I carried the stalk back to the car and tossed it into the locks. I'd stepped inside myself and had just closed the door when I saw movement to my right--on my side of the canal, in the direction of Solis Lacus Major. A small creature, a little larger than a St. Bernard, was approaching the Mars-car. It looked like a dwarf camel, except that it was headless. And the hump wasn't a hump, but a shiny bump with a metallic luster. I said it had no head, but it did have a mouth--gaping, grinning and full of pointed teeth. It had four legs and many arms--long, sinuous, many-jointed, with two fingers at the end--growing like a fringe around that bump in the middle of the creature's back. Then I saw that the vegetation in its path was smoldering. The animal had only to move a small black thing that sprouted on a stem from the top of its hump, and whatever lay in front of it started to smoke. "Axel!" I screamed into my helmet transmitter. "There's a Martian down here!" No one had told me what it was and none of its acts had shown that it had intelligence, but some instinct told me this creature was the highest form of life on Mars. _Chapter 13_ The machine in which I traveled made no distinction between forward and reverse. You set a hand throttle in one direction to go forward, and in another to go back. It went just as fast one way as the other and there was no need to turn it around. I started back up the incline without turning anything but my seat, so anxious was I to get away from that Martian. I'd started up the incline before I glanced back in my rear-vision mirror and saw that this creature had been joined by a companion, identical in every detail to my indiscriminating eyes, although I suppose their mothers could have told them apart. Axel's voice jabbered in my ears but I wasn't listening. I wanted to get out of this canal and away from these horrible creatures. I didn't like their teeth, I didn't like their black humps or radar antennae, or even their padded feet. That destroying heat ray was radar. "What's that about radar, Bill?" came Axel's voice. I knew I'd spoken aloud. "They've got built-in radar instead of eyes!" I said. "It's so powerful it sets fire to things." Radar could do that. Strong stations on earth could literally cook a man unfortunate enough to get within close range. Even weak stations could set off flashlight bulbs in a photographer's camera. The walls of the car had protected me. Even my spacesuit probably would have been sufficient protection. But I didn't like all this power in a living body. The Martians, apparently startled as much by me as I had been by them, hesitated before starting in pursuit. I was hitting the steep grade up the wall of the canal before they came after me. But they ran slowly and gracefully, in no hurry to catch me. They kept a reasonable distance.