Emmett glanced apprehensively at the air lock. She was right. At the moment they outnumbered the enemy, but when the others returned the Agronians could overpower them by sheer weight of number. And they could return without warning, at any instant.
"Why did one prevent the other from killing us?" George asked.
"He may have been afraid the other would miss and damage the ship," Emmett said. "Or possibly—"
"No. They're trained from birth to be soldiers. They're expert marksmen and their weapons are foolproof. They can adjust the blast from a weapon to travel any distance."
"Why should one enemy prevent another from killing us?" Emmett repeated wonderingly. He remembered another question that had nagged at his mind: Why had the Agronians totally destroyed Earth? Why hadn't they eliminated Earthmen and preserved the planet for exploitation—as a colony, a military base, any one of a thousand uses?
There was only one possible answer. A race might destroy a planet if it was useless. Earthmen had discovered useless planets, planets with poisonous atmospheres. Was Earth's atmosphere poisonous to the Agronians?
One Agronian had prevented another from killing them with a viciousness and an urgency that indicated it had been a life-and-death necessity.
Why? What would happen if they were to die?
Something clicked in his mind and a startling certainty occurred to him. Oxygen was poisonous to the Agronians!
That was why his life had been spared. And the pilot's—and Gloria's. Their spacesuits would have been punctured and their oxygen supply would have spread with deadly rapidity throughout the room.