He turned to confront Cornelia who had followed him. "I don't know whether I can get it through your thick head or not," she bit out, "you've simply got to get out of here. You can't—"
"Get this through your thick head, Miss Boyce," said Pritchard between clenched teeth. "This thing, whatever it is, has killed two of my men. I'm quite ready to believe it is intelligent, possibly the most intelligent organism on this planet. But it's a killer just the same and we're going to kill it. None of your idealistic theories are going to stop us, either."
She stared at him, beginning to shake her head a little wildly. "You can't kill it! That's what I'm trying to tell you. It can't be k—"
There was a sudden crash. Cornelia whirled and screamed. The three men and the girl stood transfixed.
Over by the river one of the jet cruisers was on its side, resting on a crumpled wing. The other was forty feet in the air, and rising, held in the coil of an impossible red monstrosity rearing its long wet self into the sky.
It was a worm, a very long, thin worm at least a hundred feet long, not counting what remained underground. It towered some fifty feet into the air, about thirty-five feet more of it wrapped around the cruiser. At its tip two fifteen-feet-long feelers writhed and wriggled, as if still smarting from the scorching they had received.
The coil slipped a little. The cruiser, looking more than ever like a beetle at this moment, slid slowly out and fell. And again it crashed into the cruiser on the ground and rolled ponderously off it.
"Good ... God!" came Sturgis's voice shakily at Pritchard's elbow. The Chief Hunter was still too appalled to speak. He stared as the worm's rope-like body came curving down out of the sky, down to the cruisers again. Seeing how that red length alternately thinned to a one-foot thickness and swelled again to three feet and more as it oozed around the cruiser that had remained on the ground, he had a vision of how it had entered the Apollo, shrinking itself to a mere six-inch thread that poured through the intake port, seeping along the duct, swelling, bulging at McManus's air-grill ... and coming out of the ground, probably close to the ship, it had evaded the radar field.
Cornelia's agonized face swam before his eyes. He felt his body shaking in the grip of her slender hands. Words—
"—fool, run! Listen to me! It's busy smashing your ships. We have a chance. Run—to the mountain! Oh, dear God...."