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Jo
Terl went to the right. Jo
Terl went up. Jo
Why hadn't he battered the monster's head off in the morgue? But there had been no time.
Terl went low to the right, then to the left, then to the right. Rhythmical. Easy to predict. Jo
Too late, Jo
Abruptly Terl seemed to abandon his effort to get through to the compound. He headed straight north.
Down below, the burning plane sent up soaring piles of black smoke.
Was this another Terl trick? Luring him off?
Ears blasted by the scream of tortured motors, Jo
Chrissie and Pattie, riding to the north! Their horses' bellies to the ground as they raced along.
Leverage. Jo
Jo
"If you don't go down there and land, animal, I’ll kill them both.”
Terl was right ahead of him, dropping down to about four thousand feet.
Jo
Jo
Half-deafened by the thud of contact, Jo
He glanced over the side to see that the riders were clear of that spot.
They were.
The motors of both ships were screaming in discord, fighting against one another in howling dissonance. They jerked and wrestled in the sky, suspended in space. The motors began to get hot. Very shortly they would burn and explode.
Jo
He took one final glance at the keyboard. Locked in. Six feet underground, directly below, four thousand feet down, speed control at hypersonic.
Jo
His jets barked alive and the descent slowed. By swinging his legs, he went up to a higher altitude.
He looked at the locked and fighting ships.
He had expected that Terl would bail out. The outcome was inevitable. The ships would explode. He was counting on Terl's having no belt gun, and he intended to hunt him down in a jet pack or on the ground. But Terl didn't bail out. Jo
Jo
What Terl was doing in that jerking, fighting mess where one ship's motors fought the other's, was trying to outguess the settings of the plane that rode his back. If he could, both motors would agree. Possibly, then, a quick roll and reversal of the settings would throw the other ship off his back.
The smoke from those conflicting motors was already begi
Suddenly Terl got the combination! Both ships' motors smoothed into shrieking agreement.
But Jo
At an abrupt two thousand miles an hour, both ships hurtled toward the earth.
In an instant, Terl apparently realized that this set of console coordinates was sudden death.
Jo
With only five hundred feet to go, Terl frantically punched in the reverse combination. His ship motors went into a fighting howl.
The inertia of the mass carried it down to within twenty feet of the ground before the descent halted.
But the force on the hot motors was too great for them to overcome.
Both ships burst into an orange ball of fire!
Terl's body hurtled out of the door and struck rolling.
The ships struck!
With a swing of his legs Jo
Terl was still rolling.
Chapter 6
Jo
Terl had been on fire for a moment. He was not now. He had rolled it out in the damp spring grass. He was fifty feet away. He was lying motionless. He had a breathe-mask on.
Jo
A statement Robert the Fox had made drifted through Jo
Jo
Suddenly Terl's hand blurred and a small gun appeared in it like magic.
Jo
There was a flash as Terl's gun exploded in his paw. Then he was up and starting to run.
There were questions Jo
The leg buckled and Terl went down. The foot stayed twisted in the wrong direction.
Jo
Terl was lying there, motionless. “Quit shamming, Terl,” said Jo
Terl suddenly laughed and sat up. “Why didn't you die in the morgue?”
“Animal,” said Terl, putting his foot right-way to but carefully sitting quiet under the menace of the gun twenty feet away. “I can hold my breath for four minutes!”
He was too cheerful. His leg was bleeding through his pants. He was singed. But he was too cheerful. Jo
Moving so that he could keep Terl in view out of the corner of his eye, he glanced around the plain. The compound was behind them, possibly twenty miles. Gunfire was coming faintly from that direction. He knew he should make some effort to help them.
Where were the girls? Probably they had gone on. No! There they were! Jo