Torcred struck viciously, denting the man's helmet.
Torcred struck viciously, denting the man's helmet.
Torcred struck viciously, denting the man's helmet.
He landed in a tangle of arms and legs—the man he had stunned sprawled atop another who struggled to free himself. Torcred sprang clear and, across the cramped central compartment of the panzer, faced a third gray-clad man with a drawn knife.
Incredulity and fright were written large on the panzer-man's face. Out of sheer desperation he lunged forward in a stabbing rush; but he was no knife-fighter, and the two-foot length of steel in Torcred's hands was a far superior weapon. The knife flew wide and its wielder stumbled back, nursing a bruised forearm.
Another figure appeared in the narrow door forward and stared at the scene with popping eyes—the driver, no doubt. Torcred greeting him with a ferocious grin and swung his club whistling back and forth. He looked and felt invincible.
Then Ladna's voice behind him screamed, "Torcred! Look out!"
He whirled, and the knife-blade gashed his shoulder instead of sinking into his back. Then Torcred struck a two-handed blow and felt bone give way beneath it. He took a couple of steps back from the crumpled body of the panzer-man who had unluckily disentangled himself from his unconscious comrade, and set his back against a solid bulkhead; on his face was still the savage grin that had frozen the driver in his tracks.
The bird-girl dropped lightly from the ladder and came to his side, scooping up the knife that was red with Torcred's blood. Her shining eyes reflected his fierce elation of victory.
Torcred realized that if he lost time his psychological advantage might go with it. He snapped at the two remaining panzer-men, his voice rasping strangely from his dry throat, "Quick! Do you want to live?"
They stared at him dumbly; it was almost beyond their power to grasp that this bloodstained, primitive being had got inside their defenses, that the far-ranging guns whose breeches thrust into the compartment were useless.
Torcred took a step toward them, swinging his bar ominously. The man who was clutching his right arm asked sullenly, "What are you? What do you want?"
"I am Torcred," and he added with brief thought, "the Terrible. And we want very little from you—food, water, weapons from your stores. You can keep your lumbering panzer; we've got no use for it." The two men exchanged fearful glances, sure now they had to do with a mad creature. He gave them no chance to think it out. "Right now, we want to look around in peace. Ladna! Find something and tie them up."
The girl, dagger in hand, opened the door of the rear compartment; a whimper of terror came from the darkened interior, where two women and an indeterminate number of offspring hugged one another in paralyzed panic. Ladna spoke to them with a soothing softness that amazed Torcred, rummaged inside and came out with a coil of strong wire. The solitary panzer, an economy in itself, carried a little of everything.
Under the menace of Torcred's club, the terrorized panzer-men submitted. Then the two invaders found the machine's provisions, and satisfied first their raging thirst and afterwards the hunger that had been forgotten in the face of the greater need for water. But Ladna broke off eating to bandage Torcred's slashed shoulder with strips torn from a gray garment.
It was then he remembered to scold her. "What did you mean," he demanded between bites, "by rushing in here, after I distinctly told you to keep in the clear?"
Her blue answering gaze held an impudence that was a new thing to him. "I saw you had stopped it, Torcred the Terrible, so I came. And—where would you have been if I hadn't?" Her strong slender fingers closed for a moment painfully on his wounded shoulder.
He was silent, remembering with a queer excitement what her warning cry had been. "Torcred!" not "Terrapin!" ...
The bandage finished, he stood up and said brusquely, "We'd better get ready to leave."
"You plan to go on foot again—now that we've captured a machine?"
"It's the only sensible way," asserted Torcred flatly. "Neither of us knows how to repair the caterpillar tread, or, if we managed that, how to maneuver and fight the panzer; if we were attacked, it would be a death trap for us. Afoot, we're in very little danger—what machine of prey would be likely to consider us worthy of notice?"
They looted the best of the provisions, and the girl's deft fingers fashioned for each a strap of sorts from a roil of cellotex fabric. Torcred went up to the driver's cabin, located the engine under the floor, and did things to it that would keep the panzer immobilized until long after the blowing sand should have covered their traces. The woman could untie their men as soon as they gained courage to come out of hiding....
Terrapin and bird-girl set their faces to the east and began to trek again. They trudged on with lightened hearts.
They had gone about a mile when a fold of the land revealed a wide swathe of desert dotted with camouflaged steel hemispheres, mostly buried in the sand—a big colony of the pillbox people.
They ducked back behind the shelter of the sand-hills and began what looked like the shortest detour. Suddenly Ladna, glancing back the way they had come, cried out sharply.
Torcred turned, and saw a plume of dust above the far-off dunes—then a gray scurrying beetle-thing that rose to a crest, vanished, and reappeared on a nearer swell.
It was a terrapin, travelling fast, and as it raced closer there was less and less doubt that it was following their own plainly marked trail. Torcred strained his eyes through the heat-shimmer to make out the identifying mark on its blunt nose; he stiffened, and his hand dropped to the knife he had taken from the panzer.
"Helsed! He's picked up our trail somehow—but what does he want?"
"The fat terrapin, the one that twisted my arm? I think I know," the bird-girl said in a low voice.
Torcred's dark face went hard as flint. His mind seethed: there was no hiding here, no use trying to flee from the hundred-mile-an-hour pursuer—or was there?
Uncertain, he stood stockstill. The girl pressed shivering against him. Helsed would not open fire, of course, for fear of hitting her; there might be a chance of parleying. If he could only lure the fellow into the open—
The Terrapin swung broadside—on a stone's throw from them. Its door opened, and Helsed half slid out of the seat. He eyed the pair, swarthy brows rising in seeming amusement.
"Ah, still together," he observed. "Torcred, my dear fellow—you shouldn't be traveling in such company, even in your present status. Suppose you run along and let me take care of her."
Torcred controlled his voice with an effort, "You'rea terrapin in good standing, Helsed. Would you discard your honor—"
The other smirked. "Don't worry. I'm not a fool like you; I won't take her home with me."
Torcred ground his teeth. "You're crazy!"
"I had to leave the hunt and make good time to catch you—I don't feel like being disappointed." The viciousness in Helsed's smooth voice crept into the open. "And I have a score to settle with you anyway." He jerked the terrapin's door shut, and its nose gun started to swing around.
Torcred spun and ran, crouching, knowing the girl would follow. They plunged over the dune-top close together; the terrapin's gun wavered and did not fire, then its motor snarled into life and it bounded after them.
Torcred, with Ladna close behind, ran panting down the windward slope, straight toward a cluster of domed, sunken structures. Sheer amazement of the pillbox-dwellers must have kept them alive so far; every moment he expected a murderous barrage.
It came. The nearest pillbox erupted flame, and beyond it others. The explosions rolled flatly, echoless across the desert. Torcred caught the girl round the waist and flung her down beside him; hugging the ground, he raised his head slightly and looked back.
The terrapin swerved agilely among spouting columns of sand. Then all its wheels left the ground at once, it tilted in the air and rolled over and over down the long slope of the dune. Black smoke poured from its punctured armor.
VII
Torcred stared long at the blackened wreck, hardly noting that the guns were silent, the haze settling. He knew none of the exhilaration that had been his when he took the panzer; a sickish sensation nested in his stomach. He had killed—by subterfuge, true, but killed all the same—a brother-terrapin, and now in his own mind rose up against him a lifetime's training, all the blood-ties with his own kind....
His own kind. The terrapins. But were they?What was he?
The breeze, laden with sharp smoke of explosive, made his eyes twitch and smart. He blinked, and saw the man standing on the dune's edge above them. Much nearer this time, so that there could be no doubt that the eyes were looking at him, that the lips smiled. That smile, and the careless stance that went with it, seemed to radiate confident power.
Beside Torcred the girl gasped, and he knew with sudden relief that she too had seen the stranger.
And so did the others. The bright air was split again by thunder as some touchy pillbox fired a shell. It struck squarely at the stranger's feet, and they saw him blown to fragments. But the burst drifted down the wind, things crawled and flickered in the air, and he was there again, smiling more broadly than before. He glanced aside, at the smashed terrapin, then back at Torcred, and raised his right hand in a gesture—thumb and finger forming a circle—that some of the desert peoples used as a sign of approval and encouragement.
Then he rippled slightly, like a reflection in water, and was gone.
Torcred was hardly conscious of how they squirmed out of range of the pillbox people's venomous annoyance. Ladna, brushing tangled black hair out of her eyes, was first to break the silence.
"Was that what you saw yesterday?"
"Uh-huh," admitted Torcred glumly. "But you saw. He wasn't real at all."
"Did we see the same? He was blown to bits, and reassembled himself unhurt?" Torcred nodded. "Then there was something there."
"What?" he demanded, irked by her superior reasoning.
"I don't know.... But I remember something. A month ago, a man in strange clothing like that—a real man of flesh and blood—came to our eyrie. No one knew where he came from, or where he went when they laughed him to scorn."
"They laughed—why?"
"Because he talked about 'civilization' to every one who would listen—but he didn't seem to realize that the civilization of the air is necessarily the highest. And he said we should make peace with all other creatures—even the buzzards!—and refrain from hunting, and practise photosynthesis like the lesser races." She wrinkled her peeling nose. "If that weren't enough, he mixed his talk with old legends—stories of the ancients, and the floating cities."
"I've heard—" Torcred began, looking impressed. The girl smiled loftily.
"Those are tales that have lost their substances, fit for the young, the ignorant, and the uncivilized. Certainly the great ancients existed—they were an air-people like us, who ruled the world long ago, as we shall in time to come. But that they were immortal and are still alive, drifting somewhere in midocean out of sight of land—that's nonsense."
"Maybe so," Torcred grunted stolidly. In the cosmogony he knew, the ancients were mighty terrapin heroes of the world's youth, from whose stock all other races had degenerated; they still lived somewhere, and would return to make the terrapins supreme again.... He said matter-of-factly, "If you want to know what I think—we are being watched, by something that is alive and powerfulhereandnow."
Ladna started and looked nervously round. She had begun to respect the Terrapin's shrewd native intelligence. As they plodded on across the desert, she said no more, infected by his dark preoccupation.
But in Torcred's brain the question of the stranger's identity loomed less large than that of his own. What was he? Ex-warrior and hunter, ex-hero, ex-terrapin—he could think of things he had been and was not.
I am a—
He had no word. Outcast, traitor, criminal? A newborn pride in him rebelled against the labels he would have accepted without question before his battle with the panzer. He had earned a name, but he had no name.
The west veiled its face in flame again, and darkness overtook them in the wilderness. Torcred dreamed that he stood naked in the middle of a vast circle of formidable machines that snarled and hooted, demanding his name and lineage; and he had no answer. In desperation he cried, "I am I!"—and a thousand motors roared, the armored mass rolled inward to crush him.
He woke staring into a dawn-lit sky where a black flight of buzzards droned northward thousands of feet overhead.
Ladna was awake too and looking up, the old tense fear-born hatred expressed in every line of her body.
"They're insolent," she murmured half to herself. "So close.... This is already my people's land," she explained to Torcred, and her gaze led his toward the mountains, where gray and red and yellow cliffs and slopes stood out now from the blue haze of the canyons. "I don't know how those buzzards dare to fly so near."
"Why do you hate them so?" asked Torcred.
"They're evil. They want to rule the world."
"Well—" Torcred scowled, still out of sorts after his nightmare. "Don't you bird-folk have the same grand plans?"
"That's different!" she cried vehemently. "Don't dare to compare us to the buzzards! We're hunters, like the terrapins, but the buzzards kill and destroy for sport. The milk of their mothers is bitter with cruelty! Oh, if those things should win—" she made a swift gesture to ward off evil—"you'll learn what terror can be!"
A skeptical part of Torcred's mind reflected that that was one side's story. But he wanted to believe the girl when her blue eyes blazed so and her voice trembled with passion. Once he had wanted to hurt her and humble her. That had been long ago....
But there was a strained silence between them as they made ready to resume the march.
They had hardly gone fifty paces when they heard again the noise of engines aloft, nearer this time, and looking up saw a second trio of buzzards passing over. But one of these had left the others and was dropping steeply earthward, heading, it seemed, straight toward them.
Torcred stared stupidly at the great machine—it could not possibly mean to attack them in their utter insignificance. Ladna was less confident; she shrilled, "Down!" and Torcred dropped to all fours and flattened himself to the sand beside her, just as the buzzard leveled off and shot overhead so low that they could see the landing wheels folded like talons under it, could see a door open in its black belly. Something appeared through the aperture and vanished in the speed of its fall. The buzzard had laid an egg, and it hatched mere yards away with a flash and roar that left them blinded, deafened, smothered, feeling that the earth had heaved up to meet the falling sky and pinned them between.
Torcred sat up, swaying, his head a ringing void. He glimpsed Ladna's face, tears of rage furrowing the grime of sand on her cheeks as she glared after the receding and climbing buzzard.
And not far away, among loose heaps of sand on the rim of the blast crater, he saw a strange thing. A massive cone of metal, with the spiral grooves and flanges of a screw, thrust slantingly from the ground; it was turning slowly, earth dropping from it, and as he stared it turned faster and moved forward and upward, drawing after it a glistening rounded back.
Dazedly Torcred walked toward the thing, and as he did so a port-cover lifted in the armored back and a man's head thrust out. He blinked at Torcred with a look of stunned confusion.
"What happened?" demanded the mole in a shaken voice. "I was coming up for a breath of air, then—bang!" He looked around wildly. "My garden! What have they done to my garden?"
The moles, Torcred knew, made gardens—sheets of cellotex impregnated, like the sun-screens of the trailers and like machines, with photosynthetic chemicals. Even the predators left them alone, for the most part, since the moles were a peaceful and harmless race. That, then, had been the bomb's target.
The mole peered at Torcred, seemed to come to himself. "What are you?" he gasped, and without waiting for an answer, ducked inside. The hatch-cover slammed, the great screw reversed and revolved furiously, and the burrowing machine slowly sank from sight under the sand.
"Now do you believe me—aboutthem?" demanded Ladna's stifled voice.
Torcred nodded slowly, feeling sorry for the poor frightened mole, and rather surprised at himself for it, as he had been when he had spared the beaten crew of the panzer.... Torcred the Terrapin was never like that. Mechanically his fingers caressed the half-healed mark on his forehead.
The girl's tongue seemed loosened by their near escape, and as they journeyed on, she talked, with a calm bitterness now, of the enemy. Torcred knew vaguely that, somewhere far to the north, was Buzzard Base, an immense fortress with subterranean dwellings and hangars where the black monsters bred and swarmed. Ladna enlightened him further. "Some of our spies"—the word meant nothing to Torcred—"got inside the place not long ago. They reported things stirring, the buzzards building airframes and engines at a furious rate, obviously planning a new move. Naturally, we increased our construction tempo to keep pace with them, but we've been puzzled; you see, there were rumors that the chief buzzards were worried about something else, besides the old dragging stalemate. But whatever it was, they were keeping it secret even from their own rank and file."
Torcred shook his head bewilderedly; he was lost in her world with its vastness and complexity of organization and politics and schemes for domination. With the openmindedness of confusion he had to admit that the civilization of the air was such as the free terrapins did not dream of.... And he felt an inward hurt as, in the girl's talk of her people and their life, he sensed the widening of the distance between them, which had almost dwindled away while they wandered and struggled to survive and nearly died together in the desert.
But the mountains were close now, and they made good time that day. They did not need to evade any of the prowling land machines, for the desert here was utterly empty, unmarked by wheels, under the threat of the desolate plateaus above and ahead, from which deadly flying things ranged far and wide.
A couple of times they glimpsed winged squadrons in the sky, and the girl's eyes shone, and the shadow on Torcred's face grew deeper.
As evening came on, the mesas rose bare and sheer before them out of the sandy waste. They climbed laboriously over smooth rock and gravel slides; Ladna led the way upward, trying to sight landmarks that were meant to be seen from the air.
At last she gave a little cry of joy, and pointed up the dry streambed they were ascending. Torcred looked, and saw nothing but the rock-rimmed head of the canyon; but the girl had seen some sign that wholly escaped him. "We're practically there!"
Behind her back Torcred passed a hand across his eyes. "Well, then," he said with assumed casualness, "you'll be all right from here on."
She whirled and gave him a searching look. "What are you talking about?"
Torcred's jaw muscles twitched. "I'm wishing you a happy homecoming," he answered, "by way of saying goodbye."
"But you're coming with me!... Aren't you?... What else can you do?"
He shook his head somberly. "I'm too used to freedom, Ladna. I'll take my chances with the desert again."
"I told you my people will accept you, and your fate among them will be no worse than mine...." Her protest trailed off as she read the inflexible refusal in his impassive face.
"Earth and sky can't meet." He looked back down the canyon, toward where a wedge of the barren plain, pink with reflected sunset, showed between the rock walls. Then the girl was in front of him again. Her eyes were very large, and her red lips spoke no more useless words of pleading.
Instead—her hands were on his shoulders, her arms slipped round his neck as her slim body swayed against him, her face blurred with nearness, tilted up....
Gravely, according to the terrapin custom, Torcred touched noses with her.
He felt her go tense, and she drew back. Her eyes glistened with a shock and disappointment he was at a loss to understand. She said in a choked voice, "Good-bye!" and turned and fled up the ravine.
Mechanically Torcred picked up the satchel with the remainder of her share of the food and water, which she had remembered to leave behind. His muscles tightened with a violent urge to run after her and bring her back by force.
But how could he hold her with him? She still had her place, however small, in the world of machines that had cast him out.... Suddenly he hated them all without exception, all the iron monsters that ruled the world in whose sight flesh and blood were helpless, hopeless, as nothing.
He stumbled down the mountain, going into an exile lonelier than that stigmatized by the brand on his forehead. Yet withal, loneliness and hatred, he felt a curious inner peace. His brain was no longer a battlefield of hostile allegiances and longings. He still had no name for what he had become. But it didn't matter any more.
He reached the bottom of the last rock slide, and looked back; in the failing light he could just make out the mesa rim, above which must lie the aeros' eyrie. Nothing moved up there. She would be at home now, among her own kind.
VIII
When he turned away, he saw the stranger standing not far off, beneath a great stone promontory that thrust out into the sea of sand, his back to a deep black cleft in the rock. Torcred could see his face clearly this time, and this time it was unsmiling, the brows drawn together and lips compressed in an expression of anxiety. The stranger beckoned with a jerky urgency, half-turned, and pointed toward the crevice of the cliff.
Torcred took a step toward him, his anger boiling up dangerously, blood drumming in his ears. "What are you?" he shouted. "What do you want? You've dogged my steps, watched me, and applauded my downfall. Now what—"
The stranger's eyes shifted, and he moved his head as if listening to a voice that Torcred did not hear. His eyes widened with alarm, and he vanished like a blown-out flame.
Torcred blinked baffledly. The hand on the hilt of his knife relaxed, but the roaring in his ears grew louder. Almost it might be real....
He threw back his head and looked up. Far above, individually almost indistinguishable in the pale twilight sky but making it alive with their massed formations, V after V of black flying shapes were moving. The air throbbed with the vibrant roar of many engines.
The leading squadrons were already over the mountain when the first dart of flame leaped from it and climbed with a whistling rush to meet them. Others followed, the clatter of their guns mingling with the multiple crescendo shriek of the first sticks of falling bombs.
Torcred crouched involuntarily, bracing himself for the concussions that must shake earth and air.... But only dull thudding sounds rolled down from the mesa, as if the rain of projectiles fell without exploding.
Over the mountain two buzzards dropped out of formation and wobbled earthward, trailing smoke down the sky, and a third burst into bright flame and disintegrated in a meteoric shower. New formations still came droning out of the north—the buzzards were attacking in force. Their bombs kept landing with sullen thumps, almost inaudible under the roar of motors, the sputter of guns and the flat reports of aerial cannon.
But to Torcred, hugging the lee of a great boulder and trying with straining eyes to pierce the darkness that increasingly shrouded the mesa, those dull incessant impacts became an ominous sound. Ladna had gone up there—she had had plenty of time to reach safety in the buried heart of the eyrie, which even the mightiest explosives could scarcely touch—but without knowing why, Torcred edged out of his shelter and began once more, creeping from rock to rock, to clamber up the steep ravine that the two of them had ascended together.
He had not progressed far—in the dark the uncertain footing was dangerous—when the breeze, sighing down the canyon with cool mountain-top air for the hot plain, brought confirmation of his fear with it.
A whiff of strange odor that stung in his nostrils and tickled his windpipe harshly. Then his eyes began to smart as it grew rapidly stronger; the gas the buzzards had used to blanket the mesa was a dense one, designed to seek out the aero people in the depths of their underground fortress.
Torcred halted, blinking, struggling with the growing need to cough. He recognized the odor after a moment—the same poison that the machines called skunks used against their enemies. He knew that enough of it was deadly. And a cold hand of terror clutched at his heart.
He flung caution from him and started to scramble recklessly, planlessly upward. Denser clouds of gas met him, and, half-blinded, he stumbled against sharp rocks and almost fell when fits of coughing shook him. His chest became a rasping furnace, and each deep panting breath was a flame. Bitterly he knew that his will could not drive him much longer into that torment....
In the air something flew burning, and the light of its destruction fell bright as day into the canyon and threw shifting shadows. Torcred's tear-filled eyes blurred the glare, but he glimpsed a small dark-clad figure huddled on the rocks not ten feet from him, across a black crevice that might be five or fifty feet deep.
He crouched and sprang; weakened knees betrayed him, he landed clawing on the rounded lip of the chasm and barely managed to pull himself up to the girl's side. But new strength steeled him as he gathered his feet under him and dragged both her and himself erect.
Ladna was alive and conscious; she leaned against him, coughing weakly.
"I was coming back," she gasped in his ear. "I'd have been up there ... but I was coming back ... to you...."
Torcred hardly understood her. "Come on!" he croaked. "Down!"
The way seemed immeasurably longer than the way up had been. It was really a little longer—the gas was settling fast—until, staggering, each half-supporting the other, they reached a level where the air was no longer choking poison. Ladna grew able to stand alone; swaying a little, she followed Torcred down the treacherous slides in the canyon's mouth.
On the soft wind-piled sand below the great rifted rock, where Torcred had last seen the visionary stranger, they sank down to rest by common consent. Torcred listened anxiously to the girl's hoarse breathing.
He moistened his lips and asked, "How do you feel?"
Ladna stirred and sat up with an effort that set her coughing again. "I'll be all right.... We'll go back into the desert, and live there somehow, as long—as long as we live."
"That's right," said Torcred. In the dark she couldn't see how his face grew grim at the thought of how short their life together was likely to be.
He raised his head, sniffing the air. A thin sharp taint, reminiscent of stifling agony, told him they must be up and moving soon. The gas was diffusing but still dangerous; up yonder on the plateau, where it had been concentrated, it must have left nothing save desolation and death....
Only then did he become aware, with a start of amazement, of the great silence that enfolded mountain, sky, and desert.
The air, at least, which had snarled with motors not twenty minutes earlier, should still have echoed to the sound of battle. But the sky was empty.
No, not empty—abruptly landing lights cut a brilliant swathe far out on the desert. The buzzard pilot saw he had misjudged his altitude and tried to pull up, the huge ship stalled and its lights went out as it plowed into the ground. Before the sound of its crash reached the mountain's foot, a pillar of fire was mounting above the dunes, and they saw that the air was full of machines, attackers and defenders alike in one confused flitting swarm, wheeling, dipping and always drifting downward, unpowered.
Ladna gasped, "What's happened? The buzzards—"
"I don't know. Maybe your people—"
"They're not my people any more," she interrupted swiftly. "Whatever you are, I am too.... And anyway, all the engines are dead."
Torcred got up stiffly. On the desert between them and the fire, an aero glided down, bounced and rolled to a shaky landing. Its pilot dropped to the ground and stood staring at his useless machine; he did not even look up as a buzzard passed low over him with a rush of wings, touched ground and slewed round a short way off with a broken landing gear. Small figures spilled out of it too, their movements expressing the same dazed lack of understanding. The enemies paid each other no heed.
The smell of gas was stronger. The desert would be littered with aircraft, but they shouldn't have much trouble slipping through.... Still Torcred frowned, hesitating. He turned with sudden resolution to the girl.
"Wait here. There's something I have to find out; but it won't take long."
"No!" Ladna struggled to her feet. "I'll go with you."
Torcred started to protest, then changed his mind. He turned silently toward the cliff whose blank stone face was lit redly by the dying fire, its great fissure a dark gulf of mystery.
Inside the cleft it was pitchblack, but the footing was smooth, packed sand. Torcred felt his way between rock walls. At first he heard only the scufflings the girl made, groping behind him, and then he was conscious of a faint all-pervading hum. Something was humming deep in the rock, and Torcred felt sure now that he was going to find the meaning of the visions and of the battle's uncanny end.
He was hardly surprised when white light shone in the fissure ahead and a man appeared, black against it. The figure's outline was familiar. The stranger spoke—his first word in a strange tongue, but the rest intelligible enough though oddly pronounced.
"Ahoy, there! We'd almost given you up."
Torcred advanced warily. The stranger did not flicker nor vanish. A door was open, and the white light poured out from a chamber that must have been a natural hollow, laboriously enlarged in the stone. Torcred's hand shot out and gripped the man's arm above the elbow; the stranger started, then relaxed, and Torcred caught a flash of the grin he had seen before.
"I'm real," said the stranger. "I wasn't the other times we've met—but that's one of the things Captain Relez will explain to you. Now come inside, before the air out here gets any thicker."
Cautiously Torcred edged into the brightly-lit room, keeping in front of Ladna. He saw in the cramped space a glittering confusion of unfamiliar devices—it was the flimsiness of most of the apparatus that was most surprising; the terrapins and other races built mostly machinery designed to withstand heavy mechanical forces, but a blow of the hand would shatter most of those things of wire and glass tubes. A young man, hunched over a complex control panel beside a glass screen on which a darkly indistinct image floated, glanced up with narrowed eyes, and an older one with a small pointed beard met Torcred's suspicious gaze benignly, over a small table on which a map was spread, studded with colored pins.
Then Torcred heard the door click, and whirled, hand on his knife.
"It's not locked," the bearded man said calmly. "You can leave if you like—but we've gone to a good deal of trouble to persuade you here for a talk."
Torcred faced him again, still tensely ready. The setup here didn't look dangerous, only incomprehensible. But he sensed power in this little room; the deep potent hum he had heard in the fissure was at home here, though he could not locate its source.
"My name is Relez." The bearded man rose from behind his table, "Dunu, you can take care of the chart."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the young man they had seen as a phantom in the desert, and Torcred bristled again at the alien jargon. But Relez' casual manner was reassuring.
He gestured at a shelf cut into the stone. "Have a seat." Torcred obeyed mechanically, and Ladna huddled beside him. Torcred stared fascinated at the screen. A scene had resolved itself there—one of incredible, nostalgic familiarity. It was the twice-ringed camp of the terrapins, unmistakable to Torcred though he saw it now from a strange angle, from above. All the machines were in place, as was normal after nightfall. Torcred half started to his feet.
Then he saw what was not normal for that or any hour in a terrapin camp. A confusion of bobbing lights among the cars; the shop area in the midst was almost deserted, but against the reddening fires of the forges tiny black figures scurried to and fro like distracted ants. He could almost hear the cries of alarm and exasperation over the discovery that not a functioning engine was left in the whole troop.
Torcred turned and caught Relez smiling in his beard.
"You did that!"
Relez nodded. "Unfortunately, we didn't get the anti-ionization field into operation in time to prevent the buzzards' gas attack. But there won't be any more fighting tonight, unless they do it with knives. It's a bit of luck that none of these people seem to have any notion of portable firearms. No more mechanized warfare, though, as long as that unit is working." He gestured at a thing of massive coils and bus bars and fragile glowing tubes, from which, Torcred perceived now, the humming came.
Ladna's blue eyes were wide. "That little device—has stopped all the machines?"
"It broadcasts a wave form that affects the molecules of air, of all gases, inhibiting their ionization. So no spark can jump, and motors are stopped when their electric ignition fails. The only machines that can move now, inside its range, are the moles, with their battery-driven electric motors for underground travel—which is lucky for them, or they'd be trapped under the earth.
"Everything else—terrapins, trailers, aeros, buzzards, and all the rest—are paralyzed. Our field's range blankets five hundred thousand square miles. Beyond that area, others are responsible for administering the same treatment; it already began a month ago on the coast—"
"What are you?" Torcred burst out. "What do you want?"
"We three—Dunu, Rhenu, and I—are the Continental Demilitarization Commission for this area. As to what we are trying to do, that will take some explaining—"
"I meant," Torcred scowled, dissatisfied, "what is your race?"
Relez regarded him strangely. "The same as yours. The race of man."
IX
They came of peoples which had no history, only legend and tradition. And they learned—
That there was such a thing as history, recorded in books; Relez showed them such a book, which they could not read, because neither of them could understand more than the code markings on mechanical parts.
That the storied ancients, whose powers were marvelous and whose end was terrible, had really existed and had left their record in writing.
How after the great wars that had almost seared his life from the Earth's surface, when man's weapons—and his medical science—had wiped out every creature save the indestructible destroyer himself, the machine races had risen from the shreds of technical knowledge hoarded by the scattered groups of survivors and crystallized by their descendants in the rigid mold of tradition. And how that last war had never ended, but had passed into the nature of things in the unending war of the predatory machines against the feeders on sunlight, and of the races of land and air and sea for mastery of their habitats.
"But no matter who wins, no man is master; the machine is the ruler, and man is its slave. It is against that we have begun to fight, now, after all the long dark ages...."
For one place on all the harried Earth had provided the relative security and permanence needed to keep alive a spark of the ancients' culture. That was aboard the great ships at sea, that had been built and armed to resist every hellish technique of destruction known to the dead age of their building, and were wholly invulnerable to today's weapons. Those were floating cities in truth, with atomic power plants, machine shops, dwellings, hospitals, storehouses, recreation space, libraries—and in the later times, when their first purpose as warships had been almost forgotten, classrooms and laboratories where the knowledge of the past was dredged up from the memories of men and from the books, and even added to in some ways.
"We have built up the nucleus of a new civilization on the sea," said Relez solemnly. "Now the time has come for it to take root on the dry land. But first the continents must be pacified. The world must be taken from the warring machines and given back to man.
"We possess some of the old ones' weapons, and we could try to use them to enforce our will, as they did. And I think our end would be like theirs. But we have invented some new devices to serve the cause of peace. The anti-ionization field is chief among those. I myself had some share in developing it—my title of 'captain' means leader of a group of scientists, not master of a ship."
"Is there no defense against the field?" asked Torcred shrewdly.
Relez eyed him thoughtfully. "There are ways of avoiding the effect," he admitted, "but they are not likely to occur to these custom-bound people. And once they are liberated from the tyranny of the machine—"
"Your method of liberation," said Torcred, "is to reduce everyone to an equal helplessness, and let them fight it out among themselves?"
"You might put it that way. I'm afraid there will be some bloodshed. The predatory peoples, naturally, will have the hardest time at first. But—Supposeyoutellmewhat you think will happen, for example, when the terrapins come in contact, under the new conditions, with their old enemies and prey, the trailer people."
"Why—at first they will be afraid to venture out of the camp. Then, when the food supply runs low, they will begin to think of attacking the stalled trailer herd on foot. A quick raid, by determined men with knives and clubs, might work once or twice, but not after that, because the trailer people are much more numerous, and, once recovered from the first confusion and organized, they could defend themselves...."
"But if you were chief of the terrapins, what would you do?"
Torcred thought hard, intrigued in spite of himself. "I think—I would try to get some of the sun-machines the trailers use. In order to have an independent supply of food and power, you understand. That lightning raid, perhaps—but it would be hard to dismantle the screens and escape with them. No, I think I would try to bargain with the trailers. They have no radar scanners; if their suspicions could be allayed, they'd be willing to trade a few of their sun-screens for some terrapin sighting devices."
"Not realizing that those have lost their value, now that all aircraft are grounded," said Relez with a smile. "It might work. And overcoming the suspicions may prove easier than you think, when men begin to meet each other under the open sky, and realize that their hates never belonged to them, but to the machines they served...."
"I don't know about the buzzards," murmured Ladna dubiously.
Relez disregarded that. "What we need now is helpers. The anti-ionization field is the catalyst of peace, but if it is to work quickly, the confused peoples must have guidance.
"We've done a little advance missionary work among the more civilized and approachable tribes, both in the flesh, and by teleprojection, as Dunu appeared to you in the wilderness. The televiewer, incidentally, is another of our new developments; the old machines of that type used both a transmitter and receiver, but this one works on the principle you can see once in a while in nature, when atmospheric refraction is just right to reassemble the light from a distant object and project its picture in the air. Only very recently we perfected the reverse application of the effect, so that under good conditions we can project a three-dimensional image—mirage—over large distances.
"But those methods are inadequate for working directly on the minds of the peoples. Few as we are, we can't appear openly as authors of the change; for the time being, let them think it a natural phenomenon. However," his eyes met Torcred's and held them in a challenging gaze, "very much could be done to smooth a people's way toward civilization by an agent who belongs by birth to it...."
"I was a terrapin once," said Torcred steadily. "Now I am a man of the race of man. And in the eyes of the terrapins I am an outcast, accursed."
"I know. But your very return, when they think you dead, may help the break-down of the old habits and customs.... I don't say it will be easy. But I believe the desert has sharpened your wits."
Torcred considered. The mark on his forehead burned, but he remembered how there had been compassion in Vazcled's face even as he wielded the knife, and that his worst enemy was discreditably dead in the desert. "Perhaps," he muttered.
"If you go back," said Ladna quietly, "I go too."
Relez stroked his beard. "That might make trouble."
The girl turned on him, electric fire in her look. "None of your business!"
Relez smiled. "On the other hand, maybe it will be for the best—a step forward in contact between the peoples."
Torcred felt a new strength and confidence born of Ladna's loyalty. He said, "Your scheme is good, if it will work. I will—wewill help you make it work."
The older man's face lit. "Good!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "You already have some sound ideas. I suggest—"
"Captain!" broke in a low, taut voice. "What do you make of this?"
Relez wheeled. The young technician who had been operating the controls of the televiewer was pointing at the screen in horror.
The scene was a sweep of desert, silvered by the risen moon. There were indistinct dark shapes that might be a tribe of dragons, stalled, of course. But around and among them red flashes leaped and black towers of smoke sprang up to drift down the quiet night wind.
It was a scene of death and destruction whose silence made it unreal. But as the five people in the rock chamber held their breath, they heard and felt, telegraphed from far away through the ground, the dull heavy concussions of exploding bombs.
"Scan the sky, Rhenu," gulped the captain.
The view shifted as Rhenu's trembling fingers made adjustments, and they glimpsed a black squadron drifting across the moonlit sky. Cruising with a leisurely consciousness of invulnerability, in the knowledge that the victims were helpless to maneuver, sitting ducks to be blasted at will.
"Keep on scanning!" snapped Relez, but his face was ashen as he saw his dreams crumbling.
Dunu was incredulously checking the anti-ionization generator. "There's nothing wrong here," he reported. But the screen showed scene after scene of a carnival of destruction. The night sky was full of buzzards, flying low, playing their search-lights on the desert and raining gas and explosives on everything that lived. It was the buzzards' moment to strike for dominance and they were making the most of it.
Dunu said frozenly, "They must have been warned by their kin on the coast, and have managed to develop an engine with a hotpoint ignition system."
Relez muttered, looking suddenly old and weary, "It's too bad. The people with the highest technical ingenuity—but their motivation seems to be insane hate of everything unlike them."
"I told you so," Ladna said bitterly.
Torcred had no ears for philosophy; he had seen enough of the murder going on out there. He bounded to his feet and his knife flashed in his hand.
"One side!" he snarled at the recoiling Dunu. "I'm going to smash that machine and give the rest of us a chance!"
But Relez had stepped between him and the generator. The color returned to his bearded features as he faced the threatening blade.
"Wait!" he cried. "Don't wreck all your chances for peace—"
"I'll give you peace," said Torcred, "if you don't get out of the way."
Ladna was behind him, he knew, knife drawn, holding the thunderstruck assistants at bay.
Relez did not move. "I told you we possess some of the ancients' weapons. The decision to use them belongs properly to the High Command of the Fleet—but in this case I will take it on myself."
"You have such weapons here?"
"Yes. A bomb, which in case we were discovered here could have exploded to wipe out this place and protect our secrets. You and the girl can take one of the grounded aeros outside and carry the bomb over Buzzard Base. I'll switch off the anti-ionization field for half an hour, long enough for you to go and return...."
"One bomb?" exclaimed Ladna scornfully. "Theyhave thousands!"
"No more will be needed."
Torcred's black gaze searched Relez' face for long moments. He read utter sincerity there, and lowered the knife.
X
The aero roared across a short stretch of sand and was airborne. It swerved, evading a buzzard squadron that was droning over, and climbed swiftly into the north.
Torcred huddled in the cramped space behind the pilot's seat, over the little dull metal box that Relez claimed was a bomb. He glimpsed Ladna's face, over the dimly glowing controls; it was as if transfigured. She was tasting the joy she had thought lost to her forever, the glory of flight through the high thin air at a thousand miles an hour.
"This isn't like crawling, is it?" she asked lightly. "Four or five minutes now, and we'll be there."
Torcred braced himself more firmly. "Give me thirty seconds warning."
Presently the girl cut off the power. The machine slowed and began to swerve and buck a little as its speed approached that of sound. "Thirty seconds."
Relez had told him how to arm the bomb. Torcred pushed the levers he had indicated, and looked doubtfully at the harmless-looking gray box. "We're over it," said Ladna. "The place is lit up; they're not expecting anything else in the air. I can see buzzards taking off...."
Torcred, of course, could see nothing. He shoved open the emergency escape door in the floor and tipped the lead box out into the shrieking rush of air.
The engine's sighing roar began again. He slammed the door shut and squirmed forward, into the seat beside Ladna. The little ship ran away, faster than sound or an air shock wave could follow....
But they saw the glare that turned desert and mountains and sky ahead white with a reflected radiance brighter than the noonday sun. For moments it lasted, then the light died and the night was dead black to their dazzled eyes.
"The ancients' weapons were pretty potent," said Torcred, and the girl shivered.
She made a wide circle and flew back, but they could see nothing in the valley where Buzzard Base had been. Only an immense cloud of darkness still faintly luminous at its heart, roiling slowly upward. The air was turbulent. Ladna gave the cloud a wide berth, for Relez had warned them of that.
The girl looked questioningly at Torcred. He said, "A line due south from the Salt Sea should find us the terrapins' camp."
Obediently Ladna made a few degrees' turn to the west. "You still believe—"
"That Relez was right? I don't know. But I know this—whether the men of the floating cities have their way of the world or not, they've started a change that must lead to more change, a new civilization.... And I still want to help the terrapins make a place in it—first of all by teaching them that they are men."
The great salt lake unrolled in the moonlight and slipped away beneath the ship. They raced on over the southern reaches of the valley where they had wandered three strange days. Then in midflight the motor choked and died. The anti-ionization field had closed down again.
"Relez is in a hurry for his peace," remarked Torcred, and they laughed a little hysterically. The ship lost altitude and the shadowy desert came up to meet them, but not before they saw, a couple of miles away, a spot of light that Torcred's keen eyes identified as the camp of the terrapins. He breathed a sigh of relief at finding it undamaged by the buzzard raids.
"You can start educating them in the morning," said Ladna. "Isn't the moon lovely tonight?"
"Eh?" Torcred was jarred by the disconnectedness of her remarks. "Why wait till morning?"
She started to answer, then exclaimed and wrenched at the controls. The aero wobbled on one wing as the top of a dune slid by scant feet below; then it plowed through the next crest and pancaked into the valley beyond.
The two scrambled, shaken up but undamaged, out of the battered craft, and Torcred caught the disheveled girl in his arms.
"You're a hopelessly bad bird," he growled in mock rage. "Two ships you've smashed up inside a week!"
And he would have touched noses with her, but Ladna evaded the gesture adroitly.
"Don't be a terrapin!" she chided. "You've got to learn civilized ways ... like this...."
He learned.