Chapter V

Torcred sat, head sunk limply in his hands, on the white salt beach facing the lifeless sea. The throb of motors and swirl of dust behind the departing terrapins had died down in the south; instead of hunting today as planned from this camp, they had left the spot that had become accursed. And Torcred sat numb with despair, passively waiting for the end.

Near him Ladna, the bird-girl rose to her feet. She looked in the other direction, out over the lifeless waste of sand, and then at the man's slumped, motionless figure.

Her voice was hard and scorn-edged. "So--a terrapin shorn of his armor is less than a bird clipped of her wings?"

Torcred raised his head and looked at her glassy-eyed. "You heard," he growled. "I'm not a terrapin any more."

"You'll always be a terrapin to me," she said. "A miserable, beaten crawler."

He stared without understanding. Around them was the thirsty, deadly desert; the sun was hot already, his mouth was dry, and the poisonous sea lapped mockingly at its flat shore. The girl had been ready to die when her aero crashed--but now her slender body was vibrant with the will to live.

But her bitter words could not fail of effect. Torcred stumbled erect and snapped, "I'm not beaten until I'm dead! But--what chance do we have?"

She accepted the _we_ with a faint smile, and said in a softer tone, "There is an aero eyrie--not my own, but one with which we have friendly relations--about seventy miles east of here, in those blue mountains you can see. Perhaps we can make it there on foot."

"That's all very well for you," said Torcred somberly. "But for me--what could I expect from your people?"

"We are not so narrow-minded as the terrapins. We see more and tolerate more. You can be taken in and given tasks to perform in return for your keep." She frowned at his doubt, and explained further, "Some day--soon--we birds will rule all the Earth. And we do not want to wipe out all the other races; we'll preserve them to do the jobs that must be done on the ground, and all of our people will be free to fly."

The picture of conquest she painted so naively repelled Torcred, reared in the terrapin tradition of a barbaric individualistic freedom. "You offer me slavery," he said harshly.

"No, no," protested Ladna. "According to our law, you will be free to leave if you wish." He snorted. "And--" she hesitated, "I will be in the same condition, now that I have lost my wings."

Torcred stared at the ground, shrugged. "It's better than dying here--perhaps. And we may not make it. How fast can one travel on foot?"

"Ten miles an hour?" the girl hazarded.

"Less than that, I think. It will be a long way--and I know of no water holes." Ladna shook her head at the question in his glance. "It may be impossible to walk that far without water; I never heard of anyone's doing it. But we can try."

* * * * *

The blue flat-topped mountains still shimmered unreally, far away as ever, across the heated plain. The sun was at its height and the sand was blistering. The two huddled in the scant shadow of a dune. Both were sunburned, maddeningly thirsty, and discouraged. They could not have covered more than a dozen miles before the heat had driven them to seek shelter.

They talked very little; as the burning midday dragged on, Ladna slept for a time. When she woke she looked round feverishly, and a moan escaped her lips.

"What's the matter?" asked Torcred.

"I was dreaming," the girl said in a choked voice, and, shockingly, two tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Don't cry," ordered Torcred harshly. "We've got to conserve all possible moisture."

She bit her lip, and no more tears came.

When the shadows lengthened somewhat they set out again to the east. During the morning they had seen some signs of life--had flattened themselves on the ground while a cavalcade of fire-breathing dragons passed one by one along the crest of a distant ridge, the long snouts of their flame projectors thrusting before them, and had skirted a colony of the queer crusty pillbox people who had sacrificed mobility for an almost invulnerable security. But during the long afternoon the desert seemed utterly empty. Only at dusk they saw, far over head, three vast black shapes flying in wedge formation, and the drone of motors beat down out of the hollow bowl of the sky.

"Buzzards!" whispered the girl, and shrank against the sand.

Torcred knew that the buzzards were the aero people's hereditary foes, but that did not seem adequate to explain the bright bitterness of hatred in the girl's eyes.... He was about to ask a question, when his eyes caught movement in the near distance and he froze, mouth open.

A hundred paces ahead on the way they had been going, atop a low mound, stood a figure--a man in queer garments, not identifiable with any of the races Torcred knew. When the Terrapin tried to make out his face, the man seemed to waver in the fading light; then he raised a hand in a gesture beckoning them toward him.

The bird-girl, back to the apparition, looked wide-eyed wonder. Torcred croaked wordlessly and pointed; and with the motion the stranger was gone from the ridge.

"What's the matter?" asked Ladna puzzledly.

"Nothing," Torcred managed to get out. "The shadows play tricks...."

As they crossed the rise, Torcred halted to tie a bootlace that didn't need tying. There were no tracks in the soft sand. Torcred remembered fearfully what he had heard of the visions that heralded death by thirst--but even sane people saw things that weren't there, such as the phantom lakes that had mocked them in the midday heat.

But he had been sure that vision was looking at him....

Two or three miles further on, it was almost dark. Torcred sank wearily down in the lee of a high ridge. "We'd better stop here. Perhaps a night's sleep will give us strength."

The girl sighed. "I think we will die on this desert, terrapin."

Torcred felt a stirring of the anger her use of that word always roused in him. But he said only, "We've covered perhaps a third of the way. Two more days, then."

He remembered that pebbles in the mouth ease thirst; they tried that, and it helped a little. Then they scooped hollows in the sand for sleep. Ladna wriggled out of the heavy flying suit that, stickily uncomfortable as it was, had protected her from the sun. The sleeveless shirt and shorts she wore beneath clung damply to her; even through a haze of exhaustion Torcred was stirred by the sight of her slender body, her mildly rounded breasts and long straight legs....

He slept like a log, and woke in the dim pearly light before dawn, still tired, his mouth like a furnace.

* * * * *

It was a moment before he realized that the bird-girl's piercing whisper had wakened him, and sat up abruptly. Spots danced before his eyes; he felt her hand tighten in warning on his arm.

Then he saw by that ghostly light, not a hundred yards away, a thing of nightmare.

It was a huge gray monster of metal, a moving fortress going steadily forward on endless treads that hardly dented the soft sand beneath it, though it must have weighed half a hundred tons. Shod with silicone-rubber, it rolled in an unreal silence, the purr of its engine scarcely audible in the early hush, past the two frightened watchers under the dune, and vanished over another crest.

The girl still clutched Torcred's arm, finding perhaps some flimsy reassurance in the resilient hardness of his tensed muscles. "What was it?" she gasped.

"That was a panzer," Torcred informed her in a low voice. "A big relative of the terrapins, that prowls the desert alone, by night. It carries a crew of three to six, can see in the dark and move without a sound. It's one of the most formidable land machines in the world."

Ladna drew a shuddering breath. "I hope it doesn't come back."

"Don't worry. I told you it was nocturnal--at this hour it's hunting a good safe spot to lie up for the day."

The girl was wearily pulling on her coveralls; her fire-blue eyes were clouded with hopelessness as they gazed into the gray dawn. "Perhaps it would have been better if it had seen us--better than what's ahead of us."

Torcred did not answer; he was frowning in thought. Suddenly he rose to his feet--wincing a little as he put his weight on them; with gentle firmness he turned the girl around and faced her toward the west, suggesting, "Let's go back a little way."

"Back! Are you crazy, terrapin?"

"Remember the wreck of an armadillo we saw about a quarter of a mile back? I want to get something there."

"That wreck was years old," sniffed Ladna. "There couldn't be any supplies left in it."

"I have an idea," said Torcred. Then, as he saw her unyielding disbelief, "I intend to capture the panzer."

And he trudged off purposefully to the west. The girl followed, still protesting in an undertone, as all their argument had been carried on. "You _are_ sunstruck! That monster--and we've not got so much as a knife--You might as well try to tear down that mountain peak," she pointed toward a distant blue height, wreathed in cottony clouds, "with your bare hands."

"Maybe I will," said the Terrapin.

* * * * *

The smashed armadillo had long since been stripped of usable parts by the desert's scavengers. The remaining wreckage was widely strewn, half-buried in the sand and eaten by rust.

Torcred searched with a grim intensity, tugging at the projecting steel ribs. Some were deeply buried, others too badly bent, still others too short. At last he found what he was looking for; a narrow T-beam, six straight feet of alloy steel, light but tremendously strong. He hefted it with satisfaction.

"You don't intend to attack the panzer with that!" exclaimed Ladna.

"I do," said Torcred. He looked into her wide blue eyes for a moment, then pointed down at something that had been disturbed when he pried loose the beam. A chalk-white skull with empty eyes. He kicked at it, and it crumbled. "Of such are we made, bird-girl. A fragile framework compared with the machines'. But alive, we have intelligence, and with intelligence and this weapon I mean to take the panzer."

They tramped eastward again, following their own tracks, under a sun already growing hot. After a while the girl asked in a meek voice, "How can you hope to do it?"

Torcred smiled inwardly at the impression his--largely assumed--confidence had made. He answered, "This morning I noticed some of the thing's weaknesses."

"It didn't look weak to me."

"In the first place, its guns are set high on that huge frame--above the housing of the treads. They couldn't hit a man standing right beside it. And I think I can get that close to it, because it will be resting now, the crew asleep--or one of them may be watching, but he can't watch all ways at once. There will be automatic alarms, of course, but I don't think they'll respond to anything as small and harmless as a lone man."

Ladna drew breath sharply. "Perhaps you're right--But even so, what then? You can't dent its armor with that bar, and it can simply move away and shoot you down!"

"It has another weak point. It runs on caterpillar tracks--that is, really, on wheels turning inside an endless belt that gives a wider basis of support. But if any sizable, hard object finds its way between wheel and track--"

He paused significantly, and the bird-girl's eyes met his in a luminous dawn of understanding and hope.

They had no trouble finding the trail of the panzer. As he scanned those yard-wide tracks, paralleling each other ten feet apart, Torcred's grip tightened on his T-beam; it did not seem quite so thick and heavy now, against all those tons of rolling metal might.

But he had boasted recklessly, and he was going through with it if it killed him.