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're_ a 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."