I came alive, crawling through the interior hatch, which was hanging back open, fastened back, so that the Kur could have his clean shot. I slipped inside, and nearly fell, my feet scraping for a hold. I found it. I heard the Kur outside howl with rage. I tried to swing the hatch shut, to lock it, but it hung crooked on its hinges and would not close. Perhaps it had been damaged in the crash of the ship. Perhaps the Kur with whom I had trekked had, with the frenzy of a Kur’s strength, wrenched it aside, before meeting the four charges of the other Kur’s weapon. I heard the Kur’s claws swift on the steel outside, scraping, climbing. I reached for the ring at my neck. It was gone! The bit of leather, brittle, worn from the sun, had separated. I heard the snap of the hand weapon.
I looked up. It was not more than eighteen inches from my face. It snapped again. I dropped into the darkness of the ship. It was empty. The Kur howled with rage. I fell, dropping, striking objects, sliding for perhaps forty or fifty feet, until stopped by a compartment wall. I looked up. The interior of the ship was suddenly illuminated. In the cylinder above me, in the portal, his paw at the disk, stood the Kur. He looked down at me. His lips drew back. He had discarded the weapon. I looked about myself, wildly. The interior of the ship, given its attitude, seemed oddly askew. Beyond this it was not as compact as I would have expected, as filled with devices, panels and storage cabinets. It had been muchly stripped, apparently, presumably to lighten it. I saw the Kur easily, gracefully for its bulk, with its long arms, pipe to pipe, swing down toward me. When it reached my level I tried to climb upward, clinging to piping at the ship’s side. Its hand closed about my ankle and I felt myself torn from the piping. I was lifted in the air and hurled against the wall of the ship, and I fell back from the wall, falling some ten feet to the remains of a twisted, ruptured bulkhead, slipped from it and fell another five feet into a debris of scrap and wire. I crawled on my bands and knees. I heard the Kur approach. Under some pipes, below me, suddenly, I saw the ring. I fell to my stomach, my arm clawing downward. I could not reach it. I scrambled to my feet. The Kur looked down, he, too, seeing the ring. I backed away, stumbling a bit, back in the debris and wire. I looked upward, in the inclining cylinder of the ship. High above me, some sixty or seventy feet, I saw six dials. The Kur reached down with its long arm. I bent to the pile of debris and wire. The Kur’s arm was long enough to reach the ring, as mine was not, but the piping beneath which it had fallen was too closely set to accommodate the large arm of the Kur. I began to climb upward, on projections, on spaced piping, on the remains of sundered bulkheads, toward the dials. The Kur took the pipes in his hands, to bend them apart. He had separated them some five inches when he looked up. He saw me. He howled with rage. No longer did, he concern himself with the ring. Instantly he began to climb toward me. He climbed swiftly, purposefully.
I crouched on a steel beam athwart the cylinder, opposite the six dials. The first four dials were motionless. The last two were still in motion. Each dial had a single sweep. Each dial was divided into twelve divisions. The sweeps in the first four dials were vertical. I could not read the numerals on the dials.
I surmised the vertical position was equivalent to twelve or zero. It was the position, at any rate, it seemed clear, in which the devices stopped. The movement of the sweeps was counterclockwise.
The Kur was climbing toward me.
The first dial, I surmised, registered something equivalent to months, the second to weeks, the third to days, the fourth to hours. I did not know the rate of revolution of the Kurii’s original planet, nor the rate of its rotation. I had little doubt that these measurements, however, were calibrated on the movements of a world, presumably vanished, destroyed in their wars. They had destroyed one world; they now desired another.
With my teeth I tore the insulation from a part of the wire I had taken from the pile of debris and wire, coiled and, in my teeth, carried with me in my climb.
I looped the noose where the wire was naked. As the Kur climbed near me, his back to me I caught its great shaggy bead in the loop and drew it tight. It tore at the fine wire with its thick digits but they could not slip beneath it. I flung myself backward off the beam and the wire pulled the Kur from the side of the ship until it hung, struggling, I hanging a few feet below it. It flung out its paws but could grasp on nothing. It tried to hold the wire, and climb on it, or relieve the pressure on its throat, but its great paws slipped on the slender strand; then its weight began to pull me upward; I, hands knotted in the insulated portion of the wire, kicked the Kur back as it reached for me; then I was above it, being drawn by its weight to the height of the beam; the shoulders of the Kur were mantled in red; blood ran heavily from its throat, in throbbing, gigantic glots; I braced, myself, head down, feet pressed up against the beam, to hold the Kur in place; then, without warning, the wire parted; when the wire parted I was almost horizontal to the beam, trying to keep from being pulled over it, trying to hold the Kur; the force of my legs, relieved suddenly of the counter tension of the Kur’s weight, flung me back, almost to the other side of the ship, and I slid down a few feet and caught some piping. The Kur, striking four times, fell some sixty or seventy feet, to the lowest level of the ship, past the door, well below the level of the sand outside.
I looked to the dials. The fifth sweep, on the fifth dial, was almost vertical.
Outside I knew it was night. The storm still raged.
There was heavy glass over the faces of the dials. I climbed to the beam from whence I had snared the Kur. I could not reach the dials.
I cast about wildly. I could not stop them.
Below me, to my horror, I saw the Kur, a mass of blood, struggle to its feet. It was still bleeding, heavily, from the throat. I had little doubt that the great vessel of its throat had been opened, if not severed.
The beast seemed indomitable. Its strength was almost inconceivable.
It climbed slowly. I saw its uplifted face, its terrible eyes, the fangs, the ears laid back against its head. Hand over hand, not swiftly now, not easily, but foot by torturous foot, it climbed.
I seized a narrow pipe over my head, jerking at it. It contained wire. In a frenzy I tried to free it of the side of the ship. I could not loosen it.
The beast was nearer now, and still climbing. I saw its eyes. It moved another six inches toward me.
I tore loose the pipe. The sweep on the fifth dial, suddenly, stopped. The sweep on the sixth dial began to move toward the vertical, swiftly, counterclockwise.
I did not think its journey would take more than a few seconds. I struck at the sixth dial with the pipe, again and again, shattering the glass. I saw the Kur not a foot below me. It tried to lift its hand, to seize me. Blood no longer ran from its throat. It was dead. It tumbled back from the piping on the side of the ship, and fell to the lower level.
I jammed the thin pipe, like a spear from the beam, into the face of the dial.
The sixth sweep, a moment later, struck against this obstacle, stopping short of the vertical mark.
I lay on-the beam and wept, and feared that I would fall.
When I dared to move, I left the ship. Outside the storm had abated. I found the Kur in the sand, with whom I had trekked.