"Stand by to fire," snapped Pritchard over his shoulder. The younger man lurched toward the rocket controls in the nose in front of Pritchard as the jet cruiser heeled silently over into a dive.
The bowl of Thisbe II tilted up toward them and its features steadied in the face of that arrowing plunge. Dead ahead lay a meandering thread of river stitching up a wide, jungle-filled valley. At one point the river either split in two or broadened momentarily into a lake. At any rate, there was an island, right above the little flight-sight bead on the jet cruiser's prow.
The island swelled into detail. It was fairly large, for up from its center thrust one of those strange rock mountains, the three straight planes of its cleavage converging in a jagged, towering peak, making it seem an elongated triangular pyramid that had been driven forth at a slant and had then had its extreme tip snapped off. The primrose light of Piramus high above reflected now in a dazzling shimmer from one flank.
At its base, or at the base of one impossibly machine-smooth wall, there was a semi-circular mark, as if someone had carelessly strewn dirt across the olive-hued turf. The grains and clods of this dirt resolved themselves, as the jets whined on down, into a twinkling, tumbling cluster of ants—with gnats hovering and darting. Then they became something larger.
Greene turned to shout excitedly at Pritchard, but at that instant Sturgis's voice cracked from the two-way mike Pritchard had hung above him.
"Hey, chief, aren't those some of that girl's animals?"
"Right," barked Pritchard. "That's a big rumpus down there. Follow me on down for a look. Then I think we'll try a couple of passes."
"Passes? At what?"
"Those are Miss Boyce's 'people', all right. They're fighting."