Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish. It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel that?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened. "Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up! Gunther'd do anything to—did I say anything?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.