"Let's go out," said Gary, gruffly, "and have a look around.”
"Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”
"I am," he admitted. "Pink with purple spots.”
The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.
There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.
The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.
On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.
"You'd expect to see a goblin," Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.
All at once the goblin was there.
He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.