The Course of Logic

by Lester Del Rey

Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint impulses.

Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. "Cut them off! Don't let them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning."

In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two was almost at the ramp.

At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet away.

Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or something like it—came from the other creature.

Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the midge.

It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.

There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. "If your hunger is so great, why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood smells sweet enough."

Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.

Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.