My instinct then, I must admit, was for us to retreat at once to our ship. In the heavy empty silence we stood blankly gazing at each other. Torrence was grim; Jan was shaking with excitement and the fear all of us felt.
"You heard that whistle?" I murmured.
"I heard it," Jan exclaimed. "Something—somebody—human—" There were weird, hostile inhabitants on Vulcan—no question of that now! And here was Roberts' body with a metal sliver of arrow in its back, mute evidence of what we were facing. And already our presence here had been discovered. I stared around at the rocky darkness, every blurred crag now seeming to mask some unknown menace.
"That whistle," Torrence murmured, "calling off that flaming thing—started at our shots. Something is around here, watching us now, undoubtedly."
The yawning dark doorway of the wrecked spaceship was near us. Something seemed lying just beyond its threshold.
"You two stay here," I told Torrence and Jan. "Don't let them surprise us again. We'll have to get back to our ship—"
The port doorway led into a little pressure chamber. On its dark sloping floor, as the wrecked ship lay askew, I stood with my flashlight illumining so ghastly a scene that my blood chilled in my veins. It was a bloody shambles of horror. For a moment I gazed; and as I turned away, sickened, I found Jan at my elbow. He too, had been staring. He clutched at me, white and shaken, and I turned away my light.
"The rest of them," he murmured.
"Yes. Looks that way. All of them—"
The bodies were strewn, clothing and flesh ripped apart so that here were only the bones of men, with pulpy crimson—