With horrible speed two giants pounced for him; he saw them out of the corner of his eye. Then they slammed full length to the rock, and he knew that Circe's automatic was in action. He corked the last bottle and slung it on his belt, put down the two remaining containers. Then he turned and made a mighty jump away from them, dragging Circe with him. The aliens came on.
Some of them could withstand the pull of the liquor, and some could not. There was a phalanx of them coming, for a good third of the growth's population had seen the disturbance by now. Any who appeared to be passing by the bottles, he and Circe shot; those who hesitated by them and were drawn in exchanged their liberty for their lives, because in two minutes Pinkham had feverishly capped them into the leaden prisons. He hooked them onto his belt and said into the mouthpiece before his lips, "Go for the entrance, baby. I'll cover you."
"No!" she snapped back. "You are not going to sacrifice—"
"Sacrifice, nuts!" he yelled. "This is part of the plan you'd have heard if you hadn't sneaked into the landing party at the last minute. Get going!" He was reloading as he spoke.
She ran, almost flying down the cave-tunnel with great leaps that covered many yards each. He fired three times at the giants who now loomed above him; then he was running too, stretching his legs and throwing every ounce of power and panic in his frame into the incredible jumps. And apparently he had the advantage over the brutes, for he began to outdistance them; their mass being greater, he was helped by the lack of gravity.
Then a rock crumbled under his toe, he was thrown off balance, his momentum shot him full tilt against the wall of the passage, and his head cracked sharply against the inside of his helmet. He knew that he was losing consciousness, and that he had fallen and was rolling straight into the path of the raging aliens.
CHAPTER XIX
Thought came to him before feeling. Pink lay in a hazy world of shifting ideas, of coagulating and disintegrating forms of cerebration. He was not wholly unaware of what had happened, but his groping mind was more concerned with piecing together certain facts and fancies, reaching conclusions he felt were of the first importance. If his body were in danger, it must help itself, for Pink had other fish to fry.
As he sank into thick-witted stupor, then fought up to the light of reason, feeling his mind ebb and flow with ideas and mad conjectures, it came to him that he knew the truth of the giants, and had not stated it to himself before in so many words. He had deliberately shied away from it, in fact, for it stank of fantasy, of crack-brained superstition and imbecilic fairy tales....