"And we can hold It back with our flamers. Good girl."
"But hadn't we better get a little higher?" queried Sturgis.
"Higher!" echoed the girl. "We've got to get to the top!"
Frantically, they climbed, taking insane chances, fantastically insecure holds, scrambling, cutting their hands on the raw rock edges, living a nightmare....
At last Kemp and Cornelia, weak with exhaustion, sank against the ridge, gasping and heaving. Sturgis, next in line, had no breath with which to berate them. He could only crouch there and stare helplessly at them both.
Pritchard braced his feet and dared to look down. The One was a straight red line across the meadow, a gleam of highlight from Its wet side where the afternoon sun struck It. (Unconsciously he thought of It now as Cornelia did, as a person.) It was heading for the foot of the ridge.
They all stared down, sucking in their tortured breaths. Waiting for It to reach the ridge and start climbing, Pritchard found himself studying It detachedly. He realized his courage and reason were somehow reviving.
It was, after all, a worm. It differed from a six-inch Terran night-crawler only in that It measured about a hundred and fifty feet in length, and was proportionately much thinner, like a snake. It also differed in those snail-like tips that probed out into slim, delicate points or contracted into thick stubs scarce six feet long. Those tips were investigating the jagged rock of the ridge now.
And he saw that there were tips at the other end, too. But one was missing. Only a round stump accompanied the other long trailing feeler. It was a fair index of The One's terrible strength, Pritchard thought—realizing where the rest of that tip was now—that, in trying to wrench Itself clear, It had knocked over a hundred-foot, five-thousand-ton space ship.
"It's coming," said Kemp in a shrill, brittle voice. The hunter shot a glance at the stocky youth and saw he was fighting hysteria.