Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

46 capped Jepson, he tossed him upon one shoulder and pounced forward. We drove with him as one man. Our first obstacle was a great crater bot- tomed with tired and steaming earth and some mutilated, yellow worms. Cutting around the edges of this, I leaped a six-feet length of blasted creeper which, even in death, continued to jerk spasmodically and horribly. There were many: more odd lengths writhing between here and the next crater. All were greener than any complexion, and bristled with hairlike tendrils which squirmed around as if seeking the life that had gone. The one hundred yards between craters we covered in record time, Jay still in the lead despite his heavy burden. I was sweating like a tormented bull, and I thanked my lucky star for the low gravity which enabled us to keep up this frantic pace. Again we split and raced around the rim of the second crater. This brought us nose to nose with the enemy, and after that, all was confusion. A bush got me. Sheer Terrestrialism made me disregard the darned thing despite all my recent experiences. I had my: eyes off it, and in an instant it had shifted to one side, wrapped itself around my legs and brought me down. I went prostrate, un- harmed but cursing, and the bush methodic- ally sprinkled my space fabric with a fine gray powder. Then a long, leatherish tentacle snaked from behind me, ripped the bush from my form, tore it to pieces. “Thanks, Sug Farn!” I breathed, got up, and charged on. A second bellicose growth collapsed before my needler and the potent ray carried on another sixty or seventy yards and roasted the guts of a yelling, gesticulating native. Sug snatched a third bush, scattered it with scorn. The powder it emitted did not seem to affect him. Jay was now twenty yards ahead. He paused, flung a bomb, dropped, got up and raced on, Jepson still grasped in his mighty left arm. The pinnace howled overhead, dived, created wholesale slaughter in the enemy’s rear. A needle ray spurted from behind me, lanced dangerously close to my helmet, and burned a bush. I could hear in my phone a constant and monotonous curs- ing as I pounded along. On my right, a great tree lashed furiously and toppled head- long, but I had neither time nor inclination to look at it. | Then a snake got Blaine. How it had sur- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION vived, alone among its blasted fellows, was a mystery. It lay jerking exactly like all the other tattered bits and pieces, but it was still in one, long lump and, as Blaine jumped it, the thing curled viciously, wound around him. He shrieked into his mouthpiece, and the sound of his dying was terrible to hear. His spacesuit sank in and his blood spurted out between the folds. The sound and the sight shocked me so much that I stopped abruptly, and Armstrong blundered into me from behind. “Get going!” he roared. ‘With his needler he sliced the green constrictor, segmenting it with savage gusto. We charged on, per- force leaving behind Blaine’s crushed and broken corpse. Now we were through the fronting ranks and into the natives whose numbers miracu- lously had thinned. Brittle globes plopped all around our thudding feet, but their gaseous contents were as harmless as sum- mer air. We were protected and, in any case, we were moving too fast to get a whiff. I needled three greenies in rapid succession, saw Jay tear off the head of another without as much as pausing in his heavy onrush. We were gasping with exertion when un- expectedly the foe gave up. The remaining natives melted into their protecting forest just as the pinnace roared vengefully toward them again. Our way was clear. Not slacken- ing our pace in the slightest, and with eyes alert and weapons ready, we raced to the water front, and there, lying in the great space of bright green sward, found the sweetest sight in the entire cosmos—the Marathon! It was here that Sug Farn put a scare into us, for as we sprinted joyfully toward the Open port, he beat us to it, held up the stump of a tentacle, said, “It would be as well if we do not enter—yet.” “Why not?” demanded Jay. His cold, glowing eyes settled on the Martian’s stump. _ “What the devil happened to you?” “I was forced to shed a limb,” said Sug Farn, mentioning it with the air of one to whom shedding a limb is like taking off a hat. “It was that powder. It was made of a million insects. It crawls around and it eats. It was eating me. Look at yourselves!” By hokey, he was right! Now that I came to look at it, I could see small clusters of gray powder changing shape on.my space- suit. It was moving around. Sooner or later, it would eat its way through—and then start on me. I’ve never felt lousier in my life. So, keeping watch upon the fringe of the forest, comiclooks C©