the edge with a bloodcurdling yell.
For Stan, that moment of falling into the aliens' garbage pit was so intensely terrifying as to be almost pleasurable. In the split second a million things flashed in front of his eyes like high speed movie images. Some residue of the royal jelly in his veins kicked in, and he had a moment of pure illusion.
He dreamed in that instant that he was on a mountaintop, and on all sides of him were birds and beasts, waiting to hear what he had to tell them. Mac was there in his dream, sitting up on his hind paws begging, his tongue lolling out Stan himself seemed to be wearing a robe made out of a luminous golden material, and he was not entirely surprised to find a golden halo circling his brow, casting a mellow light of its own. He was about to address all of the birds and beasts, tell them it was all right, when he struck the bottom of the pit with a resounding jar.
"Stan!" Julie cried. "Can you hear me?"
Gill came up beside her. "Is he alive?"
"I don't know yet Stan!"
Stan stirred, then fell back.
"Stan! Call out if you can hear me," Julie cried.
Stan didn't answer, but something else did. Something that spoke in a sibilant hiss, with many overtones. It was not a single voice. It was many voices. The hissing voices were like the tumultuous waves of an acid sea. Julie tried to direct her light Gill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Suddenly his grip tightened.
"What is it?" she said, and then she saw it, too.
There were passageways into the lower part of the midden. From them, heads peered; the characteristic heads of aliens. This was apparently a shortcut into a lower level of the hive. The aliens must have heard the noise Stan made while he was falling.
The aliens had come out to investigate. It was like before when they had met the alien coming into the hive. Only this time something had changed. It took Julie a moment to figure out what it was. Then she shuddered in horror.
"Gill, my God!" she said. "The suppressor must have quit. They can see him!"
Chapter 61-62
61
When Stan recovered consciousness, he had one delicious moment of thinking he was ten years old and had just awakened from a particularly terrifying dream. How grateful he was to find himself in his own bed! There, just across from him, was his computer, a good one, which his parents had bought for his last birthday. His floppy eared toy puppy was there, though of course he was too old to play with it. Still, Mr. Muggs watched while Stan did his experiments.
Now Stan stretched luxuriously and tried to think how he'd spend his day. There were some spiderwebs down near the brook that he wanted to investigate...
His outstretched fingers touched something wet and sticky. He recoiled, turned his head, looked. It was Mac, dead. He had pushed his fingers into the sticky wound in Mac's throat. What he had thought was his computer was actually the skeleton of a cow. And there were aliens glaring at him, seeing him, and starting toward him...
"Gill!" Julie screamed. "Start shooting! But for God's sake don't hit Stan!"
Julie was firing as she spoke. She had unslung the plasma rifle she had been carrying by its strap over her shoulder. Red orange flame lanced out from its muzzle, painting the garbage pit in lurid colors and huge dancing shadows.
The concentrated fury of the plasma blast danced around the aliens, who had begun advancing on Stan from a passageway that led into the midden. Red, acetylenelike cutting flames poked and probed at them, lancing through their bodies, stabbing into arms and legs. Gill was firing simultaneously, caseless carbine rounds that blew the aliens off their feet, sending them halfway up the pit, to tumble back again in a welter of severed arms and heads.
The plasma fire and the caseless rounds wove a dance of death around Stan's recumbent body. The fire approached him and then, almost delicately, backed away again.
Julie ran around the circumference of the pit, firing to keep the aliens from coming up on Stan from behind. Gill held his position, blasting a way clear for Stan, who finally stumbled to his feet and made his way to the side of the pit. He tried feebly to climb back out.
"Can you hold them, Gill?" Julie asked.
"I think so," Gill muttered.
Julie slung her plasma rifle and