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 powerful _here_ and _now_."
* * * * *
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--about _them_?" 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."