gait was so difficult to match, which so often eluded them in the forests, the scents mixing with so many others. No, this chase would be short.
Brenner stumbled and he felt his leg slashed with teeth. Crying out, he rose to his feet, his trousers torn, his leg wet with blood and saliva. He ran on. His heart was pounding. It seemed he could not breathe. In his terror he was only vaguely aware of the pain in his body. It was like someone else was in agony. He struck into a tree. He saw another white stone. He ran toward it. I am going to Company Station, thought Brenner, wildly. I am going toward Company Station! I will see the gate! I will see the fence! But he knew, too, that he was days from Company Station.
Yes, it is nearly time, they thought, were they capable of such thoughts. But it has not lasted very long. This is a strange runner. It is too slow. It is no wonder there are so few of these in the forest.
Brenner spun about, his legs buckling. Things began to go black.
He began to sob and cry, and gasp for breath.
Then he found himself backed against an outcropping of rock.
Yes, there were seven of them. He could see that now. He counted them.
There was nowhere to run.
He covered his face with his arms and crouched down.
Yes, they thought, it is now time. And each thought, I must not delay, there are the others!
Brenner lifted his head from his folded arms, after a time.
He had not felt the charge, the rending, the tearing.
He looked about himself. There was no sign of the beasts. They had melted away, back into the shadows, through the trees, disappearing in the darkness.
It was very quiet.
He stepped away from the rock outcropping. He peered into the darkness. He turned about, and screamed.
On the rocks, above his head, not yards from where he had been, he saw a gigantic, terrible shape, a huge, monstrous, sinuous, catlike form. It was not so unlike the stealthy one which had seized Archimedes, except in its dimensions. It was sitting back on its haunches. Its broad head, with its sharp, erected ears, must have been twenty feet above the rocky level on which it sat. Brenner, with his arms outstretched, could not have begun to measure the span of its chest. Its eyes, which were large, were separated by some eighteen Commonworld inches. They were set forward on the face. It doubtless had excellent binocular vision. Its pupils were black, large and round. The creature seemed excellently adapted for night vision. Such eyes would not need the feeble aid of the lantern fruit. They would have served in darker, more terrible places. Yes, it was not unlike the stealthy one Brenner had seen, that on which Rodriguez had fired, missing his shot as the creature, alarmed, had leaped away. It, too, clear in all its lineaments, in the lithe, beautiful, savage form, was a predator. That it would live by killing, and the death of the slower, the weaker, the less clever, the less fierce, was visible in every inch of its frightening beauty. It was terrible in a way that was beyond ruthlessness or cruelty. It was terrible in a simple, natural way, as lightning is terrible, or fire, or storms. It, like the stealthy one, was a product of evolution, and the coming of kings and terrors, a product of what was to be fed upon and what must be done to obtain it, of how cunning one must be, how secret, how swift, how terrible. It, like the stealthy one, was a handiwork of nature, of nature in all its merciless innocence, and yet, it seemed, of a nature more terrible than that which, over thousands of years, had fashioned the sinews of the stealthy one. Brenner shuddered to conceive the nature that might produce such a shape, and being. This, thought Brenner, is that which is first in the forest. Here, in this world, this majestic horror is king. The smaller beasts, the humped, crested ones, the pack, had slunk away. They did not do contest with one such as this. With one such as this they would dispute nothing.
I am dead, thought Brenner. But he was awed, as well. Better, thought he, to be eaten by this, to serve such a king, than to die beneath the jaws of the pack, to be torn to pieces by the small