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 A 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 yardwide 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.
VI
STEALTHILY THEY CREPT along the trail in the direction the monster had taken, lying prone to peer with immense caution over the wave-crest of each dune it had breached in crossing.
Beyond the sixth or the seventh crest, it was there. Lying still in a hollow of the sand, its gray paint blending with the drab earth to make it almost invisible from the air—and its radar alarms, no doubt, keeping watch for any moving threat. Encased in armor almost to the ground, over the great treads, and its three rounded turrets astare with guns.
At first glimpse Torcred jerked his head back like the extinct land reptile whose namesake he was. His palms grew sweaty and his insides quivered. If he had been alone, he might have slid quietly down the slope and stolen away, leaving his T-beam behind him. But he heard Ladna’s quickened breathing at his back, and knew she knew he had seen the panzer.
Before he could check her she had wriggled up beside him and peered over the edge. When she drew back her face was shades paler beneath its peeling sunburn. Her lips framed words: “Are you going to try?”
Torcred nodded, jaw set. “You stay here,” he hissed, and, gripping his weapon, began to slither over the crest of the dune.
When he was on the far side and nothing had happened, he felt reasonably sure he had passed below the horizon of its radar. But he continued to crawl, eyes fixed on the giant enemy, watching for the first stir of motion about it that would be followed by a smoky blast of death.
Halfway there—Almost there—He reached the edge of the panzer’s shadow.
Then he distinctly heard a low burring sound from inside it. Alarm! A magnetic mine detector, probably, tripped by the metal beam; Torcred realized that even as he flung himself forward in a scrambling rush that carried him the rest of the way.
The driver must have been alert. Even as Torcred caught himself with a hand against the gray steel flank, the muffled motor throbbed into life and the great machine surged forward.
Torcred ran stooping beside it, eyes measuring the gap between armored housing and racing tread. Seconds to live if he missed—already his lungs were bursting and the great gray side was slipping past. With both hands he drove the T-beam straight into that gap.
It was wrenched from his hands, its end snapped off and hurled spinning with terrific force. Then a grinding shriek of tormented metal, and the panzer’s vast mass shook and wheeled half round in a storm of sand as the jammed tread stopped and slid.
Almost before the machine had lurched to a full halt with a tremendous clank and rattle, Torcred had snatched up the broken end of his bar and was swarming up its side.
In a moment he was perched atop it within easy reach of the single exit port, leaning against the smooth warm steel, feet braced solidly against the tread housing. A quick glance assured him that there were no vision slits giving a view of the panzer’s back to those inside. He set himself and waited, controlling his labored breathing.
The wait was not overlong. The panzer-men, seeing no attacker outside, but having heard their alarm and found their machine inexplicably crippled an instant later, had no choice but to come out and investigate.
THE port-cover swung aside, and a man’s crash-helmeted head and gray-clad shoulders emerged, back to Torcred. The Terrapin struck viciously and dented the helmet; almost before its top slid out of sight, he vaulted after it into the opening, disregarding the ladder.
He landed in a tangle of arms and legs—the man he had stunned sprawled atop another who struggled to free himself. Torcred sprang clear and, across the cramped central compartment of the panzer, faced a third gray-clad man with a drawn knife.
Incredulity and fright were written large on the panzer-man’s face. Out of sheer desperation he lunged forward in a stabbing rush; but he was no knife-fighter, and the two-foot length of steel in Torcred’s hands was a far superior weapon. The knife flew wide and its wielder stumbled back, nursing a bruised forearm.
Another figure appeared in the narrow door forward and stared at the scene with popping eyes—the driver, no doubt. Torcred greeting him with a ferocious grin and swung his club whistling back and forth. He looked and felt invincible.
Then Ladna’s voice behind him screamed, “Torcred! Look out!”
He whirled, and the knife-blade gashed his shoulder instead of sinking into his back. Then Torcred struck a two-handed blow and felt bone give way beneath it. He took a couple of steps back from the crumpled body of the panzer-man who had unluckily disentangled himself from his unconscious comrade, and set his back against a solid bulkhead; on his face was still the savage grin that had frozen the driver in his tracks.
The bird-girl dropped lightly from the ladder and came to his side, scooping up the knife that was red with Torcred’s blood. Her shining eyes reflected his fierce elation of victory.
Torcred realized that if he lost time his psychological advantage might go with it. He snapped at the two remaining panzer-men, his voice rasping strangely from his dry throat, “Quick! Do you want to live?”
They stared at him dumbly; it was almost beyond their power to grasp that this bloodstained, primitive being had got inside their defenses, that the far-ranging guns whose breeches thrust into the compartment were useless.
Torcred took a step toward them, swinging his bar ominously. The man who was clutching his right arm asked sullenly, “What are you? What do you want?”
“I am Torcred,” and he added with brief thought, “the Terrible. And we want very little from you—food, water, weapons from your stores. You can keep your lumbering panzer; we’ve got no use for it.” The two men exchanged fearful glances, sure now they had to do with a mad creature. He gave them no chance to think it out. “Right now, we want to look around in peace. Ladna! Find something and tie them up.”
The girl, dagger in hand, opened the door of the rear compartment; a whimper of terror came from the darkened interior, where two women and an indeterminate number of offspring hugged one another in paralyzed panic. Ladna spoke to them with a soothing softness that amazed Torcred, rummaged inside and came out with a coil of strong wire. The solitary panzer, an economy in itself, carried a little of everything.
UNDER the menace of Torcred’s club, the terrorized panzer-men submitted. Then the two invaders found the machine’s provisions, and satisfied first their raging thirst and afterwards the hunger that had been forgotten in the face of the greater need for water. But Ladna broke off eating to bandage Torcred’s slashed shoulder with strips torn from a gray garment.
It was then he remembered to scold her. “What did you mean,” he demanded between bites, “by rushing in here, after I distinctly told you to keep in the clear?” Her blue answering gaze held an impudence that was a new thing to him. “I saw you had stopped it, Torcred the Terrible, so I came. And—where would you have been if I hadn’t?” Her strong slender fingers closed for a moment painfully on his wounded shoulder.
He was silent, remembering with a queer excitement what her warning cry had been. “Torcred!” not “Terrapin!” . . .
The bandage finished, he stood up and said brusquely, “We’d better get ready to leave.”
“You plan to go on foot again—now that we’ve captured a machine?”
“It’s the only sensible way,” asserted Torcred flatly. “Neither of us knows how to repair the caterpillar tread, or, if we managed that, how to maneuver and fight the panzer; if we were attacked, it would be a death trap for us. Afoot, we’re in very little danger—what machine of p
rey would be likely to consider us worthy of notice?”
They looted the best of the provisions, and the girl’s deft fingers fashioned for each a strap of sorts from a roil of cellotex fabric. Torcred went up to the driver’s cabin, located the engine under the floor, and did things to it that would keep the panzer immobilized until long after the blowing sand should have covered their traces. The woman could untie their men as soon as they gained courage to come out of hiding . . .
Terrapin and bird-girl set their faces to the east and began to trek again. They trudged on with lightened hearts.
They had gone about a mile when a fold of the land revealed a wide swathe of desert dotted with camouflaged steel hemispheres, mostly buried in the sand—a big colony of the pillbox people.
They ducked back behind the shelter of the sand-hills and began what looked like the shortest detour. Suddenly Ladna, glancing back the way they had come, cried out sharply.
Torcred turned, and saw a plume of dust above the far-off dunes—then a gray scurrying beetle-thing that rose to a crest, vanished, and reappeared on a nearer swell.
It was a terrapin, travelling fast, and as it raced closer there was less and less doubt that it was following their own plainly marked trail. Torcred strained his eyes through the heat-shimmer to make out the identifying mark on its blunt nose; he stiffened, and his hand dropped to the knife he had taken from the panzer.
“Helsed! He’s picked up our trail somehow—but what does he want?”
“The fat terrapin, the one that twisted my arm? I think I know,” the bird-girl said in a low voice Torcred’s dark face went hard as flint. His mind seethed: there was no hiding here, no use trying to flee from the hundred-mile-an-hour pursuer—or was there?
Uncertain, he stood stockstill. The girl pressed shivering against him. Helsed would not open fire, of course, for fear of hitting her; there might be a chance of parleying-. If he could only lure the fellow into the open—
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 28
