They ran.
When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.
They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke in absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He was down. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay on the sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds like oversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away at sight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of them halted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fled again.
Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.
He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at earliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made a career of being a rich man's spoiled little boy. Now he'd had a fright great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.
He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holden reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed a reasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.
But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him. Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore. He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the pearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flat spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in a doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous, complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.
Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to be apprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying with infinite satisfaction:
"The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It's a new world, bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night—if they're good food-stuff—will make this a place like the old west, and everybody envies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything's so nearly the same—."
"I never," observed Babs, "heard of blue sand on Earth."