Curt glanced about nervously at the thought of the liquid scorpions—the one form of animal life the colonist had found on this mineral-rich planet. Liquid scorpions were enormous masses of clear, jellyish liquid that oozed forward across the rock and sand with remarkable speed. A liquid scorpion changed shape constantly, its mass shooting out legs wherever they were needed. Only the eyes, fixed in a bulge over the center of its mass, and the almost-solid, curved stinger that arched over its back remained the same.
The first landing party had stood transfixed while one of the crew was attacked and absorbed before their eyes. Clear, the scorpion had been almost invisible to them until it flowed about the navigator's legs and paralyzed him with the swaying stinger. When his frantic struggles had ceased, the creature flowed over his body and absorbed it. As the party watched, the clearness slowly became a thin, dark red, and the body could no longer be seen.
Avengers had poured out of the ship after the giant scorpion, which reared back, tripling its height and halving its width. At the apex, the two protruding eyes bulged at them and the stinger swayed back and forth, reaching out and retreating. Explosive pellets fired into its flesh were absorbed with a slurping sound. The captain in the end, had knelt and taken careful aim at the right eye, behind which was the only unreddened sector of the mass. When the right eye disappeared, the clear area spurted out of the hole and drained over the jelly-like surface. Slowly, silently, the first of the liquid scorpions died.
Curt counted the pellets in his belt—an even hundred. Enough ... if he managed to keep out of sight and had good enough aim. He surveyed the surrounding countryside. Farther along the valley were shaded caves where he could find protection once he had marked his course.
If he could walk that far.
Xen came sluggishly awake, feeling the warmth penetrate his mass. The time of heat had come again, the time to search for what would halt the hunger that ached through every inch of him.
Slowly, his cold-stiffened mass flowed forward from its hiding place in the warmth-holding sand. The heat melted the stiffness out of him and he began to slide across the sand, his alert senses functioning again. Sense of touch led him across rocks and over ridges easily. The touchy sense of vibration waited apprehensively for movement that would shake the ground. And the third sense, the one that could be called only "sense" or "sense of knowing," functioned as always without his understanding. Today, this third sense told Xen, was different from other days.
Extra-cautious, Xen oozed over rocky barriers in the direction that his "sense" told him held food. Once he felt a slight tremor, and in terror flooded out over the rock into thin, transparent nothing. He waited several degrees of heat, but no further movement touched the sensitive receivers in his mass.
A falling rock, he decided, collecting himself and starting forward again. He slithered down rocky walls, pouring almost like water when the drop was long and drawing together at the bottom. When his feeling of touch warned him of the shade whose coolness might solidify him and leave him helpless in the open, he drew hurriedly away and changed direction.