"Wherever you're going, I'm going too!"
"You're not!" he said harshly. "You'll go in the control room with your hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in those wrecks, you'll smash them if they jump me! I haven't so much as a pocketknife! You've got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!"
He went swiftly out the air-lock with only a cutting-torch in his hands. He fairly ran toward the débris of the attacking army of machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges gone not to liquid but to vapor in the deadly stream.
The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws, designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the Erebus to fragments. With an army of such machines—
Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting-torch. All about him were small devices, cryptic things, the strictly practical contrivances of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. He itched to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such simplicity. Only—
He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through machinery to which an engineer would have devoted months of study. He had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and Something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces. Other Things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.
Another exploded as Esther, in the Erebus and watching with the infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.
Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand. Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide eyed and trembling and sick with horror at what she had to do.
But he stumbled into the air-lock and dogged it shut behind him. And Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie. She was not wearing her space suit.