"Fired every bolt in the damn weapon!" He saw the unconscious Venza. "Good God, Gregg!"
Never have I heard such anguish in his tone. "Gregg, she isn't...."
"One of them bit her. Help me."
He floundered up with her, a hundred feet above the tree-tops of that horrible forest. The little lanterns of eyes down there had all winked out. The open starlight was over us.
Anita came swimming, then Venza stirred. She murmured, "... all right."
She had fainted. It seemed nothing more; but I found her upper arm swelling. She tried to bend her body and sit up; but it threw us all out of balance.
"Lie straight," Snap murmured. "Venza, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why not?" And then she laughed. It sent a shuddering chill over me. "What's the fuss about? Let's get away from here. Somebody will be coming."
She was swimming now and we let her loose, but stayed close by her. The reddish firmament was like an inverted bowl. The curving Wandl surface gave us a narrow little vista, the forest rolling up from the horizon in front. Then we saw where the forest seemed to end. Water was beyond it: a ribbon like a broad river, and beyond that, frowning mountains, terraced and spired with jagged peaks.
Snap and I suddenly recalled the gravity ray projectors. We tried them; found that they would fling little beams of two varieties. Pencil points of radiance, they seemed to have an effective range of no more than a few hundred feet.