"That was a good shot, Tom," he said.
McManus came toward him, grinning with relief. "I'd had about all I could take—" he started to say, and then Pritchard's fist slammed into his jaw. His feet left the ground and he fell heavily onto the hard ground under the tubes.
Pritchard was picking him up again when he heard Sturgis's voice again. "You'd better make it snappy, chief. I think they're working up to something."
Shapes were moving up through the distant grass. Wings were flapping or tilted in soaring across the jungle not far beyond. There came to the ship a dim, vast babble of cries, grunts, squeals, howls and barks.
They carried the inert McManus over to the platform in a hurry. But Pritchard let his finger rest on the buzzer-button while he looked over the array of animals now gathering in plain sight, fanning out around the perimeter of the scorched ground.
There were the slate-gray ones, like that which McManus had downed—six-legged, suber-snouted, long-tusked. There were hulking, scaly-hided ones, resembling ant-eating bears—also six-legged. In fact, the six-legged skeleton seemed to prevail among the fauna of Thisbe II. The canine-like ones running this way and that were six-legged, and so were certain slinking, feline types. On the other hand, the maned gorillas had but four appendages, and so had the ungainly-looking, leaping ones, that looked like hairless kangaroos except for their wicked, underslung jaws.
Quite suddenly, this horde was charging across the burn, converging on the shining cylinder towering above them, aiming for the platform still resting on the ground.
"What's he waiting for?" Pritchard heard the whisper above the rising thunder about them, knew he was meant to hear it. He jabbed home the button and the rising floor pressed their feet. He stepped over to the squawkie and spoke into its 'phragm. "Chief on, Savage. Hold your fire. We're clear." Turning to the men on the now rapidly rising platform, he said, "No shooting."
Soberly, they all gazed down at the horde sweeping up below, swirling about, bumping into the fins and one another. Their silence, other than the noise of their thousands of feet and hooves, was oppressive and menacing. A few of the leaping ones soared up at the platform, wriggling in mid-air and pawing, but it had gone too high and they fell back.
Then Pritchard glanced up. His hand started for his snapper. Toward them through the air came a cloud of flying things—great leathery-winged birds, smaller, faster, feathered ones—rising on a line of flight that would carry them above the platform to a point of interception, claws distended, beaks open and eager.