Chapter X

The aero roared across a short stretch of sand and was airborne. It swerved, evading a buzzard squadron that was droning over, and climbed swiftly into the north.

Torcred huddled in the cramped space behind the pilot's seat, over the little dull metal box that Relez claimed was a bomb. He glimpsed Ladna's face, over the dimly glowing controls; it was as if transfigured. She was tasting the joy she had thought lost to her forever, the glory of flight through the high thin air at a thousand miles an hour.

"This isn't like crawling, is it?" she asked lightly. "Four or five minutes now, and we'll be there."

Torcred braced himself more firmly. "Give me thirty seconds warning."

Presently the girl cut off the power. The machine slowed and began to swerve and buck a little as its speed approached that of sound. "Thirty seconds."

Relez had told him how to arm the bomb. Torcred pushed the levers he had indicated, and looked doubtfully at the harmless-looking gray box. "We're over it," said Ladna. "The place is lit up; they're not expecting anything else in the air. I can see buzzards taking off...."

Torcred, of course, could see nothing. He shoved open the emergency escape door in the floor and tipped the lead box out into the shrieking rush of air.

The engine's sighing roar began again. He slammed the door shut and squirmed forward, into the seat beside Ladna. The little ship ran away, faster than sound or an air shock wave could follow....

But they saw the glare that turned desert and mountains and sky ahead white with a reflected radiance brighter than the noonday sun. For moments it lasted, then the light died and the night was dead black to their dazzled eyes.

"The ancients' weapons were pretty potent," said Torcred, and the girl shivered.

She made a wide circle and flew back, but they could see nothing in the valley where Buzzard Base had been. Only an immense cloud of darkness still faintly luminous at its heart, roiling slowly upward. The air was turbulent. Ladna gave the cloud a wide berth, for Relez had warned them of that.

The girl looked questioningly at Torcred. He said, "A line due south from the Salt Sea should find us the terrapins' camp."

Obediently Ladna made a few degrees' turn to the west. "You still believe--"

"That Relez was right? I don't know. But I know this--whether the men of the floating cities have their way of the world or not, they've started a change that must lead to more change, a new civilization.... And I still want to help the terrapins make a place in it--first of all by teaching them that they are men."

* * * * *

The great salt lake unrolled in the moonlight and slipped away beneath the ship. They raced on over the southern reaches of the valley where they had wandered three strange days. Then in midflight the motor choked and died. The anti-ionization field had closed down again.

"Relez is in a hurry for his peace," remarked Torcred, and they laughed a little hysterically. The ship lost altitude and the shadowy desert came up to meet them, but not before they saw, a couple of miles away, a spot of light that Torcred's keen eyes identified as the camp of the terrapins. He breathed a sigh of relief at finding it undamaged by the buzzard raids.

"You can start educating them in the morning," said Ladna. "Isn't the moon lovely tonight?"

"Eh?" Torcred was jarred by the disconnectedness of her remarks. "Why wait till morning?"

She started to answer, then exclaimed and wrenched at the controls. The aero wobbled on one wing as the top of a dune slid by scant feet below; then it plowed through the next crest and pancaked into the valley beyond.

The two scrambled, shaken up but undamaged, out of the battered craft, and Torcred caught the disheveled girl in his arms.

"You're a hopelessly bad bird," he growled in mock rage. "Two ships you've smashed up inside a week!"

And he would have touched noses with her, but Ladna evaded the gesture adroitly.

"Don't be a terrapin!" she chided. "You've got to learn civilized ways ... like this...."

He learned.