Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/94

94 handed Claude the atomic rifle he'd been resting against the platform railing. "If anything comes up, wake me. Don't try to handle it yourself."

He disappeared down the spiral staircase.

Claude peered down into the dense foliage that surrounded the landing platform at the bottom of the towers. There, somewhere in the darkened thickness of the weird jungle, were the krickaks he had intended to use for study.

He noticed that the bodies of the roundly formed creatures who'd been slain on the platform the night before were still there, exactly as they'd fallen. Then he turned his attention once more to the tangled gray-screen morass of strange jungle.

The minutes crawled by. The hours oozed along. A cramp came into Claude's back, and a sweat of strain and anxiety clouded his spectacles. He stretched, took a firmer grip on the atomic rifle. Grimes had said that the space liner would be passing in two days.

That would mean some time tomorrow. They would have to hold out untill tomorrow. And suddenly Claude was aware of the resignation of his thoughts. Until tomorrow. And after that, supposing the krickaks got them?

Claude Kelvin shuddered. Up until this very moment in his young life the thought of death had been but contemplation in a science laboratory. He had studied death in relation to other people. Never to himself.

It wasn't pleasant. Claude took off his spectacles with one hand and wiped them carefully on his tunic. Then he placed them back on his lean, ascetic nose and resumed his contemplation of the jungle foliage.

He looked over his shoulder for an instant. The needle on the big dial of the instrument panel was flickering with the same intensity as it had the day before. He shuddered, thinking of those pop-eyed krickaks lurking out there, watching him. He wondered how he had escaped death when he'd ventured out there.

Suddenly Claude felt a sense of guilt assail him. Here he was wrapped up in consideration of the salvage of his own hide when the lives of thousands were at stake. For he knew, even though Grimes hadn't said so in so many words, that the stopping of the rayhouse beams would hurl the luxury space liner into an unnavigable morass of small, interwoven asteroid belts. The liner would undoubtedly crash on one of these webs without the guidance of the ray beams.

Claude saw a round, globular body appear against the gray green thickets on his right. He turned swiftly and squeezed the trigger of the atomic rifle. The figure disappeared. Claude was unable to tell if he'd made a hit or not.

Another hour crept by, and then another. Claude was finding it difficult to keep the haze from his spectacles. They reflected too much light. Far too much light. It made everything seem hazy, dim, dim.

LAUDE came awake with a start.

It might have been due to the loud crackling vibrations that seemed to be everywhere around him. Or it might have been due to the splat, splat, splat of an atomic rifle firing rapidly somewhere on the spiral staircase.

Darkness was setting in, and Claude realized even as his eyes blinked open that he'd been guilty of horrible weakness. He'd fallen asleep on watch!

He lurched erect, grabbing his atomic rifle and rushing to the staircase. It was clear to him now that that was where the noise of the rifle and the