Bill felt a quick flood of sympathy for the gray creatures. One had stopped to help the other. That meant that they felt affection. And the globe had waited for them to run again. It seemed to be baiting them maliciously. Almost he fired the rocket. But his orders had been not to fire unless the ship were discovered.
Now they were not a mile away. Suddenly Bill perceived a tiny, light-gray object grasped close to the breast of one of the gray bipeds. Evidently it was a young one, in the arms of its mother. The other creature seemed a male. It was the mother that had fallen.
They came on toward the cliff.
They were very clearly in view, and not five hundred yards below, when the female fell again. The male stopped to aid her, and the globe poised itself above them, waited. The mother seemed unable to rise. The other creature lifted her, and she fell limply back.
As if in rage, the gray male sprang toward the blue globe, crouching.
A tiny purple spark leapt from it. A flash of violet fire enveloped him. He was flung twisted and sprawling to the ground. Burned and torn and bleeding, he drew himself to all fours, and crept on toward the blue globe.
Suddenly the sphere dropped to the ground. A round panel swung open in its side—it was turned from Bill, so that he could not see within. Green things crept out. They were creatures like the one he had seen in the Mexican desert—a cluster of slender, flexible green tentacles, with suction disks, an insignificant green body, and three malevolent purple eyes, at the ends of foot-long stalks.
There were three of the things.
The creeping male flung himself madly upon one of them. It coiled itself about him; suction disks fastened themselves against his skin. For a time he writhed and struggled, fighting in agony against the squeezing green coils. Then he was still.
One of the things grasped the little gray object in the mother's arms. She fought to shield it, to cover it with her own body. It was torn away from her, hidden in the hideously writhing green coils.