"Parker!" Retch's voice lifted in a yell. "Parker! I've got your girl. Come on out and give yourself up or I'll let her have it."
This was his moment of triumph, this was the moment when he won his victory. Parker, peering around the edge of the doorway, knew now that he had no way to go. If he moved into the room, and tried to shoot Retch, the man would certainly kill Effra in one wild burst of slugs as he turned the gun on the pilot.
"Parker!" Retch yelled again. A smile on his face, he waited for an answer.
Effra's fingers moved on the control panel. Mercedes got slowly to her feet. The men in the room were silent, waiting for an answer to Retch's command. Parker stood just outside the door, hesitant. No matter what he did, it seemed to him that there was only one answer.
Behind Retch, coming from the corridor, something moved. At the sight of it, Parker felt a flood of biting cold surge through him.
It was a puma—a gigantic puma. In its jaws, as it swung its head from side to side, dangled the body of a man it had killed in the corridor.
It was a Jezbro puma.
Once it had been a little image in a niche beside the machine from the old time. Then life had flowed into it, its own kind of life, now it walked as a huge ravening beast through the room where once it had been a tiny image.
The first man who saw it went dead white and slumped downward in a faint. The others saw it in almost the same instant. Pandemonium swept through the room. No man's nerves were proof against such a sight as this. Screaming men were suddenly trying to fight their way out of a place that had suddenly become haunted.
The puma flowed into the room. Like Retch, it had yellow eyes. They glared now, with a burning light. There was a vague mistiness about this puma but there was also about it the appearance of solid reality.