There was a sudden howling in the sky. Flashing overhead, as the two
stood momentarily petrified, went a shrieking flight of half a dozen
winged shapes--stubby vanes slanting back from vicious noses, they
hurtled low over the desert and vanished swiftly into the distance,
dust-devils dancing across the ground in the whirling wind of their
passage.
Dworn stared after them, and his eyes narrowed. A new and desperate
resolve had begun shaping itself in his mind.
Of the things he had meant to do in life, it was no use thinking any
more of rejoining his people. He was dead to them, for sure--not even a
beetle any more, but only what was left of one, a ghost.... But a holy
duty, stronger than death, remained to him; his father was still
unrevenged.
What he could do against a foe so powerful as those who had just passed
over, he had no idea--but perhaps a ghost could accomplish what a living
man might well deem impossible.
He motioned Qanya peremptorily toward the waiting spider-machine. "Come
on. We're taking your machine, and we're going to find _them_!"
For a moment she seemed to hesitate ... then she obeyed. If her face was
paler than usual, Dworn failed to notice it.
* * * * *
The spider-vehicle lurched and swayed, even its marvelous system of
shock-absorbers protesting as it climbed steeply, straddling upward from
rock to rock.
Dworn clutched at handholds inside the pitching cabin and tried to
combat the sympathetic lurching of his stomach. Qanya huddled tensely
over the controls, slim hands flashing nimbly to and fro as with
incredible deftness she guided the laboring machine.
Dworn risked a glimpse from the turret-windows, then shut his eyes with
a rush of giddiness. They were climbing now up the steepest part of the
great slide, where the mountainside had collapsed in a chaos of
splintered rock and tumbled crags that would have been utterly
impassible for any wheeled vehicle. Below them, the sloping valley floor
they had left appeared from this height entirely flat and sickeningly
far away. And still the cliff-heads frowning above them seemed terribly
remote.
"How ... far?" gasped Dworn.
"It can't be very far now to the top," said Qanya, without glancing up
from her absorbed concentration. Both their lives were in her hands; a
slip, a misstep, and they might fall hundreds of feet among the jagged
rocks to their death.
For seconds at a time, the walking machine poised motionless, one or
more of its clawed limbs groping for footholds. As it clambered
painfully upward, it was hopelessly exposed to attack if it should be
sighted from the air.
_Dworn_, the beetle told himself savagely, _you are not only a ghost,
you are an insane ghost_. _Only a madman would have undertaken such a
journey._
The cabin heeled wildly as the machine grappled a ledge and, its engine
panting at full throttle, levered itself upward a few more feet.
He had commanded the spider girl to find the route by which her people
had descended. But twice already they had missed the way and had arrived
at dead ends beyond which it was impossible to climb higher; twice they
had been forced to descend and search for an easier path. It had been
scarcely noon when they started; now the sun was already sinking low.
Dworn could not even be sure that he would find his sworn enemies beyond
the Barrier. But the duty of vengeance was all he had left to live for,
since what was to have been his triumphal return had ended in
bereavement and catastrophe.
_And a dead man_, thought Dworn bleakly, _needs something to live for,
even more than other people do_.
The world came level again, for the moment. The machine sidled
precariously along a narrow ledge girdling an unscalable wall of rock,
as Qanya sought a spot to resume the ascent. Dworn winced at the thought
that the way might be blocked again. But, no--fifty yards further on,
the wall was breached, and toppled boulders formed a perilous but not
impossible stairway.
Just as Qanya grasped the levers which would set the spider scrambling
upward once more, there was a sound--one grown hatefully familiar to
Dworn since the night before, the feverish buzzing of a number of light
high-speed engines. He opened his mouth to hiss a warning, but Qanya
too had heard. Instantly she guided the spider-machine as close as
possible to the cliff, where the hollowed rock afforded some shelter,
and twirled a knob that made it sink down, legs folding compactly.
They waited scarcely breathing. A couple of times before they had
huddled like this, while flights of the winged enemies whistled over ...
but the wingless ones? It seemed impossible that they should be up here,
where surely nothing that ran on wheels could travel....
* * * * *
The head of a column of the aluminum crawlers came into view, whirring
along the ledge with a confident air of knowing where they were going.
One by one, the little machines rolled past within a few feet of the
crouching spider, hastening on with an uncanny pre-occupation.
Dworn saw that, like those he had seen earlier, they were of diverse
kinds; and several of them, fitted with claws and racks for transporting
booty, were heavily laden now with metal plates and girders carved from
some larger machine, a roll of caterpillar tread, a slightly bent
axle.... The last pygmy in line, whose afterbody was a bloated tank,
gurgled as it jolted by, and trailed an aroma of looted fuel.
A few yards beyond the staring watchers, each of the little plunderers
pivoted sharply in its turn and without even slackening speed vanished
straight into the cliff-face. Dworn and Qanya looked incredulously at
one another.
"A tunnel!" Dworn grunted in realization.
That explained one mystery, at least--how, if the winged and wingless
strangers' home base was somewhere above the cliffs, the wheeled
machines contrived to forage at the foot of the Barrier. They must have
one or more inclined tunnels, bored through solid rock for a distance
that staggered Dworn's imagination. Emerging at this level, they had
found or constructed a passable road the rest of the way to the valley
floor.... Now he noticed that the ledge to which the spider had so
laboriously climbed showed signs of being an often-used trail, and the
cliffs it skirted exhibited in places the raw marks of recent blasting.
"Remember this spot," he told Qanya. "If we should return this same
way--there's evidently an easier path down."
She said nothing. Dworn wondered wrily if, in her drug beclouded mind,
she was aware of how unlikely it was that either of them would be
returning from beyond the Barrier.
A mad enterprise indeed--a ghost and a zombie, going to seek out a foe
whose numbers and whose might grew ever more apparent. The tunnel
opening here was clear evidence of engineering resources and skill far
beyond that of any of the machine races Dworn knew.
Its discovery was no help to them, since it was far too small to admit
the spider.
"Go on!" Dworn ordered doggedly. "At least we know now that _their_
dwelling can't be far!"
Qanya glanced briefly sidelong at him, then moved the levers, and the
spider rocked upright once more and began to climb.
* * * * *
The sun was low, and the shadows of rocks and dunes in the valley behind
them were pointing long blue fingers eastward, when the machine
staggered up the last precipitous ascent and stood on level ground at
the summit.
Dworn took a deep breath and looked ahead, looked for the first time in
his life upon the unknown land beyond the Barrier.
At first glance, it differed little from any of the desert country where
he had lived all his life. The ground shelved gradually away from the
rocky rim on which they stood; far off, against the darkening eastern
sky, blue mountains rose murkily, but between here and the ranges lay a
vast shallow depression, an arid sink floored with wind-rippled sand.
Perhaps it had been a lake-bed once, before natural or unnatural
cataclysms, and the millennial drying-up of all this country, had
emptied it of water. Or perhaps--as its circular form suggested--it was
one of those other, mysterious depressions which were scattered
irregularly across the face of the earth where no lakes had ever been;
those, legend said, were scars left by the ancients' wars.
The rich light of the declining sun fell at a shallow angle into the
miles-wide bowl and brought out with startling clarity the maze of
wheel-tracks, crossing and criss-crossing, which covered its sandy
expanse and testified to a fever of recent machine activity there. The
light gleamed, too, here and there, upon scurrying metallic shapes, that
raced by ones and twos or in trickling columns to and from the center of
the bowl, where--
Dworn strained his eyes and his capacity for belief in an effort to make
sense of the structures there, miles away. He was not very successful,
for the scene was too unlike anything he had ever looked on before.
There were certain races which built stationary dwellings--Dworn knew of
the scale-makers who lived, in colonies sometimes of considerable size,
beneath individual armored, anchored domes sunk into the face of some
impregnable rock; he knew of the sand devils with their pits, and now he
had seen also how the spider people nested. But the huge buildings that
loomed yonder, lowering and windowless, and the winged things clustering
thick on the ground about them, were such as he had never seen in his
nomadic life.
Atop a slender tower that spired above the squat structures he could
make out something which turned and turned, something like a broad net
of lacy wires, revolving steadily from east to west, from north to
south. Strange, too, the smooth-surfaced ways that radiated outward in
four directions, like an immense cross, broad paved roads that came to
abrupt dead ends a mile or more from the central buildings.... After a
moment, though, he guessed that those were runways for the aircraft
which flew from this place.
The unknown builders were obviously a mighty people, a people who had
perfected their peculiar form of organization on a gigantic scale. And a
people who acted and thought strangely; for their behavior, as Dworn had
observed it, suggested a chilly-blooded and fanatic discipline, a
regimentation which he found monstrous and repellent.
Dworn turned questioning eyes on Qanya.
"I don't know what they are," she answered his unspoken query in a voice
that faltered. "I remember this valley. But a few months ago it was
uninhabited. All this has been built since then."
* * * * *
Dworn hesitated. He was seeing very clearly now just how hopeless this
mad expedition was. Nevertheless, he had sworn vengeance, and he could
at least perish with honor.
But--Seeing the fear in Qanya's face, it came to him sharply that, after
all, she had no part in his blood feud. She had served him well by
bringing him this far. The vague plans he had had, of using the
spider-machine for an attack on the enemy, stood revealed as rankest
folly. Big and powerful as the spider was by ordinary standards, against
such as those it could accomplish little more than a man with his bare
hands.
Which was what Dworn would be--He stifled further reflection, said
crisply: "You can go now. I'll remain here; I have a duty to perform.
But you can return--go make your peace with your people, or whatever you
like."
Qanya's black eyes met his squarely. "I won't," she said.
"Now see here--" Dworn began, and broke off, thunderstruck.
"B-but," he gulped, "you _can't_ disobey me. The drug, the spider
poison--"
"Doesn't work on a born spider. I must have neglected to mention that,
naturally, _we're_ all immunized against it." She smiled with a flash of
those sharp white teeth.
"Then--then--" Dworn stumbled, feeling his preconceptions tossed
helter-skelter. "Then you must have come with me--of your own free
will!"
"At first," murmured Qanya, "I knew you'd never trust me unless I
pretended ... and I was curious, too, to see how it was to be the one
that obeyed. And then ... well, you'd have known, if you'd ever seen how
the drug really works. You should have realized, anyway, when I laughed
at you.... But you do so love to be masterful don't you?"
For a moment, Dworn's chief emotion was one of quick rage at the
revelation of how thoroughly she'd deceived him. Then the anger subsided
and left him feeling merely foolish, as he saw that she'd merely let him
deceive himself. And, finally--as it came home to him that this girl had
followed him of her own choice into exile and great danger--a new and
quite unaccustomed feeling flooded in on him, a queer sense of humility.
"I'm sorry," he said confusedly. "I didn't--I don't--understand."
She breathed in a barely audible voice, "You said I was beautiful....
And _you_ hadn't the drug."
From far away, from around the vast, mysterious buildings, came mournful
hooting sounds, a sighing and a sobbing as of some mythical monster in
torment.
Dworn was rudely recalled to realization of where they were--and of the
fact that, as the spider-machine stood poised here on the cliff-edge, it
would be starkly visible from over there, seen against the setting sun.
He gave up trying to unsnarl the tangle of his own feelings. He said
hurriedly, "But you should go back. There's no time--I _have_ to go on.
But there's no reason you should die."
Qanya's face was drawn and determined. "No," she said flatly.
"I don't know what you're talking about. But I won't leave you now...."
The distant sighing rose to a whining roar.
"Quick!" cried Dworn in desperation. "Find cover. I think we've been
seen!"
* * * * *
The girl reached for the controls and the spider's engine raced up. But
it was already late. Off yonder, along that one of the radiating runways
that stretched toward them, something was moving, racing swiftly and
more swiftly outward with its long shadow following it.
All at once the moving thing left its shadow behind, and Dworn
recognized it for an aircraft taking off.
Then he had to snatch for a handhold as the spider-machine lunged into a
dead run. At full speed on the level ground, it could make good time;
the ground outside skimmed past at fifty or sixty miles an hour.
Qanya had spied some rocky outcroppings, which might furnish a modicum
of shelter, about a mile away and some distance from the brink of the
cliffs, and she was heading for them. But the terrain nearer at hand was
implacably flat--and the enemy was airborne, a vicious winged shape
growing at terrifying speed. Its whistling roar swelled and grew
deafening.
Qanya shouted something inaudible and pointed. Dworn understood, and,
holding on for dear life in the pitching cabin, clawed his way within
reach of the fire-controls. Wrestling with the unfamiliar mechanism, he
fought to train the spider's guns on the hurtling attacker.
Puffs of smoke bloomed high in air--but any hit on such a fast-moving
target, from so unstable a platform, would have been a miracle. The
enemy screeched overhead, and an instant later flame and thunder erupted
all around the running spider. The machine stumbled and for a moment
seemed going down, but it righted itself and staggered on.
Dworn shook his ringing head and saw the flier banking steeply half a
mile away, while a second and a third were climbing against the sky,
gaining altitude to dive.
They couldn't last another thirty seconds, couldn't even hope to reach
the doubtful cover of the rocks.... Up ahead, two hundred yards, was a
low mound, only a few feet high, the only nearby elevation of any sort.
And it was plainly artificial, though wind-piled sand had softened its
outlines; others like it were scattered around the periphery of the
great sink, and Dworn guessed their nature as he saw a column of the
aluminum crawlers beginning to emerge from the side of the one just
ahead. It must be the other end of a tunnel such as they had discovered
among the cliffs....