Fear that man

because of the bats on Capistrano. It’s a necessity when you go out hunting multi-tonned radar-eyed things like those.” He thumbed the gear into full operation, jumped the sphere a hundred feet straight up.
        Beneath them, the missile streaked back toward the mother ship. With luck, they would get to see it strike the mountainous vessel in a matricide thrust. There was one trouble with a weapon that was completely self-controlled. Sure, it cut down the duties of the war room when you were firing a thousand rounds a minute, but it also left open the possibility of the round returning to strike the gunman. With a yellow cloud of thick smoke, the missile struck the hull of the other ship, tearing a hole ten feet across in the thick metal hide. Even this, however, was a minor abrasion on that great body.
        “I think this confirms the extra-galactic theory,” Sam said.
        With anti-radar giving them a form of invisibility-temporarily, at least-Coro brought the floater in closer, buzzing only fifty feet over the top of the slab-like vessel. “Still, the death of God should have made them nonviolent tool”
        “What now?” Lotus asked.
        Sam was surprised that a woman had kept such superb composure through an actual malicious and deadly missile attack. Even he was stifling a scream, but she seemed perfectly willing to accept a flying mountain full of men-if, indeed, they were men-from another galaxy.
        “Next? We go in,” Coro said very matter-of-factly. “We go inside the ship.”
        All three turned to stare at him, mouths open, as if he were some strange curiosity.
        “You’re insane!” Lotus said, almost as if she meant it literally.
        “What good will going inside do?” Crazy said, scratching in his tumble of hair.
        “He’s right,” Sam said after a moment of silence.
        “Right?” Lotus held a hand up to her ear as if to block out this ridiculousness.
        “Yes. Andy is perfectly correct. We don’t have the fire power in this floater to shoot them down. Besides, now that we are fighting intelligent creatures and not just Beasts, I am quite sure none of us could pull a trigger anyway. We are ingrained with pacifism. We are and have long been above war. Let’s face it: the only way we can hope to save ourselves and the rest of the galaxy is by first-hand analysis of the problem.”
        “Well put,” Coro said.
        “How many have to go in?” Lotus asked.
        “Not you,” Coro said. “You’re too fragile for this job.” He saw her bristling at the remark and hastened to add a qualifying statement: “Besides, we need someone behind to ready the robodoc unit and prepare for us in case we get hurt in there. And Crazy will stay behind too. This is going to have to be an after-dark, hush-hush sort of thing. With those hooves, Crazy would make too much noise.”
        “That’s fine with me,” Crazy said, turning to look back at the giant ship.
        “Sam?”
        “I’ll go,” Sam answered, wondering where he was finding the reservoir of courage, deciding it was a spill-over from Coro.
        Coro brought the floater around, hugging the alien hull, and set a speed matching that of the ponderous vessel. “We wait until they set her down somewhere and until dark. She’s bound to set down for repairs from the missile strike. We take whatever equipment we can use or adapt to use, cut a hole in her side, go in, and find out what we can. All very simple.”
        “And dangerous,” Lotus said, looking at both of them with eyes that cut deep and saw much. “Too dangerous.”
        
        At the base of the towering monolith, they looked back toward the grove of trees where the floater lay. They had to strain their eyes to see the vague curve of the outer hull, and even then, it seemed to be a trick of shadows and not really a hard, worldly object.
        “What next?” Sam asked, turning back to the impressive black hull before them, the seamless alien wonder.
        Coro rapped the metal lightly with the handle of his knife. There was an almost imperceptible change in tone as they moved down the long flank, a tendency to hollowness. They repeated the process again to see if the same change hit them this time. It did. “We cut a hole-here,” Coro said, reaching behind into his backpack, struggling a hand-laser out, thumbed it to full intensity.
        They wore space suits, and now, by mutual accord, they flipped the