Under the Green Star

Now I swung myself about, with some difficulty, striving to reach the many-faceted eye that bulged out like a swollen mass of black crystals on the other side of the monstrous horny head. But from the position in which I was held, the other eye was beyond my reach.

Risking all on a desperate gamble, I swung about. Bracing myself with but one foot against the mandible that strove to force me into the drooling maw, I drove the other booted foot crashing into the monster’s second eye!

It squealed in an ear-splitting shriek of fury as my heel crunched through the complex structure. The globular eye broke in a smear of oily ruin—

And the xoph, stung at last with stabbing pain, threshed to and fro in blind agony—

And dropped me!

I struck the thick anchor cable to which the spider clung and would have bounced from it, hurtling into the dim gloom-drowned abyss below, had it not been that the leather of my war harness clung to the adhesive cable.

Niamh was at my side in an instant, even as the adhesion of the cable was yielding to my weight. She caught my arm and half-lifted, half-dragged me to the topmost surface of the cable.

Thrusting her ahead of me, I staggered further out on the thick web strand. Behind us, the giant albino spider convulsed in maddened fury, furred legs thrusting, claws snapping at empty air, making the taut-stretched cable bounce and quiver to the frenzy of its convulsions.

We clambered away from the blinded thing with all possible speed, heading toward the nearer of the colossal trees, that soared above us like arboreal Everests.

“Will it follow us?” Niamh panted as she stumbled along the rise of the thrumming cable.

“Only the gods know that,” I said. “But let us put what distance between us that we can—while we can!”

We both knew the brute could sense our whereabouts by its sensitivity to the vibrations of our movement as we scrambled up the web strand. Our only hope lay in the pain I had perhaps inflicted on the white furred monster. In its agony, it might not think to pursue us for some time—perhaps long enough for us to reach a more secure shelter among the boughs of the forest giant that rose before us like a tremendous wall of bark.

It took the two of us the better part of an hour to reach the crotch of one colossal branch, and whatever the reason, the monster xoph did not follow us up the great strand to where it was anchored to the tree.

The cable rose ever more steeply, like one of the support cables of a huge suspension bridge on my native world. Toward the last we were climbing with great difficulty up an almost vertical incline, and had it not been for the sticky goo wherewith the cable was surfaced, the feat would have been much more dangerous and difficult than it actually was.

But, after an interminable climb, we reached at last the safety of the crotch of a branch as broad as Times Square, and flung ourselves down, weary and trembling with exhaustion, faint from our exertions, but safe enough for a time.

But we were hopelessly lost—alone, unarmed, and helpless—in a strange world of shadowy terrors and numberless monsters against whose attack we had not the slightest means of defense.

And night was falling across the World of the Green Star.