For more than an hour they fumbled about on jungle trails that led everywhere and nowhere. They tended to panic. Then the small particoloured moon passed swiftly overhead and Larsen oriented himself by it. He noted the relative position of certain bright stars to each other and the line of the moon's orbit, then snarled his followers to silence and led the way towards the ship.
They were halfway back to the clearing when one of the party stepped on a flat, flaccid, greenish-grey splash of what looked like a mould or fungus on the ground. He did not see it, though it was nearly six feet across. He knew nothing of its presence until something stirred violently under his foot and then cold, wet, invisible snaky things seized him in the darkness. He screamed and struggled. Rough mouth openings with rasping bristles scraped at his garments and tore them. Something fastened on his cheek. He clawed at it. Monstrous, sinewy, horrible arms closed upon him and began to squeeze the life out of him.
Larsen and the others heard the noise. Somebody shakily made a light. They saw their fellow crew member engulfed by what now appeared to be a monster land octopus whose tentacles formed a net about him which swiftly grew smaller. The thicker, central portion of the horror slavered and bubbled in its eagerness to feed, and many other small mouths attempted to begin.
Larsen used a blast rifle. He could have been more careful, but there was desperate need for haste. There were more lights held up in shaking hands. The monster dropped off after the blaster bolt hit it, but the crewman fell to the ground too. Then other blast rifles opened up on the thing. Presently it was only a writhing group of unspeakable fragments on the ground, each of them seeming separately alive and ravenous.
The returning party hastened on. Now they carried lights, and things came out of the jungle to gaze raptly at the torches. The men used blast rifles again, shooting their way along the game trail. Two of them helped the man the beast had almost killed. Larsen had burned his own leg badly with his first shot while blowing the monster apart.
Then something utterly gigantic blocked the trail and stood gazing fascinatedly at the torches. The men of the Theban desperately poured blaster bolts into it. Presently they were able to believe it was dead. But they heard other rustlings. Their torches were bringing other beasts.... Glassy-eyed with terror, they tiptoed past the monster they had killed, which smelled of slime.
When they reached the clearing, the state of their nerves was deplorable. Some of them stumbled across the carcasses of the creatures Larsen had killed from the air lock door. They were terrified.
But Horn's group of fugitives was in a much better situation. When night fell, they were safe from pursuit. True, their food supply was to be counted only in days; they were hunted; they couldn't expect rescue. But they were safe from pursuit, or so it seemed, and only this morning they hadn't been. They rejoiced in the wisdom of their new leader.
Except the engineer. He was restless and racked by his need for the bottles he depended on. The others were very weary, and an hour after the sudden sunset only Ginny and Horn were awake - aside from the engineer. Horn was taking the first night watch and Ginny sat beside him. They talked in the darkness. Sometimes Ginny laughed - not because Horn had said something humorous, but because she was happy. Fortunately we humans are really rational only part of the time.
Once, though, the Theban's engineer disturbed them to ask pitifully if there wasn't even part of a bottle among the castaways. Even part of a part - There wasn't.
As they talked, Horn worked in the darkness on a bit of bark from a thick-barked tree. He carved out an object some six inches wide and eight long, felt his handiwork, then made a second. When he was satisfied, he awoke the Danae's junior officer. He gave him the stun pistol for armament, then went to sleep with Ginny's fingers intertwined with his own.
Again he awoke when the sky grew grey. He took back the stun pistol and some other items. He went into the water alone, moving faster with no others to shepherd.
It took him an hour instead of a much longer time to reach a spot suited to his purposes. This was at the edge of the swamp. The water level had risen half a foot during the night. He strapped the carved bark items to his feet and ventured on solid ground, then examined his tracks.
They weren't human tracks. He'd invented an animal and the animal's tracks. He left those tracks behind him instead of his own. He went briskly along the jungle trails. And as he went, he spread bait.
The bait was interstellar credit notes which he laid along the game trail he followed. There were hundred-credit notes, and five-hundred-credit notes, and thousand-credit notes. He left them in plain sight. Anybody searching for a human trail where Horn moved would not find one. But anybody from the Theban who saw money in a jungle path would cease to look for anything else.
Halfway along the trail, Horn came upon the place where Larsen and the others had encountered a greenish-grey constrictor beast the night before. They'd blown it to bits with blast rifles, and the smaller bits were quite dead now. But the thicker, more noisome centre of the creature still throbbed faintly. Horn was sickened by the fact even as he put money down beside it.
He went on. Presently he hid himself carefully, to watch the clearing and what might happen in it. The bodies of the light-dazzled creatures were moved now from where they'd been. They were now food for some of those same greenish-grey horrors. The men of the Theban had shot some of them for sport, and shot and shot again the fragments into which they separated. But they were mindless, mere ravenousness. To kill them was poor sport even for strong- stomached men like Larsen's followers. They'd dragged the dead larger beasts out of the way, and now the flat discs squirmed and swarmed over them, embracing them foully while the mouths at the ends of the tentacles fed, and fed, and fed.
These things Horn saw. The gluttony of the monsters was revolting. But he waited for the movements of men.
At barely midmorning a second hunting party started out from the Theban. The men filed into a trail leading into the jungle. They vanished. Horn kept watch from a place well within the jungle's edge, listening. Not long after the departure, he heard a faint shout in the distance.
Then silence. The Theban stood almost perfectly upright, with the blazing sunshine of tropical Carola beating upon her. 'There was no movement except of the grey-green things devouring dead animals. There were the normal, strangely sweet sounds of the jungle, flutelike noises similar to bird calls, and small creakings from a particular kind of tree which became vocal when it swayed. Once or twice he heard deep-bass bellowings, minutes apart, and once he was sure he heard very deep, very faraway thunder.
Just after midday there was a sudden waning of the light. Horn looked up, and there were clouds almost reaching to mid-sky, thick and sullen and dark grey in colour. Lightning flashed among them. They did reach mid-sky, and then they sullenly floated away again.
The party from the Theban came back before dusk. Their clothing was dry. They hadn't attempted to follow the castaways to an imaginary destination beyond the swamp. Instead, they'd found money spread invitingly along a trail they came to, and they'd picked it up. They gathered up every bit of bait Horn had spread for them, and devoted the rest of the day to trying to find more. They were exuberant. They were excited. They'd found money!
They went joyously into the ship. Before they were all inside the air lock, they were babbling to those who had kept ship. They'd found money! Much money!
And it was true. Forty million credits was an abstraction. It didn't really exist. Hundred- credit notes did. So did five hundreds. And they had visible proof that there were such things as thousand-credit notes. These were not abstractions. These were things one could hold in one's hand. They felt rich!