Free Android at Arms by Andre Norton Page B

spark is very low. I do not know whether he can survive the voyage. Yet he must if he is to have any hope of a future.”
    Andas watched her hand around the tubes. Seventy-eight years according to their reckoning! Yet she seemed a girl his own age, maybe younger, though one could never be sure of the true age of another species. It could be a short life span or one as long as the Zacathans who had outlived empires. Should he tell her of their new discoveries or what Grasty said had happened to Naul, of how long she might have been separated from her own people? He decided against that for the present.
    It was an uncomfortable night, and Andas got little sleep. They had turned on the nose light of the ship, thinking perhaps Turpyn might be honestly lost and could use that for a beacon, though they drew in the ramp as a logical protection. The visa-screen remained on, and twice Andas started up at a spark of light appearing on that, thinking maybe Turpyn had found some planet dwellers and was returning. But each time he watched the erratic actions of that spark he was forced to conclude it must mark the flight of some luminous night creature.
    By morning he was even more tired than he had been when he had dropped into that astrogator’s chair. But it would seem that his unrest had not been shared by his companions, for Grasty’s snores and the Salariki’s even breathing were those of sleepers. Andas lay for a while watching the change of view on the screen.
    A dark hump moved out into the field. Andas darted a finger to a button to freeze and enlarge the scene. A man crawling? Turpyn injured? No, it was a beast coming slowly because it grazed at some small plants that had sprung up among the old burn scars. From a long, pointed muzzle a blue tongue snapped out, curled about a tuft of the growth, jerked it loose from the soil with a sharp tug, and brought it back to the waiting mouth, all with methodical regularity like a servo robot.
    The humped body was shiny and dark, and the legs were very short, but its tail did not taper to the end. In fact, that reversed the usual pattern by uniting with the body in a narrow portion that then thickened and widened into a club. And the club seemed to have a coating of quills, which the creature either consciously or unconsciously flexed at intervals, so that they bristled out in an ominous display.
    But it was what was caught on those quills that riveted Andas’s full attention. Something fluttered, a small flag, bedraggled and stained. And that appeared also to annoy the creature, for it turned now and then (with difficulty because of its short neck and heavy shoulders) to snap out its tongue, as if it would so pull loose the rag from its quills.
    Some freak of the wind finally brought it within reach of the creature’s tongue, and the animal tore it loose and mouthed it. And then, with a very readable disgust, stamped upon it and turned aside, to eat its way through another patch of vegetation.
    Andas was already on the ship’s ladder. He descended as fast as he could, triggered the ramp controls, and then was out in the morning, heading for that rag. It was a wet mass, but he used stems of plants to straighten it out on the ground, only to have his suspicion proved correct. Chewed, torn, muddied, it was also otherwise stained. And it was part of a coverall—Turpyn’s.
    The tracks of the animal were easy to read. These could be back-trailed. They must be. Andas started for the ship.
    Grasty refused to go, and they overruled Elys when she volunteered. So it was Yolyos and Andas, with all the caution they could summon, who went down that trail. It led them to the buildings engulfed in the jungle. In the center of what had once been a courtyard they found what they sought.
    It was not good to see, and they scooped a hurried grave, both working as swiftly as they could to get it out of sight; “it”—because what lay there had no resemblance now