"Don't worry. I told you it was nocturnal--at this hour it's hunting a
good safe spot to lie up for the day."
The girl was wearily pulling on her coveralls; her fire-blue eyes were
clouded with hopelessness as they gazed into the gray dawn. "Perhaps it
would have been better if it had seen us--better than what's ahead of
us."
Torcred did not answer; he was frowning in thought. Suddenly he rose to
his feet--wincing a little as he put his weight on them; with gentle
firmness he turned the girl around and faced her toward the west,
suggesting, "Let's go back a little way."
"Back! Are you crazy, terrapin?"
"Remember the wreck of an armadillo we saw about a quarter of a mile
back? I want to get something there."
"That wreck was years old," sniffed Ladna. "There couldn't be any
supplies left in it."
"I have an idea," said Torcred. Then, as he saw her unyielding
disbelief, "I intend to capture the panzer."
And he trudged off purposefully to the west. The girl followed, still
protesting in an undertone, as all their argument had been carried
on. "You _are_ sunstruck! That monster--and we've not got so much as
a knife--You might as well try to tear down that mountain peak," she
pointed toward a distant blue height, wreathed in cottony clouds, "with
your bare hands."
"Maybe I will," said the Terrapin.
* * * * *
The smashed armadillo had long since been stripped of usable parts by
the desert's scavengers. The remaining wreckage was widely strewn,
half-buried in the sand and eaten by rust.
Torcred searched with a grim intensity, tugging at the projecting
steel ribs. Some were deeply buried, others too badly bent, still
others too short. At last he found what he was looking for; a narrow
T-beam, six straight feet of alloy steel, light but tremendously
strong. He hefted it with satisfaction.
"You don't intend to attack the panzer with that!" exclaimed Ladna.
"I do," said Torcred. He looked into her wide blue eyes for a moment,
then pointed down at something that had been disturbed when he pried
loose the beam. A chalk-white skull with empty eyes. He kicked at it,
and it crumbled. "Of such are we made, bird-girl. A fragile framework
compared with the machines'. But alive, we have intelligence, and with
intelligence and this weapon I mean to take the panzer."
They tramped eastward again, following their own tracks, under a sun
already growing hot. After a while the girl asked in a meek voice, "How
can you hope to do it?"
Torcred smiled inwardly at the impression his--largely
assumed--confidence had made. He answered, "This morning I noticed some
of the thing's weaknesses."
"It didn't look weak to me."
"In the first place, its guns are set high on that huge frame--above
the housing of the treads. They couldn't hit a man standing right
beside it. And I think I can get that close to it, because it will
be resting now, the crew asleep--or one of them may be watching, but
he can't watch all ways at once. There will be automatic alarms, of
course, but I don't think they'll respond to anything as small and
harmless as a lone man."
Ladna drew breath sharply. "Perhaps you're right--But even so, what
then? You can't dent its armor with that bar, and it can simply move
away and shoot you down!"
"It has another weak point. It runs on caterpillar tracks--that is,
really, on wheels turning inside an endless belt that gives a wider
basis of support. But if any sizable, hard object finds its way between
wheel and track--"
He paused significantly, and the bird-girl's eyes met his in a luminous
dawn of understanding and hope.
They had no trouble finding the trail of the panzer. As he scanned
those yard-wide tracks, paralleling each other ten feet apart,
Torcred's grip tightened on his T-beam; it did not seem quite so thick
and heavy now, against all those tons of rolling metal might.
But he had boasted recklessly, and he was going through with it if it
killed him.