Torcred felt a stirring of the anger her use of that word always roused
in him. But he said only, "We've covered perhaps a third of the way.
Two more days, then."
He remembered that pebbles in the mouth ease thirst; they tried that,
and it helped a little. Then they scooped hollows in the sand for
sleep. Ladna wriggled out of the heavy flying suit that, stickily
uncomfortable as it was, had protected her from the sun. The sleeveless
shirt and shorts she wore beneath clung damply to her; even through
a haze of exhaustion Torcred was stirred by the sight of her slender
body, her mildly rounded breasts and long straight legs....
He slept like a log, and woke in the dim pearly light before dawn,
still tired, his mouth like a furnace.
* * * * *
It was a moment before he realized that the bird-girl's piercing
whisper had wakened him, and sat up abruptly. Spots danced before his
eyes; he felt her hand tighten in warning on his arm.
Then he saw by that ghostly light, not a hundred yards away, a thing of
nightmare.
It was a huge gray monster of metal, a moving fortress going steadily
forward on endless treads that hardly dented the soft sand beneath
it, though it must have weighed half a hundred tons. Shod with
silicone-rubber, it rolled in an unreal silence, the purr of its engine
scarcely audible in the early hush, past the two frightened watchers
under the dune, and vanished over another crest.
The girl still clutched Torcred's arm, finding perhaps some flimsy
reassurance in the resilient hardness of his tensed muscles. "What was
it?" she gasped.
"That was a panzer," Torcred informed her in a low voice. "A big
relative of the terrapins, that prowls the desert alone, by night. It
carries a crew of three to six, can see in the dark and move without a
sound. It's one of the most formidable land machines in the world."