_by_
_Robert Abernathy_
The beetle woke from a dreamless sleep, yawned, stretched cramped limbs
and smiled to himself. In the west the sunset's last glow faded. Stars
sprang out in the clear desert sky, dimmed only by the white moon that
rose full and brilliant above the eastern horizon.
[Illustration]
Methodically, suppressing impatience, he went through every evening's
ritual of waking. He checked his instruments, scanned the mirrors which
gave him a broad view of moonlit desert to his left. To the right he
could see nothing, for his little armored machine lay half-buried,
burrowed deep into the sheltering flank of a great dune; all day long it
had escaped the notice of prowling diurnal machines of prey. He
listened, too, for any sound of danger which his amplifiers might pick
up from near or far.
The motor, idling as it had all day while its master slept, responded to
testing with a smooth, almost noiseless surge of power. The instruments
were in order; there was plenty of water in the condenser, and though
his food supply was low that shouldn't matter--before tonight was done
he would be once more among his people.
Only the fuel gauge brought an impatient frown to his face. It was
menacingly near the empty mark--which meant he would have to spend time
foraging before he could continue his journey. Well ... no help for it.
He opened the throttle.
The beetle's name was Dworn, and he was twenty-one years old. The flesh
and blood of him, that is. The rest, the steel-armored shell, the wheels
and engine and hydraulic power-system, the electric sensory
equipment--all of which was to his mind as much part of his identity as
his own skin, muscles, eyes and ears--was only five years old.
Dworn's face, under his sleep-tousled thatch of blond hair, was boyish.
But there were hard lines of decision there, which the last months had
left.... Tonight by the reckoning of his people, he was still a youth;
but when tomorrow dawned, the testing of his wanderyear would be behind
him, and he would be adult, a warrior of the beetle horde.
Sand spilled from the beetle's dull-black carapace as it surged from its
hiding-place. It drifted, its motor only a murmur, along the shoulder of
the dune. Dworn eyed his offending fuel gauge darkly; he would very much
have liked to be on his way at top speed, toward the year's-end
rendezvous of the horde under the shadow of the Barrier.
He began cruising slowly, at random, across the rolling moonlit waste of
wind-built dunes, watching for spoor.
He spied, and swerved automatically to avoid, the cunningly concealed
pit of a sand devil, strategically placed in a hollow of the ground.
Cautiously Dworn circled back for a second look. The conical pit was
partly fallen in, unrepaired; the devil was obviously gone.
The burrowing machine would, Dworn knew, have had fuel and other
supplies somewhere in its deep lair, buried beneath the drifted sand
where it spent its life breathing through a tube to the surface and
waiting for unwary passers-by to skid into its trap. But Dworn
regretfully concluded that it would not be worth while digging on the
chance that whatever had done away with the devil had not rifled its
stores.... He swung the beetle's nose about and accelerated again.
On the next rise, he paused to inspect the track of a pill-bug; but to
his practiced eye it was quickly evident that the trail was too old,
blowing sand had already blurred the mark of heels, and the bug probably
was many miles away by now.
A mile farther on, luck smiled on him at last. He crossed the fresh and
well-marked trail of a caterpillar--deeply indented tread-marks,
meandering across the dunes.
* * * * *
He began following the spoor, still slowly, so as not to lose it or to
run upon its maker unawares. A caterpillar was a lumbering monster of
which he had no fear, but it was much bigger than a beetle, and could be
dangerous when cornered. Dworn had no wish to corner it; the caterpillar
itself was not the object of his stalking, but one of its supply caches
which according to caterpillar custom it would have hidden at various
places within its range.
The trail led him uphill, into a region cut by washes--dry now, since
the rainy season was past--and by ridges that rose like naked vertebrae
from the sea of sand that engulfed the valley floor.
Several times Dworn saw places where the caterpillar had halted, backed
and filled, shoved piles of earth and rocks together or scraped patches
of ground clear with its great shovel. But the beetle knew his prey's
habits of old, and he passed by these spots without a second glance,
aware that this conspicuous activity was no more than a ruse to deceive
predators like himself. If Dworn hadn't known that trick, and many
others used by the various non-predatory machine species which
manufactured food and fuel by photosynthesis, he would have been unfit
to be a beetle--and he would never have lived through the wanderyear
which weeded out the unfit according to the beetle people's stern
immemorial custom.
At last he came to a stop on a rocky hillside, where the tracks were
faint and indistinct. Carefully scanning the ground downslope, he saw
that his instinct had not misled him--the caterpillar had turned aside
at this place and had afterward returned to its original trail, backing
and dragging its digging-blade to obliterate the traces of its side
excursion.
Dworn grinned, feeling the stirring of the hunter's excitement that
never failed to move him, even on such a prosaic foraging expedition as
this. He sent the beetle bumping down the slope.
The blurred trail led into the sandy bed of a wash at the foot of the
hill, and along that easily-traveled way for a quarter mile. Then the
stream made a sharp bend, undercutting a promontory on the left and
creating a high bank of earth and soft white rock. Dworn saw that a
section of the bank had collapsed and slid into the gully. That was no
accident; the mark where a great blade had sheared into the overhang was
plain to read, even if it had not been for the scuffed over vestiges of
caterpillar tracks round about.
Dworn halted and listened intently, his amplifier turned all the way up.
No sound broke the stillness, and the black moon-shadows within range of
his vision did not stir.
He nosed the beetle carefully up to the heap. He had no equipment for
moving those tons of soil and rock, but that was no matter. He twisted a
knob on the control panel, a shutter in the beetle's forward cowling
snapped open and a telescoping drill thrust from its housing, chattered
briefly and took hold, while the engine's pulse strengthened to take up
the load.
Twice Dworn abandoned fruitless borings and tried a different spot. On
the third try, at almost full extension the drill-point screeched
suddenly on metal and then as suddenly met no more resistance. Dworn
switched on the pump, and quickly turned it off again; he swung the
overhead hatch open, and--pausing to listen warily once more--clambered
out onto the cowling, in the cold night air, to open the sample tap at
the base of the drill and sniff the colorless fluid that trickled from
it.
It gave off the potent odor of good fuel, and Dworn nodded to himself,
not regretting his caution though in this case it had not been needed.
But--clever caterpillars had been known to bury canisters of water in
their caches, poison for the unsuspecting.
* * * * *
The pump throbbed again; there was the satisfying gurgle of fuel flowing
into almost-empty tanks. Dworn leaned back, seizing the opportunity to
relax for a moment in preparation for the strenuous journey still
before him.
But he didn't fail to snap alert when just as the gauge trembled near
the full mark, he heard pebbles rattling on the hillside above.
Immediately thereupon he became aware of the grind of steel on stone and
the rumbling of an imperfectly muffled engine.
In one smooth rapid motion Dworn switched off the pump, and spun the
drill control. As the mechanism telescoped back into place, he gunned
his engine, and the beetle shot backward and spun round to face the
oncoming noise.
A squarish black silhouette loomed high on the slope above the
overhanging bank, which rose so steeply that a stone loosened by turning
treads bounded with a clang off the beetle's armor in the wash below.
The caterpillar halted momentarily, engine grumbling to take in the
scene.
Dworn didn't linger to learn its reaction at spying a looter. A snap
shot from his turret gun exploded directly in front of the other
machine, throwing up a cloud of dust and--he hoped--confusing its crew.
And the beetle was fleeing around the bend in the stream bed, keeping
close to the high bank.
A score of yards past the turning, intuition of danger made Dworn swerve
sharply. An instant later, the ground blew up almost in his face--the
bend had brought him into view, under the guns of the enemy above.
He wrenched the beetle around in a skidding turn and raced back for the
bend where the overhang afforded shelter. Another shell and another
crashed into places he had just left, and then he was safe--for the
moment.
But it was an uncomfortable spot. The caterpillar rumbling wrathfully on
the slope above him, couldn't see him as long as he hugged the bank,
undercut by the water that flowed here in the rainy season; but, by the
same token, he couldn't make a dash for safety without running the
gauntlet of a murderous fire in the all-too-narrow way the stream bed
offered. In open country, he would not have hesitated to count on his
ability to outmaneuver and outshoot the caterpillar ... but here he was
neatly trapped.
And it was nerve-racking to be unable to see what the enemy was about.
It seemed to have halted, judging the situation just as he had been
doing. Now, though, he heard its engine speed up again, and the grinding
of its treads came unmistakably closer. His ears strained to gauge its
advance as it came lurching down the slope, till it sounded only a few
feet away and Dworn braced himself to shoot fast and straight if it
started coming down over the bank. Then it paused again, and sat idling,
hoping no doubt that he would panic and show himself.
He didn't. The caterpillar's engine raced up once more and began to
labor under a heavy load. There was an increasing clatter of falling
stones. Then Dworn remembered the great digging-blade it carried, and
realized what it was going to try.
Ten feet to his right the bank began giving way. Tons of rubble
thundered into the gully. Dworn winced and moved away as far as he
dared. He heard the caterpillar back and turn, then it snarled with
effort once more and another section of the overhang caved in with a
grinding roar.
Inside minutes at this rate, it would either have driven him from his
refuge or buried him alive. Now it came rumbling forward for the third
time; rocks showered from the rim directly above his head, and he saw
the bank begin to tremble.
* * * * *
Dworn braced himself. Even as the wall of earth and rock began leaning
outward above him, he gave his engine full throttle. The wheels spun for
one sickening instant, then the little machine lunged forward from
beneath the fresh landslide and was climbing, bucking and slewing, up
the slope of loose soil created by the ones before.
The caterpillar loomed black and enormous on his left hand, so close
that it could not have brought its guns to bear even if its crew had
expected the beetle to take this daring way out. With its shovel lowered
and half-buried, it could not swing round quickly--Dworn had counted on
that.
As the beetle's flank cleared the corner of the digging blade with
inches to spare, Dworn's gun turret passed in line with the space
between the blade and the caterpillar's treads, and he jabbed the firing
button. The explosion wreathed the monster's forward half in smoke and
dust, and into that cloud it tilted forward, teetered ponderously and
then slid headlong to the bottom of the wash as the loosened bank gave
way conclusively under its great weight.
Dworn looked back from the hill crest to see it still floundering,
treads furiously churning sand, struggling to fight clear of the
avalanche it had carried with it. The beetle laughed full-throatedly,
without rancor. This hadn't been the first nor the tightest corner he'd
been in during the dangerous course of his wanderyear; and in that hard
school of life you learned not to worry about danger already past.
At another time, he might have returned to the battle in hope of
capturing the additional supplies the caterpillar carried and--still
more valuable booty--the chart it would have, showing the location of
its other caches. But now he was in a hurry--this refueling foray had
cost him a couple of hours, and the moon was already high.
So he slipped quietly away over the ridge and set his course to the
east.
Beyond the hilly land, the terrain ironed out into level alkali flats
where a vanished lake had been in the long-gone days when the earth was
fertile. There he opened the throttle wide. The plain, white in the
moonlight, rolled under the racing wheels at ninety and a hundred miles
an hour; air whistled over the carapace....
Impatience surged up in Dworn once more. Eagerly he pictured his
forthcoming reunion with his native horde--and with Yold, his father,
chief of the horde.
Countless times in the long wanderyear--in moments when death loomed
nearer than it had in the brush just past, and he despaired of surviving
his testing, or in other moments, yet harder to bear, when the immensity
of of the desert earth seemed about to swallow him up in his
loneliness--he had grasped at that vision now soon to be real: he,
Dworn, stood before the assembled horde, the year of his proving
triumphantly completed, and he received before them all the proud,
laconic commendation of the chief, his father.
Hungrily he scanned the horizon ahead, saw with leaping heart that it
was no longer flat. Along it a black line rose, and grew ragged as it
came nearer, and became an endless line of cliffs, marching straight
north and south as far as the eye could see.... The Barrier!
Dworn recognized familiar landmarks, and altered his direction a little
so as to be heading directly for the year's-end rendezvous. He knew,
from childhood memories even, the outline of that vast stone rampart as
it appeared by moonlight. Every year the Barrier formed the eastern
limit of the beetles' annual migration, as naturally as the shore of the
sea was its westward terminus. So it had been for a thousand years or
more, as far back as the oldest traditions reached: generation after
generation, hunting, foraging, and fighting--from the Barrier to the
ocean, from the ocean to the Barrier.
* * * * *
To right and left the serried cliffs stretched out of sight--the edge of
the world, so far as beetles knew. If you examined the contour of its
rim, you could see how it corresponded point by point to the
irregularities of the hilly land on its hither side. Some time,
millennia ago, a great fault in the earth's crust had given way, and the
unknown lands of the continental interior had been lifted as if on a
platform, five hundred feet above the coastal regions. Or perhaps the
coast had sunk. Legend attributed the event to the ancients' wars, when,
it was said, some unimaginable weapon had cleft the continent
asunder....
Dworn perforce slowed his breakneck pace as the ground grew uneven
again. He guided his machine with instinctive skill over the ascending
slopes and ridges, eyes combing the moon-shadows for the first sign of
his people.
Then, a couple of miles ahead, he glimpsed lights. His heart bounded
up--then sank with a prescient dismay; there was something wrong--
The fires that winked up there--four, no, five of them, under the very
rim just before the cliffs rose sheer--didn't look like campfires. They
were unequally spaced, and they flared up and waned oddly by turns,
glowing evilly red.
Dworn braked the beetle to a stop on a patch of high ground, and sat
straining to discern the meaning of those ominous beacons. To his
imagination, rasped raw by expectation and the tension of long travel,
they became red eyes of menace, warnings.... He tried the infrared
viewer, but it showed no more than he could see with the naked eye. Only
ghosts paraded across the screen, ghosts of the folded slopes that rose
to the abrupt wall of the Barrier. Nothing seemed moving there; the
whole sweep of broken and tumbled landscape appeared dead and lifeless
as the moon.
But yonder burned the fires.
Sternly Dworn reminded himself that this night he was mature, a warrior
of the proud beetle race. He thrust his fears resolutely aside; there
was nothing to do but find out.
The beetle drifted forward, but cautiously now, at a stalking pace.
Dworn took advantage of the lie of the land, continually seeking cover
as he advanced, to shield him from whatever eyes might be watching from
the silent slopes above.
Boulders lay ever more thickly strewn as he neared the Barrier cliffs,
and he skirted patches of gravel and loose stones that would have
crunched loudly under his wheels. Only occasionally, emerging into the
open, he glimpsed his objective, but his sense of direction kept him
bearing steadily toward the fires.
Fifteen minutes later, the beetle's blunt nose thrusting from under a
shelf of rock that would disguise its outline if anything was watching,
its motor noiselessly idling, Dworn knew that his premonitions had not
been in vain. He looked out upon a scene that chilled his blood.
The burning machines, scattered for two hundred yards along the talus
slope where destruction had come upon them or where they had plunged out
of control, were beetles. Or they had been. Now they were wrecks,
smashed, overturned, fitfully aflame.
There was no sign of an enemy. But here was the havoc which some
powerful enemy had wrought, it could not have been long ago.
He strove to find identifying marks on the blackened hulks, but in the
uncertain light could make out at first no more than the female
ornaments which had graced two or three of them. Names and faces flashed
through Dworn's mind; he could not know yet who had perished here, which
faces he would not see again....
It hardly occurred to him to speculate that anyone might be left alive
on the scene of the debacle. For one thing, the destruction's
thoroughness was too evident, and besides, in Dworn's mind, by all his
background and his teaching, human and machine were inextricably one;
when one perished, so did the other....
* * * * *
There was a dull explosion, a shower of sparks and a spreading glare as
a fuel tank blew up. The flare revealed the pillar of smoke,
blood-colored by reflection, that towered into the night above the
scene.
And it revealed more. For Dworn saw by that unholy light that one of the
nearer beetles--capsized and burned out, its carapace burst raggedly
open--it bore the golden scarab emblem which was the chief's alone.
The sight smote Dworn like a physical blow, so that he almost cried out
aloud. Somehow it had not even crossed his mind that his father Yold
could have been among the slain in whatever disaster had fallen upon
the beetles here.... Others might die; but his father was a pillar of
strength that could not fall--the grave iron-willed chief, demanding and
rewarding, for his son impartially as for all the people....
Dworn's breath choked in his throat and his eyes stung. Fiercely he told
himself that a beetle, a chief's son, did not weep.
Not to mourn--to revenge, that was his duty. By the law of his people,
the bereaved son must seek out and slay not less than three members of
whatever race had done his father to death. Until then, his father's
insatiate spirit would roam the deserts without rest....
But Dworn did not even know as yet who had done this night's work.
Suddenly, by the new blaze that still continued, he saw movement, a dull
sheen of metal moving, and he froze the gesture that had been about to
send him forward into the arena of death.
The infrared was useless; by it the flickering firelight was blinding.
Dworn bit his lip in anger at his own lack of precaution, and hastily
twisted his sound-receptor control to maximum. The crackling of the
flames swelled to a hissing roar, but through it he heard the
unmistakable creaking sound of treads. Beyond the smoke moved an
indistinct and monstrous shape.
Dworn's jaw muscles set rock-hard and his hand flashed to another
control. His turret gun revolved soundlessly, and the crosshairs of the
sight danced across the mirrored image of the approaching thing. His
finger poised over the firing button, he braced himself to fling his
machine into swift evasive action before the enemy's perhaps
overwhelming firepower could reply--
The monster lumbered slowly into the light, canted far over and
traveling with an odd sidling motion along the steep rubbly slope. Great
treads set far out on each side of the squat, ungainly body preserved it
against overturning. Its flattened forward turret swiveled nervously
from side to side, peering blackly from vision ports steel-shuttered
down to squinting slits.
And Dworn relaxed. The red hatred that had blazed up in him subsided
into mere disgust; he watched the great machine's wary progress with a
familiar, instinctive contempt. It was a scavenger, huge but not very
formidable, drawn from afar by the fires which promised loot,
salvageable scrap, perhaps even usable parts, fuel or ammunition.... It
could not possibly have been responsible for the carnage; such cowardly
creatures gave a wide berth to the beetle horde.
The monster ground to a halt amid the wreckage. Then its engine bellowed
with sudden power and it spun half round, one tread spraying gravel, and
backed hastily away up the slope. And Dworn was aware that the noise of
creaking treads had redoubled. He cast about, and saw, laboring upward
from below, another big machine, closely similar to the first.
Both scavengers came to a stop, facing one another across the fading of
the fires, their unmuffled engines grumbling sullenly. Dworn watched
them narrowly, expecting the shooting to begin any moment. But the
scavengers' way of life was not one that encouraged reckless valor.
After a long minute, a hatch-cover was lifted in the first arrival's
armored back; a cautious head thrust forth, and shouted hoarsely, words
clear to Dworn's amplified hearing:
"Better go back where you came from, brother. We got here first!"
The other scavenger's turret-hatch also swung slightly open. A different
voice answered: "Don't talk foolishness, brother. We've got as much
right here as you, and anyway we _saw_ it first!"
The first voice thickened with belligerence. "We've got the advantage of
the ground on you, brother. Better back up!"
"Oh, go smelt pebbles!" snarled the other. No doubt that was a scathing
rejoinder among the scavengers.
* * * * *
Dworn grimaced scornfully and brought his turret-gun to bear on an
outcropping midway between the disputants. Either of them outweighed the
little beetle twenty times over--but at this juncture a single
unexpected shot would probably send both of them scuttling for cover--
But he halted again on the verge of firing. For he had not stopped
listening, and now his trained ears picked out another, an unfamiliar
sound from the background of noises.
It was a queer rattle and scurry, mingled with a high-pitched buzz that
could only come from a number of small but high-speed motors. It was not
a sound the exact like of which Dworn remembered having heard before. He
went rigid, staring, as the sound's source came into view.
A column of little machines--lighter even than a beetle, and more
elongated--advancing in single file, multiple wheels swerving in the
leader's tracks as the column wound nearer along the mountainside. As
the firelight fell on them they gleamed with the mild sheen of aluminum.
Round vision-ports stared glassily, and turbines buzzed feverishly
shrill.
With astonishing bravado, the flimsy little vehicles, one behind
another, came parading onto the wreck-strewn slope.
And what was more startling still--no two of them were alike. The leader
mounted a winch in plain view; behind came another machine fitted with
oddly-shaped grappling claws, and next one bearing a mysterious device
terminating in front in a sort of flexible trunk.... Strangely, too,
they didn't seem to carry any armament--no snouting guns, no flame or
gas projectors.
Despite that fact or perhaps because of it, something sounded an alarm
deep in Dworn's mind.
Their diversity itself was uncanny, that was certain. In all Dworn's
experience, machines were the work of races whose traditions of
construction, handed down from forgotten antiquity, were as fixed and
unvarying as the biological heredity that made one race light-haired,
another dark....
A hatch-cover clanged shut, and another. The squabbling scavengers had
finally noticed the appearance of outside competition. The one upslope
raced its engine uncertainly, swung round to face the buzzing invaders,
hesitated.
The newcomers, for their part, seemed oblivious to the scavengers'
presence. Their column began dispersing. A grapple-armed machine laid
hold on one of the wrecked beetles and, whining with effort, sought to
drag it to leveler ground. A second, following, spat a burst of sparks
and extended a gleaming arm tipped by the singing blue radiance of a
cutting torch.
The first-come scavenger growled throatily and lumbered toward the
interlopers, plainly taking heart from their air of harmless stupidity.
Behind it, the other scavenger came clattering up the slope to its
fellow's aid.
Flame bloomed thunderously from the muzzle of the first one's forward
gun. The machine with the torch was flung bodily into the air and went
rolling and bouncing down the hill, wheels futilely spinning. The gun
roared again, and the exploding shell tore open a flimsy aluminum body
from nose to tail. Motors whirred frantically as the pygmies scattered
before the charging behemoth. One of them darted witlessly right under
the huge treads, and disappeared with a brief screech of crumpling
metal.
* * * * *
The fight was over as quickly as it had begun. The scavenger wheeled,
snorting, and fired one more shot into the dark after its routed
opponents....
Dworn muttered an imprecation under his breath. No chance of frightening
the scavengers off now that their blood was up and their differences
forgotten; and a lone beetle could scarcely stand up to two of them in a
knock down fight. To rush in now would be suicidal.
He gave up the idea of investigating the scene of disaster more closely,
and backed stealthily away, keeping to the cover of the rocks. At a safe
distance he began circling round, downslope.
What he could and must do now was to locate what was left of his native
horde. It had numbered about fifty when he had departed for his
wanderyear; a dozen, perhaps more, had died on the mountain tonight. He
must seek out the survivors, and help plan retaliation against whatever
enemy had dealt them this terrible blow.
Yet something else nagged at his mind, until he halted to gaze achingly
once more toward the glowing embers up there, where the scavengers now
clanked to and fro about their business.
Dworn recognized that what bothered him was the puzzle of the
unidentified little machines that had turned up on the battlefield only
to be sent packing. During his yearlong solitary struggle to survive, he
had developed an extra sense or two--and in the queerly confident
behavior of those buzzing strangers he had scented danger, a trap....
So it happened that he was still looking on at the moment when the trap
was sprung.
A star, it seemed, fell almost vertically from the zenith, falling and
expanding with the uncanny silence of flight faster than sound. The
scavengers had no time to act. Dworn caught one faint glimpse of a
winged shape against the sky, limned by the flashes that stabbed from it
as it leveled out of its terrific dive.
One scavenger shuddered with the force of a heavy explosion somewhere
within it, and subsided, smoking. The other too staggered under
crippling impacts, but ground somehow into motion, spinning and sliding
crazily down the gravel slope. Then, as the first attacker's shock-wave
made the very earth tremble, a second and a third plunged from the black
heights, and as the last one rose screeching from its swoop the whole
lower face of the hillside boomed into a holocaust of flame and oily
smoke. The fleeing scavenger was gone, enveloped somewhere in an acre of
fiery hell.
Dworn, two hundred yards away, felt a searing breath of heat, and with
a great effort controlled the impulse to whirl round and race for opener
ground. He sat still, hands cramped sweating on the beetle's controls,
while the sky whistled vindictively with the flight of things that
circled in search of further targets.
When, after a seeming eon, their screaming died away, he released held
breath in a long sigh. He found himself trembling with reaction. Still
he didn't stir. He was ransacking his memory for something he should be
able to recall but which eluded him--a myth, perhaps, heard as a child
beside the campfires of the horde--
The old men would know; Yold would have known. At thought of his father,
the grief and fury rose up again in Dworn, and this time he knew the
object of his vengeful anger. There was small doubt now in his mind that
those flying machines which struck so swiftly and so murderously had
been the beetles' attackers.
But he didn't know what they were. He knew, of course, about the
machines called hornets, which could fly and strike at fearful speeds
like that, outracing sound. But the hornets flew only in daylight, and
made no trouble for the nocturnal race of beetles. These--were something
else.
And more--between the deadly night-fliers and the harmless-looking
aluminum crawlers he had seen, Dworn sensed some connection, some
unnatured symbiosis. He had heard vague rumors about such arrangements,
but had half-discounted them; any of the peoples whom he knew at first
hand would have scorned to enter into alliance with an alien species.
Lastly, he realized bitterly, he didn't even know where the enemy's
lair, their base on the ground, might be....
* * * * *
The moon stood high now. But the Barrier, close at hand now, rose like
an immense black wall, folded in shadows, revealing no secrets--walling
off the world the beetles knew from the unknown beyond. Involuntarily
Dworn shivered. He couldn't be sure--but it seemed to him that the
destroyers had come from over the Barrier and had flown back there.
He set his machine in cautious motion again and stole along, making
northward and keeping close to the Barrier. It occurred to him that the
beetle horde, routed and fleeing, might well have hugged the cliffs for
protection against flying foes.
The going here was not easy. The terrain seemed increasingly unfamiliar
though he should have known every foot of it. But--he remembered no
such tumbled crags, no such great heaps of stony detritus as blocked his
way and forced him into long detours....
Finally he halted to take his bearings, and, looking up, discovered what
had happened. The black rampart of the Barrier was notched and broken.
Sometime in the past year, since Dworn had left this place to begin his
wandering, a quarter-mile-wide section of the upper crags, hollowed and
loosened by the slow working of millennial erosion, had fallen and
spilled millions of tons of rock crashing and shattering onto the slopes
below. Here now water would run when the rains fell, and in ten or
twenty thousand years, perhaps, a river-course would have completed the
breach.
Dworn wondered fleetingly whether any living thing had been here when
the cliffs fell. If so, it was buried now, crumbling bone and corroding
metal, under the mountain for all time to come.
He set about skirting the rockfall, still searching the ground for
traces of beetle wheels. But there were very few wheel or tread marks of
any description to be seen--and that was strange in itself.
Impulsively he halted again and listened, his amplifier turned up. He
should have heard faroff engine-mutterings, occasional explosions from
the desert to the west, where normally the predatory machines and their
victims prowled and fought all night long over the sandy tracts and the
desolate ridges.... But there was nothing. A silence, vast and
unnatural, lay upon the wastes in the shadow of the high plateau.
He looked up again at the fallen rampart of the Barrier. The great
landship had opened, as it were, a gateway to the unknown lands in the
east--a gateway for what?
There was a strangeness here since last year, and the strangeness crept
chillingly into Dworn's blood, made the mountain air seem thin and cold.
As he started again, he noticed yet another curious thing. He was
crossing a sandy natural terrace, and the soft soil here was traversed
by a row of indented marks that marched in a straight line across the
open space. They were scuffed depressions, such as a ricocheting
projectile might have made--but oddly regular in shape and spacing,
almost, he thought fancifully, like giant footprints, ten feet apart....
Dworn was growing numbed to riddles. He shrugged impatiently and pressed
the accelerator again.
He would push on northward for a few more miles, he determined, and if
he still found no sign of his people, he would circle back to the
south....
The moonlight shadow of the huge tilted boulder ahead was inky. But
Dworn was keeping to the shadows by preference, remembering the death
from above; so he cut close around the overhanging rock.
Too late to swerve, then, he saw the gleam of something stretched across
his path. A metallic glint of deceptively slender strands which, as the
beetle rolled headlong into them, snapped taut without breaking, sprang
back and flipped the beetle clean over to fetch up against the rock with
an ear-shattering bang.
Half-stunned by the suddenness of it and the violence with which he had
been flung about, Dworn blurrily saw other cables settling from
overhead, coiling almost like living things around his overturned
machine. Then he glimpsed something else; stalking monstrously down from
the unscalable crag above, its armor glimmering in the moonlight, a
machine such as he had never imagined--a machine without wheels or
treads, a nightmare moving on jointed steel legs that flexed and found
holds for clawed steel feet with the smooth precision of well-oiled
pistons. A machine that walked.
Capsized, its vulnerable underside exposed, the beetle was all but
helpless. One hope remained. With wooden fingers Dworn groped for the
emergency button, found it--
The propellant-charge went off beneath him with a deafening roar. The
beetle was hurled upward and sidewise, in an arc that should have
brought it down on its wheels again--but the ensnaring cables tightened
and held, and Dworn's head slammed against something inside the cabin.
The world burst apart into a shower of lights and darkness....
* * * * *
Dworn came awake to a pounding head and blurred light in his eyes. He
moved, and sensed that he was bound.
His vision cleared. He saw that he was in a closed, half-darkened
chamber--and that discovery alone made him shudder, he who as a free
beetle had spent his whole life under desert skies. His feet rested on a
floor of hard-packed sand, and his back, behind which his wrists were
lashed together was propped uncomfortably against a wall ribbed with
metal girders. The room was circular and its walls converged upward,
into tangled shadows overhead; the chamber was roughly bottle-shaped.
To one side a door stood ajar, and it was thence that the light
streamed, but from where he was Dworn couldn't see into the space
beyond.
He tried hard to collect his thoughts. When had everything stopped
making sense? When he had first glimpsed the fires that were burning
beetles on the mountainside, or....
The converging lines of the wall-girders led his eyes upward. The
shadows overhead resolved themselves as he studied them, and Dworn's
heart pounded as he commenced to understand what manner of place he was
in. The roof of the bottle-shaped chamber--he was sure it must be
underground--was no roof, but was the underside of a great machine
complex with gear-housings and levers connected with the six powerful
metal legs radiating from it, their cleated feet resting on a shelf that
encircled the bottle-neck. It squatted there, motionless above him,
sealing the entrance to its burrow....
Trapped. For some reason he couldn't guess at, he had been taken
alive--his human body, at least; he didn't know what had become of the
rest of him, the machine that was part and parcel of him too.
The light suddenly brightened. The door at one side was swinging open.
Dworn blinked at the glare from the lighted room beyond. Against it a
figure stood in silhouette, and he saw that it was a woman.
She was slender, not very tall, and her hair was jet-black, a striking
frame for a startlingly pale face. Here beneath the earth she must not
get much sun.... In that white face her lips were shockingly red, the
color of fresh blood. And the nails of her slim white fingers were
crimson claws. After a moment, he realized that both must be painted--a
strange thing to him, for there was no such practice among beetle women.
She was clad in a coverall suit of much the same design as the green
garment Dworn wore according to beetle custom. But her garb was shiny
black, and in front, between the swelling mounds of her breasts, was an
emblem he did not understand; the shape of an hourglass, in vermilion
red.
She stood gazing at him, smiling a little with a curve of scarlet lips
that revealed white, sharp-looking teeth. Dworn groped for his voice;
but she spoke first.
"Patience, beetle," she said. "I'll attend to you in a moment."
The words had the accent of a strange speech, but they were
intelligible. Dworn stared uncomprehendingly at her, mumbled,
"Who--_what_ are you?"
She moved nearer and stood smiling down at him. "Why, beetle, don't you
know?... I'm the spider who caught you."
"_Spi-der?_" Dworn fumbled with the unfamiliar word. "I don't--"
Her eyes too were black, very black and intense. She said slowly, "You
don't know about spiders, beetle? Strange. It must be that till now
there were none of our kind on this side of the Rim."
* * * * *
Dworn's aching head was not serving him well, but a part of his
intelligence functioned to grapple with the implication of her words.
"The Rim"--that must mean the Barrier, as seen from its eastern side.
Then she, and others like her, must have come from beyond the Barrier. A
walking machine could descend by the broken path of the landslide.
But "spider"--the word rang some bell deep in his mind, some
recollection of childhood's fairytale bogeys perhaps, but he still
hadn't succeeded in grasping the memory.
He growled, "I don't know--but if you'd untie my hands, I'd show you
what a beetle is."
She eyed him thoughtfully. Then she smiled, showing the sharp little
white teeth again. "Presently I'll free you. When it's quite safe. As
soon as--" Her hand dipped to a small black case secured to her belt,
and came up with a diminutive gleaming object--a slender needle
thrusting from a liquid-filled plastic cylinder fitted with a plunger.
"Do you know what _this_ is, beetle?"
Dworn glowered silently.
"When I've injected this fluid into your veins, you will have no will of
your own left. You'll do what I say, and only what I say--for the rest
of your life, beetle!"
Dworn's eyes clung in unwilling fascination to the glittering needle. He
said through stiff lips, "Now I remember. Your kind is a legend among my
people. The evil women who have no men ... who kill their male children
at birth, and trap their mates from among the other races, and kill
them, too, when they no longer want them.... _Spider!_"
His gaze collided squarely with hers, and she needed no skill to read
the loathing in it, rendered more violent by her beauty that he could
not help but see.
Her eyes dropped first. She clutched the needle and muttered fiercely to
herself, "But when you've had the injection, it won't matter. I'll say,
'Love me!' and you'll love me, and 'Die!' and you'll die...."
Dworn stared burningly at the slim figure in black with the scarlet
hourglass on her bosom. He was alert again, and his mind was racing. To
all appearances he was lost--but something in the spider girl's manner
gave him an unreasonable hope.
He said abruptly, "So. Why didn't you use your poison while I was
stunned? That would have been easy."
She looked away. "You ask foolish questions, beetle. Naturally, I had to
prepare myself according to our customs. I had to paint my face and make
myself beautiful...."