He gestured toward the room's inner doorway. "And that room there, that is for me, the Man-God?"
"Yes," she agreed.
"Then I shall go there now. You call me if the Selah wants us."
Triumph swept him as he reached the dim other room. He had lost his flash-gun in the tree-tops when he was chasing the girl. But he still had his other equipment. He discarded it all now save the little insulated cylinder slung over his shoulder, the cylinder in which he would store the precious Xarite. The window-ovals here were dark. Cautiously he went to one of them. There was a sort of garden outside, with beds great blossoms topping spindly stalks. A little forest of them, high as a man's head. To the left, a section of the village was visible; crowded with milling excited Marlans. But to the right, beyond the garden there was dimness. The barrage at the outskirts of the village there, had not yet gone up. It should be possible to get out through this window; make a run through the shrouding flowers of the garden.
Atwood watched his chance. Then, like a shadow, he was out of the window, sliding into the tall flower-clusters. Every instant he feared that there would be an alarm; but there was not. Then he was through the garden, skirting a dark edge of the town. The barrage was going up to the left of him, but its light did not reach him, and in a moment he was in the open country, with great sailing leaps bounding toward the hills and the caves of the Xarite.
The little cave was a weird, intense glare of violet light. Atwood had had no difficulty finding it; the glare streamed like an aura from its entrance, out into the night. The Xarite, almost in a pure state, lay in great powdery heaps. Atwood's hands were trembling as he scooped it up, filling his insulated cylinder, clamping down its lid. More than ever, a desperate haste was upon him now. So many things might be transpiring back in the village. And he realized too that his spaceship might be discovered.
Within a minute or two he was into the cave and out again, with his precious little cylinder slung on his back. He was more skillful at leaping now. Ahead the circular barrage was complete now, a vertical violet curtain of light enclosing the village. It made the darkness out here on the rocks seem more intense by contrast.
The dim landscape swayed weirdly with his flat sailing leaps. And suddenly, off to one side, he was aware that round blobs of yellow glow were appearing. The monster genes. With the season of their growth upon them, they were struggling up out of their microscopic invisible world.
The night out here now was hideous with the throbbing, humming voices of the monsters. Atwood's heart went cold. How would he get the girl out of this damnable place? He could think only that in some way he must quickly persuade her. Together, running, leaping like this—or like birds following the flimsy forest-top which the genes could not reach—he would be able to get her to the spaceship.