Nixon could feel the figures on his neck moving to begin their gruesome work on the prone, half-conscious giant. But Nixon was more conscious, stronger now than they realized. He strained at the cables, but found that he could move far less than when he had been bound on the Spaceship. His head could shift a little so that he could glance sidewise, but that was all.
"Stop it!" he gasped suddenly. "You damn little butchers—" He'd frighten them with his voice. Roaring, bellowing and twisting his head. That was all he could think of to do.... The end of Allen Nixon.... A vision of the rippleless Florida bayou, his brother Ralph, their cabin under the grey oaks and cedars came to him....
Then suddenly, out in the moonlit distance of the rock-slope between the pyramid-cities, cries were sounding. The surgeons on Nixon's neck stood tense, peering, listening. A turmoil of wild cries sounded off there. It spread to the cities. Cries, then Orites screaming. And in another moment a huge tawny shape came leaping from the shadows. The panther!
Nixon gasped. Then his roar held his mingled horror and a queer sort of triumph. "So now you've got something else to worry about!" he shouted. "There it is—mean and hungry. Take a look at that critter, you damn butchers, and see what you're going to do about it!"
The panther was loose. Nixon remembered now, how Loto had said it was in a cave with a purple barrage barring the entrance. Loto and Nixon had never thought of it—that when Loto pulled the barrage-switch, for that moment the panther's barrage had blacked out the same as Nixon's!
Tork was stammering, "Why I—I sent men to verify that it was still there! The darkness of the cave—the barrage was only off for a moment—they must have thought—"
"Well, it isn't there, it's here!" Nixon roared. "Go ahead—carve me up, if that panther gives you time!"
It was the supreme catastrophe, that raging tawny beast loose among the scurrying, tiny human figures. The screams were horrible as it pounced on a group of them who were trying to reach the shelter of one of the pyramids. With sunken sides showing its ribs and madly lashing tail, the panther gobbled up the tiny figures. Orite humans, each of them hardly a mouth. Then with another leap, the great amber-eyed cat was pouncing again. A line of Gorts with suicidal willingness to attack, stood their ground as it came at them. A sweep of its huge paw knocked them away.
Around Nixon, for those few horrible seconds, the Orites stood stricken. "Go ahead," Nixon said. "Kill it. Why don't you folks kill it? If you don't it sure as shooting will kill you."