There were flying fish wheeling round them like queer rigid birds. They had grown legs like little dragons, and long tails.

A pair of huge eels slid over the rough earth, pulled down a man and fought over the body. Policemen began to appear, and there was a popping of guns. The sirens made a mad skirling above the din.

Some of the rays swooped to the crowded beach. Others came on, scenting human food.

Guns began to crack from the cliff-tops, from the windows of apartment houses. Fallon caught the chatter of sub-machine guns. One of the rays was struck almost overhead.

It went out of control like a fantastic plane and crashed into the hillside, just behind Fallon and the girl. Men died shrieking under its twenty-foot, triangular bulk.

It made a convulsive leap.

The girl slipped in the loose rubble, and lost her hold on Fallon. The broad tentacles on the ray's head closed in like the horns of a half moon, folding the girl in a narrowing circle of death.

Fallon raised his iron curtain rod. He was irrationally conscious, with a detached fragment of his brain, of the girl's sapphire eyes and the lovely strength of her body. Her face was set with terror, but she didn't scream. She fought.

Something turned over in Fallon's heart, something buried and unfamiliar. Something that had never stirred for Madge. He stepped in. The bar swung up, slashed down.

The leathery skin split, but still the feelers hugged the girl closer. The great ray heaved convulsively, and something whistled past Fallon's head. It struck him across the shoulders, and laid him in dazed agony in the dirt.

The creature's tail, lashing like a thin long whip.

Webb Fallon got up slowly. His back was numb. There was hot blood flooding across his skin. The girl's eyes were blue and wide, fixed on him. Terribly fixed. She had stopped fighting.

Fallon found an eye, set back on one of the tentacles. He set the end of the iron rod against it, and thrust downward....

Whether it was the rod, or the initial bullet, Fallon never knew, but the tentacles relaxed. The girl rose and came toward him, and together they went up the hill.

They 

 Prev. P 5/28 next