Then he was up, bruised but whole, on his knees and scrabbling out from under the light gray stuff. By crawling under every line he avoided entanglement and in a minute was clear and running, unsnapping the harness as he went.
Not until he was well away from the mountain did he dare a glance over his shoulder. Then he almost stumbled, at the chill terror gusting through him, freezing every muscle.
The worm was a red festoon, drooping from the ridge. Even as he looked, Its whole length came off, to fall writhing out of sight momentarily at the base of the mountain.
He hadn't expected that. He had planned for It to back laboriously down the way It came, giving him a decent margin of time. But it had crossed him up. Now he had seconds instead of minutes.
He put his head down and dug in, pumping his tired, aching legs furiously. This was the worst gamble of his career, against the longest odds. He had no idea how fast the worm could go on level ground.
Suddenly, he was racing a shadow. In the slanting light of Piramus, setting through the afternoon, something like an elongated caricature of a snail's head crept across the grass beside him—two long slivers of tapering purple shadow.
Then he saw his flamer, lying almost dead ahead where it had landed after being catapulted off the ridge. Sobs rasping his throat, he slanted toward it, dove and rolled, to come up clutching it.
There was a spattering sound close by, a spatter that changed to an angry fizzing. Pritchard swung the nozzle up in the very face of the glistening red column swaying toward him. He squeezed the handle-grip.
Through the booming flame, he saw the shape twisting aside and followed it with fire. It went down to the ground, backing away into a swelling body. The worm writhed desperately away from that searing plume of licking flames.
Pritchard wheeled and ran toward the cruiser that had not burned.