Then suddenly he broke out into a profuse sweat. His breathing became easier, and then he was running lightly. His second wind had come to him. He was no longer exhausted. He felt as if he could run forever, and ran on more swiftly still. Suddenly the flashlight beam showed him a deep furrow in the rotting vegetation underfoot, and something glistened. A musky reek filled his nostrils. The thing’s trail—the furrow left by its dragging tail! That musky reek was the thing’s blood. It was bleeding from the wounds the explosive bullets had made. It was spouting whatever filthy fluid ran in its veins even as it waddled onward, screaming.
Five minutes more, and he felt that he was gaining on it. Then, and he was sure of it. But it was half an hour before he actually overtook the injured monster marching like a mad machine. Its mutilated ducklike head held high, its colossal feet lifting one after the other in a heavy, slowing waddle, and its hoarse screams re-echoing in a senseless uproar of agony.
Tommy’s hands were shaking, but his brain was cool with a vast coolness. He raced past the shrieking monster, and halted in its path. He saw Evelyn, a huddled bundle, clasped still to the creature’s scaly breast. And Tommy sent a burst of explosive bullets into a gigantic, foot thick ankle-joint.
The monster toppled, and flung out its prehensile lizard claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing did not so much die as disintegrate under the storm of detonating missiles.
Then Tommy went to Evelyn. He was wild with grief. He had no faintest hope that she could still be living. But as he picked her up she moaned softly, and when he cried her name she clung to him, pressing close in an agony of thankfulness almost as devastating as her fear had been.
It was minutes before either of them could think of anything other than her safety and the fact that they were together again. But then Tommy said, in a shaken effort to be himself again:
“I—I’d have done better if—if I’d had roller skates, maybe.” His grin was wholly unconvincing. “Why’d you get out of the Tube?”
“Its eyes!” Evelyn shuddered, her own eyes hidden against Tommy’s shoulder. “I saw them suddenly, looking at me. And I—hadn’t any will. I felt myself getting out of the Tube and walking toward it. It was like the way a snake fascinates—hypnotizes—a bird….”
A vagrant wind-eddy submerged them in the foul reek of the dead thing’s flesh. Tommy stirred.