"Well, after all, it is his planet," Prule said.
"His women," Kunklin corrected.
Late in the afternoon the halftrack struck a road. It climbed up onto it and Web pressed full speed to thirty. He had considered hiding the halftrack somewhere during the day and going on at night, but there was really no place to hide, and the aliens would probably double back and find the halftrack missing and come looking for it very soon, and they could probably see in the dark anyway. So he got out of the desert as quickly as he could.
In all, three separate scouting crews found him in the first four hours. They died silently, above him, without him being even slightly aware of their existence.
He had plenty of time to think. The big mystery, of course, was why in hell he hadn't disappeared along with everybody else. The damn things certainly wanted to kill him, or why had they followed the pod down? Well somehow, they had missed him. And he had been so doggone lucky up until now that he was beginning to feel invulnerable. He considered the whole business from beginning to end, trying to figure out what they were and why they wanted nobody in the satellite.
They wanted no Earthmen in space.
Then why didn't they just blow the thing up?
Maybe they were worried about starting a war. Maybe—yes—they wanted nobody up there because anybody up there could see what they were doing, would give an alarm, but a full scale war would be the worst thing that could happen, because they were undoubtedly somewhere on Earth right now, and they would be caught in the middle of it.
After that much thinking he was through. In the end, of course, there was no way of knowing, but whatever it was they wanted it was certainly pretty bad. Bad enough to kill him, which was all the bad he needed.