“It’s alive!” If he had been holding that test branch, Dard thought later, he might have dropped it at the realization of what the red stain was. But Rogan kept a tight grip.
“Lively little beggars, aren’t they?” he asked. “Look like spiders. Do they float-or swim? And why so thick in the water. Now let’s just see.” He knelt and using the stick along the surface of the water skimmed off a good portion of what Dard secretly considered the extremely repulsive travelers. With the layer of “spiders” removed the water changed color becoming a clearer brownish fluid.
“So they can be scraped off,” Rogan observed cheerfully.
“With a strainer we may be able to get a drink-if this stuff is drinkable.”
Dard swallowed hastily as Rogan tapped off on a convenient boulder the greater number of creatures he had fished out of the stream; and then together they followed the water to the sea. Several times they detoured, quite widely on Dard’s part, to escape contact with patches of red marooned on shore. Not that the “spiders” appeared uncomfortable on the firmer element for they made no attempt to move away from the spots where some sudden eddy had deposited them.
A stiff breeze came in over the waves. It was heavy with the tang Rogan now identified for Dard.
“Natural sea-that’s salt air!” What he might have added was drowned out by a hideous screech.
Close on its dying echo came a very human shout. Kimber and Kordov were running along the beech just beyond the water’s edge. And above their beads twisted and darted a nightmare, a small nightmare to be sure, but still one horrible enough to have winged out of an evil dream.
If a Terran snake had been equipped with bat wings, two clawed legs, a barbed tail, and a wide fanged mouth, it might have approached in general this horror. The whole thing could not have been more than eighteen or twenty inches long, but its snapping fury was several times larger than its body and it was making power dives at the running men.
Rogan dropped his spider stick as Dard’s hand flew inside his blouse to claim the only possession he had brought from Terra. He threw the hunting knife and by some incredible luck clipped a wing, not only breaking the dragon’s dive but sending it fluttering down, end over end, screeching. It flapped and beat with the good wing, squirming across the sand until Kimber and Kordov pinned it to the shingle with hastily flung stones.