Adventure stories; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction
Her fingers found a firm hold on his collar. She moved, broke into a
steady run, and his body, floating effortlessly at the height of her
waist, followed. She ran quietly, sure-footed in the darkness, with
only the sound of her breathing and the thin protests of the moss under
her feet. Sometimes his collar jerked as she changed course to avoid
some obstacle.
"I have no weight, but I still have mass and therefore inertia,"
he found himself thinking, and knew he should be afraid instead of
indulging in such random observations.
He discovered he could turn his head, although the rest of his body
remained locked in weightless rigidity, and gradually he became aware
of something following them. From the glimpses he caught in the
slanting red moonbeams it resembled a lemur. He watched it glide from
tree to tree like a flying squirrel, catch the rough bark and scramble
upward, glide again.
A whistle, overhead, a sound entirely distinct from that of the
wind-whipped branches, brought the girl to a sudden stop. She jerked
Eldon to a halt in mid-air beside her and pulled him into the deeper
shadow beneath a gnarled tree just as a great torpedo-shaped thing
passed above the treetops, glistening like freshly spilled blood in the
moonglow. Some sort of wingless aircraft.
They waited, the girl fearful and alert. The red moon dropped below the
horizon and a few stars--they were of a normal color--did little to
relieve the blackness. The flying craft returned, invisible this time
but still making a devilish whistle that grated on Eldon's nerves like
fingernails scraped down a blackboard as it zigzagged slowly back and
forth. Then gradually the noise died away in the distance.
The girl sighed with relief, made a chirruping sound, and the
lemur-thing came skittering down the tree beneath which they were
hiding. She spoke to it, and it gave a sailing leap that ended on
Eldon's chest. Its handlike paws grasped the fabric of his shirt. He
sank a few inches toward the ground, but immediately floated upward
again with nightmarish buoyancy.
The girl reached to her belt again, and then she was floating in the
air beside him. She grasped his collar and they were slanting upward
among the branches. The lemur-thing rose confidently, perched on his
chest. They moved slowly up to treetop level, where the girl paused
for a searching look around. Then she rose above the trees, put on
speed, and the hot wind whistled around Eldon's face as she towed him
along.
It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning. It might have been
minutes or hours. The throbbing of his headache diminished, leaving him
drowsy.
The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very
dim starlight he could just discern that it was pointing upward with
one paw, an uncannily human gesture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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