With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous desk.
The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling. It reached out for him.
In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful ass of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose....
Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before him, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER XIII
The dawn-man, a thing like a wet rat, bared its teeth at the dinosaur.... The Cro-Magnon faced a horde of hulking Neanderthals with a grin.... The Crusader stood with a broken sword and brandished the hilt at the charging Saracens.... The Apache drew his knife to fight a double-troop armed with carbines.... The American flung his empty M-1 in the faces of forty Japanese ... toujours le beau geste. Captain Pinkham, standing in his cabin aboard the spaceship Elephant's Child adrift in Star System Ninety, leaned forward and pulled the trigger to the two-century-old, out-moded, laughable popgun of a Colt .44 firing once and twice and again and again into the face of the bronze-yellow space-dwelling giant.
The being loomed over him, and a scream like the death-wail of a meteor lanced into his eardrums and made him gasp with anguish. He pumped the last slug into the enemy and launched himself side-long, without much hope of landing anywhere but in a bushel-sized palm. He was actually surprised when he found himself on the rug. He scrambled for cover, but before he reached it, it dawned on him that he might not need it.
The alien had sunk to its knees, was making a convulsive effort to rise but obviously lacked the strength! Somehow, and God alone knew how, Pinkham had wounded the beast!
He drew back to the wall, watching. The agony of the big humanoid was doubling it over and throwing it upright as though a volcano were erupting in its belly. It flung out an arm, struck a foam-chair, which shattered explosively. Pink put more feet between them. The convulsions were like those of a harpooned whale. Yet the creature did not seem able to move from its knees. Finally, perhaps a minute after the first throes, it collapsed all at once, a crumpled titan. Pink cautiously opened the door, just as Daley was reaching for the handle.