The jets wouldn't hold her up. She sank, stern-first. Stannard almost relaxed. If the gyros seized now or the jets cut out—a trick they'd been doing for three days past—he was simply dead. He'd done everything there was to do.
He caught a fleeting glimpse of foliage rising past the side ports. Then jets sputtered erratically, he heard the beginning shriek of dry gyro-shafts, there was a crashing, then a violent bump, then a heaving, wrenching explosion. The control room split down the middle on either side of him, the whole scrap heap which was the Snark partly folded on itself like an accordion and partly billowed out like an expanding latex bubble—and there was a vast silence.
Stannard hung in the control seat with an expression of vast amazement on his face. The amazement was because he was alive. He didn't even seem to have any broken bones. But the Snark was not quite through. He heard a crackling, booming noise.
The fuel-store had caught. It might burn merely brightly or it might burn with the ravening ferocity of thermite or it might let go at any instant in a monstrous detonation which would blast everything up to half a mile away.
It was time to get away from there. Stannard broke loose the straps, pitched headlong and without dignity, scrambled through a gap in the plating and ran like the devil.
He dodged tree-trunks, panting, and came out on a patch of savannah just as the fuel blew. There was a sound like the end of all creation, a blast of air lifted him off his feet and hurtled him forward off the ground with his legs still making ridiculous running motions. He landed in a slough of mud. He fell hard. He went under. The mud tried enthusiastically to smother him.
He fought to the surface and cleared thick adhesive stuff from his mouth so that he could gasp in air. He cleared his eyes and nose. He floundered ashore to something solid, swept more mud from himself, saw squirming things wriggling frantically out of the stuff that still coated him—and began to swear.
Instants later he was out of his outer garments and ready for anything. But the squirming things were as anxious to get away from him as he was to avoid contact with them. They writhed and squirmed and inched themselves like measuring-worms, back toward the mud. They were two or three inches long and disgustingly naked flesh. They fled. He heard tiny sucking sounds as they regained their normal habitat and scrambled into clayey seclusion again.
Then there was stillness once more. He looked about and listened. In ancient days there had been tales of castaways. They were very glamorous exciting stories. But this was something else. In the act of estimating his own situation he grew angry all over again at the sabotage which had brought it to pass, for the ruining of the task on which he had been engaged.
He fumbled at the mud which was his outer clothing. He pulled loose and scraped off the belt, which contained a heat unit that, on occasion, could serve as a weapon. He slung the belt about himself and scraped further at his clothes.
He listened from time to time. The mud was infinitely adhesive. Presently he surveyed the mud-slough. There was a small, languid stream which flowed into it. There was a fallen tree-trunk which spanned it at its narrowest. He went out on the trunk and scrubbed off the mud with flowing water.
Four or five more squirming things came frantically out and dropped into the water. His garments became clean. He flapped them violently and the water-droplets flew away. He put his clothes on again, dry.
Somehow he felt better, though this was no enviable situation. Aside from the absolute failure of the job he'd been on he was in a bad fix. This was one of the planets of the Bornik star-cluster and he thought it was Pasik but he was not sure.
The whole group had been surveyed, a couple of centuries before and all the stars were yellow dwarfs, the planets were approximately solar-family types and vegetation on this one had been green as seen from space. Green vegetation plus seas meant breathable atmosphere and not too impossible a climate.
This could be Pasik, if he'd identified the local sun correctly. But he wasn't sure even of that. This part of the galaxy wasn't much visited. Sometimes a hunting-party came through to land here and there and gather more or less improbable specimens.
There were races of low development on some of the planets and there was a vague commerce of sorts kept up by occasional traders. But the known facts about the planets were few. Men could live on them but few did. A castaway could survive but the odds against being picked up were so enormous that they were best expressed by zero.
A single castaway on a planet the size of Earth could escape notice even during a ninety-per-cent complete survey. When there was only one ship in years, which might touch only at one spot more or less at random, there was no chance at all.
So Stannard looked upon his life as a member of the human race as finished. Somebody else would have to take over his job.
In the stillness he heard the crackling of cooling metal sheets. There wouldn't be much to salvage from the Snark and what there was could wait. But still—
He moved back toward the site of the recent explosion. He came to trees bent outward from the blast. He went through them to stumps of trees snapped off by the explosion and piled in untidy windrows. He wormed through a passable place and saw the crater where the Snark had been.
There was literally nothing left but a hole in the ground. On one pile of shattered trees he saw a bit of torn plating. Caught among tree-stumps he saw a crumpled mass of metal. And that was all.
He managed to shrug. No stores, no tools, no food. Hopelessly isolated for all time—
Then he saw a movement across the clearing the explosion had made. Something glistened blackly among tree-branches. A thing came out of the tumbled, shattered trees. It carried a spear and it was about five feet high. It had a cylindrical body and glistening, jointed legs which looked mechanical.
It had two arms of nearly human size and two smaller, apparently specialized mandible-like upper arms and a head which was curiously humanoid without being in the least human. Another similar creature followed it, and another and another. There were thirty of them altogether. Some carried spears and others carried other weapons and several had bags containing mysterious objects slung over their shoulders.
They regarded the crater and made noises among themselves. Stannard froze. A man who stands motionless does not attract attention. This is true on all planets everywhere. Stannard stood still.
The sticklike men moved forward. Despite the angularity of their structure they moved gracefully. They peered into the crater where the fuel had blown a hole all of forty feet across. One of them pointed to the crumpled plating. More noises. One of them doubled up suddenly, and then was erect again. Others did the same.
They clustered around the crater and gesticulated to one another. Then, suddenly, they began to dance. It was a hilarious, unorganized, utterly gleeful dance. Stannard realized, blinking, that they knew exactly what the plating was.
They knew that a ship had crashed and blown itself to atoms and their doublings-up were laughter and the hopping and cavorting was the expression of exuberance that a creation of men had destroyed itself and—of course—apparently killed all the humans in it.
Then one of the stickmen saw Stannard. The dancing stopped instantly. All the stickmen—those with spears included—stared at him. They began to move toward him.