young kid who won't make a move without your approval and example—
Jerry's ruminations were cut short by a sound of leathery wings, high in the coppery sky. Abruptly alert, he lifted his shaggy head and saw an ominous formation of Vs in the sky. They grew in size, and became the forms of gigantic airborne things, a cross between the ancient Terran pterodactyl and a sort of saber-toothed ape.
Something told him these approaching things were not friendly.
He turned his head to the cub, but this, apparently, was a lesson already learned, because all he saw of his scion was a disappearing blur of buttocks and tail as the cub scurried in a clumsy gallop across the plains of sunburnt rock. In another instant, Jerry was scurrying right after him, for reasons above and beyond Togetherness.
The paws wouldn't manage right, so he finally dropped back a bit and let the lion-thing's brain take over the job of escape, his own mind merely going along for the ride.
"But where can we hide?" he wondered, fascinated despite his fear. "Can we pull the hollow reed routine under the surface of a sulphur-pit? Or are there caves someplace in the vicinity? Or do we just run until either our legs or those simianipters' wings give out?"
Then his mind got entangled with the purely empirical cogitation about the validity of coining a word like simianipters (which seemed to mean "ape-winged" when the coinage he desired was "winged-apes") and his mind was bouncing so busily between this knotty problem and the chances of escape from those creatures and the puzzle of just what constituted safety from the flying things that he barely noticed the white flash of silent lightning that heralded cessation of Contact.
V