Chapter VIII

When he turned away, he saw the stranger standing not far off, beneath a great stone promontory that thrust out into the sea of sand, his back to a deep black cleft in the rock. Torcred could see his face clearly this time, and this time it was unsmiling, the brows drawn together and lips compressed in an expression of anxiety. The stranger beckoned with a jerky urgency, half-turned, and pointed toward the crevice of the cliff.

Torcred took a step toward him, his anger boiling up dangerously, blood drumming in his ears. "What are you?" he shouted. "What do you want? You've dogged my steps, watched me, and applauded my downfall. Now what--"

The stranger's eyes shifted, and he moved his head as if listening to a voice that Torcred did not hear. His eyes widened with alarm, and he vanished like a blown-out flame.

Torcred blinked baffledly. The hand on the hilt of his knife relaxed, but the roaring in his ears grew louder. Almost it might be real....

He threw back his head and looked up. Far above, individually almost indistinguishable in the pale twilight sky but making it alive with their massed formations, V after V of black flying shapes were moving. The air throbbed with the vibrant roar of many engines.

The leading squadrons were already over the mountain when the first dart of flame leaped from it and climbed with a whistling rush to meet them. Others followed, the clatter of their guns mingling with the multiple crescendo shriek of the first sticks of falling bombs.

Torcred crouched involuntarily, bracing himself for the concussions that must shake earth and air.... But only dull thudding sounds rolled down from the mesa, as if the rain of projectiles fell without exploding.

Over the mountain two buzzards dropped out of formation and wobbled earthward, trailing smoke down the sky, and a third burst into bright flame and disintegrated in a meteoric shower. New formations still came droning out of the north--the buzzards were attacking in force. Their bombs kept landing with sullen thumps, almost inaudible under the roar of motors, the sputter of guns and the flat reports of aerial cannon.

But to Torcred, hugging the lee of a great boulder and trying with straining eyes to pierce the darkness that increasingly shrouded the mesa, those dull incessant impacts became an ominous sound. Ladna had gone up there--she had had plenty of time to reach safety in the buried heart of the eyrie, which even the mightiest explosives could scarcely touch--but without knowing why, Torcred edged out of his shelter and began once more, creeping from rock to rock, to clamber up the steep ravine that the two of them had ascended together.

He had not progressed far--in the dark the uncertain footing was dangerous--when the breeze, sighing down the canyon with cool mountain-top air for the hot plain, brought confirmation of his fear with it.

A whiff of strange odor that stung in his nostrils and tickled his windpipe harshly. Then his eyes began to smart as it grew rapidly stronger; the gas the buzzards had used to blanket the mesa was a dense one, designed to seek out the aero people in the depths of their underground fortress.

Torcred halted, blinking, struggling with the growing need to cough. He recognized the odor after a moment--the same poison that the machines called skunks used against their enemies. He knew that enough of it was deadly. And a cold hand of terror clutched at his heart.

* * * * *

He flung caution from him and started to scramble recklessly, planlessly upward. Denser clouds of gas met him, and, half-blinded, he stumbled against sharp rocks and almost fell when fits of coughing shook him. His chest became a rasping furnace, and each deep panting breath was a flame. Bitterly he knew that his will could not drive him much longer into that torment....

In the air something flew burning, and the light of its destruction fell bright as day into the canyon and threw shifting shadows. Torcred's tear-filled eyes blurred the glare, but he glimpsed a small dark-clad figure huddled on the rocks not ten feet from him, across a black crevice that might be five or fifty feet deep.

He crouched and sprang; weakened knees betrayed him, he landed clawing on the rounded lip of the chasm and barely managed to pull himself up to the girl's side. But new strength steeled him as he gathered his feet under him and dragged both her and himself erect.

Ladna was alive and conscious; she leaned against him, coughing weakly.

"I was coming back," she gasped in his ear. "I'd have been up there ... but I was coming back ... to you...."

Torcred hardly understood her. "Come on!" he croaked. "Down!"

The way seemed immeasurably longer than the way up had been. It was really a little longer--the gas was settling fast--until, staggering, each half-supporting the other, they reached a level where the air was no longer choking poison. Ladna grew able to stand alone; swaying a little, she followed Torcred down the treacherous slides in the canyon's mouth.

On the soft wind-piled sand below the great rifted rock, where Torcred had last seen the visionary stranger, they sank down to rest by common consent. Torcred listened anxiously to the girl's hoarse breathing.

He moistened his lips and asked, "How do you feel?"

Ladna stirred and sat up with an effort that set her coughing again. "I'll be all right.... We'll go back into the desert, and live there somehow, as long--as long as we live."

"That's right," said Torcred. In the dark she couldn't see how his face grew grim at the thought of how short their life together was likely to be.

He raised his head, sniffing the air. A thin sharp taint, reminiscent of stifling agony, told him they must be up and moving soon. The gas was diffusing but still dangerous; up yonder on the plateau, where it had been concentrated, it must have left nothing save desolation and death....

Only then did he become aware, with a start of amazement, of the great silence that enfolded mountain, sky, and desert.

The air, at least, which had snarled with motors not twenty minutes earlier, should still have echoed to the sound of battle. But the sky was empty.

No, not empty--abruptly landing lights cut a brilliant swathe far out on the desert. The buzzard pilot saw he had misjudged his altitude and tried to pull up, the huge ship stalled and its lights went out as it plowed into the ground. Before the sound of its crash reached the mountain's foot, a pillar of fire was mounting above the dunes, and they saw that the air was full of machines, attackers and defenders alike in one confused flitting swarm, wheeling, dipping and always drifting downward, unpowered.

Ladna gasped, "What's happened? The buzzards--"

"I don't know. Maybe your people--"

"They're not my people any more," she interrupted swiftly. "Whatever you are, I am too.... And anyway, all the engines are dead."

* * * * *

Torcred got up stiffly. On the desert between them and the fire, an aero glided down, bounced and rolled to a shaky landing. Its pilot dropped to the ground and stood staring at his useless machine; he did not even look up as a buzzard passed low over him with a rush of wings, touched ground and slewed round a short way off with a broken landing gear. Small figures spilled out of it too, their movements expressing the same dazed lack of understanding. The enemies paid each other no heed.

The smell of gas was stronger. The desert would be littered with aircraft, but they shouldn't have much trouble slipping through.... Still Torcred frowned, hesitating. He turned with sudden resolution to the girl.

"Wait here. There's something I have to find out; but it won't take long."

"No!" Ladna struggled to her feet. "I'll go with you."

Torcred started to protest, then changed his mind. He turned silently toward the cliff whose blank stone face was lit redly by the dying fire, its great fissure a dark gulf of mystery.

Inside the cleft it was pitchblack, but the footing was smooth, packed sand. Torcred felt his way between rock walls. At first he heard only the scufflings the girl made, groping behind him, and then he was conscious of a faint all-pervading hum. Something was humming deep in the rock, and Torcred felt sure now that he was going to find the meaning of the visions and of the battle's uncanny end.

He was hardly surprised when white light shone in the fissure ahead and a man appeared, black against it. The figure's outline was familiar. The stranger spoke--his first word in a strange tongue, but the rest intelligible enough though oddly pronounced.

"Ahoy, there! We'd almost given you up."

Torcred advanced warily. The stranger did not flicker nor vanish. A door was open, and the white light poured out from a chamber that must have been a natural hollow, laboriously enlarged in the stone. Torcred's hand shot out and gripped the man's arm above the elbow; the stranger started, then relaxed, and Torcred caught a flash of the grin he had seen before.

"I'm real," said the stranger. "I wasn't the other times we've met--but that's one of the things Captain Relez will explain to you. Now come inside, before the air out here gets any thicker."

Cautiously Torcred edged into the brightly-lit room, keeping in front of Ladna. He saw in the cramped space a glittering confusion of unfamiliar devices--it was the flimsiness of most of the apparatus that was most surprising; the terrapins and other races built mostly machinery designed to withstand heavy mechanical forces, but a blow of the hand would shatter most of those things of wire and glass tubes. A young man, hunched over a complex control panel beside a glass screen on which a darkly indistinct image floated, glanced up with narrowed eyes, and an older one with a small pointed beard met Torcred's suspicious gaze benignly, over a small table on which a map was spread, studded with colored pins.

Then Torcred heard the door click, and whirled, hand on his knife.

"It's not locked," the bearded man said calmly. "You can leave if you like--but we've gone to a good deal of trouble to persuade you here for a talk."

* * * * *

Torcred faced him again, still tensely ready. The setup here didn't look dangerous, only incomprehensible. But he sensed power in this little room; the deep potent hum he had heard in the fissure was at home here, though he could not locate its source.

"My name is Relez." The bearded man rose from behind his table, "Dunu, you can take care of the chart."

"Aye, aye, sir," said the young man they had seen as a phantom in the desert, and Torcred bristled again at the alien jargon. But Relez' casual manner was reassuring.

He gestured at a shelf cut into the stone. "Have a seat." Torcred obeyed mechanically, and Ladna huddled beside him. Torcred stared fascinated at the screen. A scene had resolved itself there--one of incredible, nostalgic familiarity. It was the twice-ringed camp of the terrapins, unmistakable to Torcred though he saw it now from a strange angle, from above. All the machines were in place, as was normal after nightfall. Torcred half started to his feet.

Then he saw what was not normal for that or any hour in a terrapin camp. A confusion of bobbing lights among the cars; the shop area in the midst was almost deserted, but against the reddening fires of the forges tiny black figures scurried to and fro like distracted ants. He could almost hear the cries of alarm and exasperation over the discovery that not a functioning engine was left in the whole troop.

Torcred turned and caught Relez smiling in his beard.

"You did that!"

Relez nodded. "Unfortunately, we didn't get the anti-ionization field into operation in time to prevent the buzzards' gas attack. But there won't be any more fighting tonight, unless they do it with knives. It's a bit of luck that none of these people seem to have any notion of portable firearms. No more mechanized warfare, though, as long as that unit is working." He gestured at a thing of massive coils and bus bars and fragile glowing tubes, from which, Torcred perceived now, the humming came.

Ladna's blue eyes were wide. "That little device--has stopped all the machines?"

"It broadcasts a wave form that affects the molecules of air, of all gases, inhibiting their ionization. So no spark can jump, and motors are stopped when their electric ignition fails. The only machines that can move now, inside its range, are the moles, with their battery-driven electric motors for underground travel--which is lucky for them, or they'd be trapped under the earth.

"Everything else--terrapins, trailers, aeros, buzzards, and all the rest--are paralyzed. Our field's range blankets five hundred thousand square miles. Beyond that area, others are responsible for administering the same treatment; it already began a month ago on the coast--"

"What are you?" Torcred burst out. "What do you want?"

"We three--Dunu, Rhenu, and I--are the Continental Demilitarization Commission for this area. As to what we are trying to do, that will take some explaining--"

"I meant," Torcred scowled, dissatisfied, "what is your race?"

Relez regarded him strangely. "The same as yours. The race of man."