"Perhaps," Jorik suggested, "it is undergoing some unnatural stress—possibly tied up somehow with whatever it was that depopulated this city?"
"A good point, Jorik," said Gwann.
A long black shadow slid across the pavement near their feet and the five Venusians, very much startled, looked overhead. They were barely in time to see the huge gray form of the carnivore before it vanished behind a sign atop a nearby building which bore the mystifying information "Pepsi-Cola."
"There, sir!" cried Jorik. "That's exactly like the one I saw earlier!"
"Those teeth!" Klendro whimpered. "They could bite one of us in two!"
"And what they could do to us, they could do to an Earthman," Gwann said speculatively. "From the sizes of the doorways in these buildings, and the clothing on display in the shop windows, the Earthmen could not have been much larger than us."
"Sir," said Drog, holding up the map so that the leader could see it, "look here. This blue section that runs all over the map. You see, it's marked circle-arc-fork-cone-zigzag."
"Yes," said Gwann. "I see. What about it?"
"Well, sir, it recurs on the map, but each time it has a new group of symbols in front of it. What can it mean?"