2 - Blades of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury Page A

dozen
wounds but none had, it appeared, been effective in slowing it down. Suddenly
it began to run in a straight line, a thin, high wailing sound coming from it.
                   We lay flat as its speed increased, looking
our puzzlement at one another.
                   It must have been moving at a good sixty miles
an hour - probably more - as it darted along the tunnels, carrying us deeper
and deeper into the city.
                   Now the wailing increased in volume. The
spider-creature had gone berserk. Whether it was exhibiting a
madness , a heritage of its mad ancestors that it had only now failed to
control, or whether our wounds were driving it berserk with pain we were never
to know.
                   Suddenly I saw movement ahead.
                   It was a pack of the spider-men - whether they
were the same who had taken us to the hall of the web I could not guess -
looking plainly panic-stricken as we rushed at them.
                   When the huge, intelligent spider paused in
its mad rush and began to fall on them, biting them to death, taking a head in
its jaws and snapping it off at the neck, or biting a torso in two. It was a
grisly sight
                   We continued to cling as best we could to the
furry back of the incensed beast. Occasionally it would shout a recognisable
word or phrase but they made no sense to us.
                   Soon every single spider-man had been
destroyed and nothing was left but a heap of dismembered corpses.
                   My arm was aching and I felt I could not hang
on to the fur much longer. Any moment I was going to drop and become prey to
the spider-beast. From Hool Haji's grim expression I could see that he, too,
was feeling the strain and could not bear it much longer.
                   And then, quite suddenly, the spider-beast
began to sag at the leg joints. The legs were slowly drawn up under its body
and it sank down amongst the broken bodies of its servitors.
                   It had destroyed them, it seemed, in its
death-throes, for it cried one word: 'Gone!' - and died.
                   We made sure that the heart had ceased to beat
and then virtually fell from the beast's back and
stood looking up at it.
                   ‘I am glad it died and not us,' I said, 'but
it must have realised it was the last survivor of its aberrant species. What
actually went on in that crazed, alien brain, I wonder? I feel sorry for it in
a way. Its death was somehow noble.'
                   'You saw more than I did,' Hool Haji broke in.
'All I saw was an enemy that nearly destroyed us. But we have destroyed it -
that is good.'
                   This pragmatic statement from my friend shook
me from my somewhat speculative frame of mind - possibly out of place in the
circumstances - and made me begin to wonder how we were to find our way out of
this maze of a city. I wondered, also, if all the spider-men had been killed in
the death-throes of the beast.
                   We picked our way through the ruin of corpses
and followed the tunnel until it turned into a large hall.
                   We discovered a further tunnel leading off the
hall and plodded on, simply hoping that we should eventually find a room with a
window or exit - for there had been some visible from the outside.
                   The tunnels were difficult for Hool Haji to
negotiate most of the time - only a few of them were large enough to take the
spider-beast, for instance. This led me to conclude that the creature we had
destroyed had been, even amongst his own kind, a 'sport.'
                   Once again something in me awakened sympathy
for the misshapen creature that had been so ill-fitted for the world and yet
plainly possessed an excellent intelligence. In spite of its having threatened
my life, I could