Two plump silvery beetles screamed through the thin stratosphere high above the little planet. Behind them, dropping below the horizon, a needle stood gleaming in a black thumbprint. It was no longer possible to make out the smudge marring the Apollo's alabaster flank, much less the team now hanging in buckets from eyebolts high in the nose, chipping away the cracked and carbonized glaze—cracked by last night's fall and carbonized by the hell-fires of the righting operation.
In one beetle rode the wiry Sturgis and stocky Kemp. In the other, the rangy blond, Greene, handled the controls while Pritchard studied the face of Thisbe II rolling slowly under them.
"Got any ideas yet as to what hit us last night?" said Greene.
"Nope." After righting the ship, they'd turned on the floodlights, but neither then nor in the broad light of day was there any sign or trace of their visitor. A burial detail had laid McManus the traditional six feet into the crust of Thisbe II. The long red thing had flopped and tossed startlingly as they sank hooks into it and dragged it off into the grass.
"Must have been the tail of something big, huh? How come it got past the radar?"
Pritchard shrugged and continued to peer attentively ahead.
"Sure is a mighty pretty hunk of country," sighed the blond boy. "In places it reminds me of the stuff around the Cumberland Gap. If it weren't for that lavender sunlight, that is."
Pritchard didn't answer, his eyes steadily sweeping the terrain unfolding ahead.
"That was a hell of a thing happened to poor Tom last night," Greene went on. "Do you figure he had much pain before it finished him?"