Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  The Terrapin’s eyes burned into the screen as his own wild zigzags flung him painfully against his safety belt. The aero might let things go at that . . . No, the screen’s image expanded again. His finger closed once more on the firing button.

  The winged outline grew with ominous determination. Careless now of the single gun that rattled defiance, it was coming down for the kill. With the corner of his eye Torcred saw the vicious puffs of sand that strode to meet the racing terrapin; he swerved instantly, but in that same instant the car staggered and spun out of control. He had not heard the thunderous concussion that stung his face and hands. The forepart of the roof bowed inward, and there was a knife-like fragment of steel, inches long, in the cushion almost touching Torcred’s ear.

  Dimly he realized that his wheels were spinning futilely, the car canted far over; it had nosed into a dune and half-buried itself. The fight was over . . .

  But ten, twenty seconds went by and no fresh storm of destruction burst on him. Incredulously his eyes found the radar screen. It was still working, and the image that filled it wavered strangely, neither receding nor coming nearer.

  He threw his machine into reverse and opened the throttle; the front wheels took hold and the terrapin bucked itself free of the sand. Then Torcred leaned sidewise, recklessly flung open a steel shutter and looked out.

  He blinked, dazzled, at the sweep of desert and bright blue sky before his eyes found the falling shape, twisting and fluttering as it fell despite its weight of tons. As he watched, the aero almost leveled out, teetered on one wing and sideslipped out of sight behind a distant dune. A cloud of dust sprang up and drifted away, but no smoky death-pall rose after it.

  THE Terrapin shook his dizzy head, and his narrow hawk face hardened. He pressed the pedals and sent the combat car rolling swiftly toward the spot that his practised eyes had marked accurately in the midst of the featureless desert.

  The black-and-yellow aero’s nose was sunk deep into the loose sand that had slid down to partly bury the wreck, its blunt tail pointed into the cloudless sky it had left forever. One wing had been tom off and hurled yards away, the other was crumpled beneath the slanted fuselage.

  The terrapin slowed to a crawl along the crest of the nearest sandhill as its pilot surveyed the scene. But he was about to wheel away once more when he noticed the sprawled figure in bulky dark-blue flying clothes, that lay face down in the shadow of a brown drift.

  Deftly Torcred sent the terrapin careening down the slope to halt close to the motionless enemy. He hesitated briefly, then, shrugging, unsnapped his belt, wrestled open the almost-jammed door and clambered out. Dead or stunned, he had to make sure, and there was no harm in indulging a trifling curiosity.

  Under the remote blue curve of the sky, he shrank into himself a little. It was always so outside the steel shelter of the terrapin in which he had spent most of his days since childhood; he felt an oddly naked helplessness. But he looked down with interest on the body, his hand gripping the haft of the broad-bladed knife at his side. He had never before seen in flesh and blood a member of the lofty peoples of the air.

  As if roused, the limp form twitched a foot, shivered, and rolled over with a sigh. A pale face, closed eyes were upturned to the glaring sun and the startled gaze of the Terrapin. Startled he was, for the face was a girl’s.

  She could not have passed twenty. In spite of the heavy coverall worn against the stratosphere’s chill, and a wide strawberry mark where her left cheek had met the sandy soil, she contrived to be pretty. No more—but the terrapin women were brown and sturdy and coarse-featured, hardened by the drudgery of the camps.

  This girl’s face was very white in the frame of dark hair that escaped the oversize plastic helmet. She breathed slowly and fitfully, and Torcred guessed at a state of shock; she might be badly injured.

  He shook off an unaccustomed indecision and knelt beside her. His face was unpleasantly hard as the knife slid from its sheath with a faint whisper, as he laid its thin edge along the exposed curve of the girl’s throat, where a flutter marked the great artery. One quick slash, she would never wake . . .

  But it was as if a restraining hand fastened on his wrist. Slowly he drew back the glittering blade and returned it to its place. He stood up and scowled down at the still, slight figure, brushing sand savagely from the knees of his heavy breeches.

  Angrily Torcred told himself that he had only to turn and go. The desert would finish the job, and no one would know that his courage had failed him. But still he stood and stared, not consciously admitting his strange desire to know the color of the eyes behind those closed lids.

  They were blue, he saw as they flickered wide without warning. Not cold sapphires, but the living blue of a desert sky or of electric flame. They were alive as a small bird’s eyes—but of course Torcred had never seen a bird. Rather, he called the girl a bird, as he called himself a terrapin.

  Still he did not move, even as the bird-girl struggled to a sitting position and gathered her feet under her. Dismay came into the blue gaze fixed on him; she half raised a hand as if in defense.

  AND Torcred’s determination slipped again. “You are my prisoner,” he announced in a hollow voice that did not sound at all like a victor’s.

  Without answering, the bird-girl sprang nimbly to her feet; then her mouth twisted with pain and she swayed dizzily, but her eyes never left Torcred’s expressionless face.

  “You are the terrapin?” she gasped. Her voice had the exotic accent of the bird-people’s speech, and in her inflection of the word “terrapin” rang a contempt that was like a whip across the face. She glanced swiftly about, at the boat-shaped gray machine that crouched, purring, like a waiting animal on its six wheels some yards away, then at the broken wreck that had been her aero. Her eyes went wide with a blue flame of horror and regret, and her right hand darted to her side.

  Torcred exploded from rigidity into action; his feet dug into the sand as he lunged, and his hand closed on the girl’s slender wrist, halting the sharp point of her dagger an inch above her left breast.

  Her free hand struck viciously at his hastily averted face. The Terrapin ground his teeth and twisted her wrist mercilessly until the long knife fell among their scuffling feet. Then he thrust the girl away and set his foot solidly on the weapon, pressing it into the sand. He glared at her dead white face.

  “I said you’re my prisoner. That means you’ll live while I want you to!”

  The bird-girl was trembling uncontrollably. “My ship is destroyed,” she said in a stifled voice. “I am already dead. It is the law.”

  Torcred’s black brows knitted in anger—at her and at himself for the impossible situation into which he had blundered. “Get yourself another aero,” he growled unreasonably, knowing the truth of what she said. On land or in the air, the code was the same. With destruction of the fighting machine, the poor, soft being of flesh did best to perish too. He snapped, “Be quiet and do as I say. Come along!” He half turned toward the waiting terrapin.

  The girl stiffened. “Well!” she said on a note of cold, controlled scorn. “You crawlers keep slaves?”

  That was absolutely untrue, and was exactly what was bothering the Terrapin. His people kept no slaves and took no prisoners. He barked, beside himself: “You will obey me! Or stay here and die—slowly—of thirst.”

  Her lips parted as if to retort, but her gaze slipped past Torcred to sweep the remote horizon and the dun wilderness that stretched to it without path or landmark. In the two expanses of sand and sky there was no life visible. The thin shoulders under the heavy flying suit seemed to sag.

  “All right, terrapin,” she said with weary disdain. “You win, for the time being.”

  II

  THE LITTLE MACHINE HELD two well enough; married terrapins on the march carried their wives beside them and children stowed somehow and anyhow in the rear compartment. Torcred snapped the catches of his safety belt and motioned the girl to do the same; when she was slow
to obey, he leaned over and fastened the belt himself, drawing it painfully tight about her slim waist. Then the engine’s hum rose as he opened the throttle; the wheels spun and gripped, and the terrapin bounded away, bearing westward over the dunes. As it picked up speed Torcred was touched by the familiar sense of power and mastery in the deep throb of the motor and the ready surge of the armored car. But he brooded darkly as mountain and desert rolled past in monotonous succession, as the minutes heaped themselves into hours . . .

  The sun was a redhot disc descending into a bath of fire in the west. And minute by minute the angry light crept higher up the sky and assumed new forms, clouds and streamers, for it was a mighty redlit pall of dust that was ever higher and nearer to the rushing terrapin.

  Torcred glanced sidelong at the girl beside him. Her face was even whiter under the harsh light of sunset, her eyes closed beneath long lashes. Watching that smooth, tragic face, Torcred realized again how young she was; he shook his head somberly. The air people were a strange race, who sent their young females on missions fit only for grown men. The terrapins were far more sensible.

  But no terrapin woman had the strange beauty of this alien creature from the sky . . .

  Presently he said, “Look. Ahead.”

  The girl’s eyes opened listlessly. They were dark-blue, opaque. But faint interest stirred them as she scanned the view ahead.

  The flaming dust cloud had climbed to the very zenith; the smell of it was in the terrapin, its feel between the teeth. Miles ahead across the desert, a dim encarmined shimmer marked the waters of the Salt Sea.

  Nearer, but still far ahead, a black stream was moving across the rippled plain at right angles to the terrapin’s course. It was without beginning or end, pouring steadily from north to south. A distant vibration seemed to shake the earth beneath the sway and swoop of the moving vehicle.

  “The trailer herd,” said Torcred. “Thousands on thousands of them, moving south with the sun that feeds them. The fall migration is farther west this year, and they are coming in greater numbers than any of our troop can remember.”

  The girl said nothing. He added irritably, “You understand—there will be good hunting.”

  She shocked him by laughing. “Is that all you think of?” she inquired mockingly. “Good hunting—a full stomach and a full fuel tank. You crawlers lead poor, empty lives.”

  “We don’t crawl,” said Torcred shortly, eyes fixed on the speedometer that registered a hundred miles an hour.

  The bird-girl laughed again. “You know so little, you earthbound creatures,” she taunted. “You’ve never known the joy of flight—to climb up and into the clear bright stratosphere, and see the Earth with all its secrets unroll below you . . . You creep from place to place and cower in your camps, but we range farther than you dream, and know the world and all its peoples that fly and swim and crawl and burrow. And we are the highest race of all.”

  “Higher than the buzzards?” asked Torcred.

  She hesitated, then said defiantly, “Of course! Those evil things are huge and powerful, but we’ll defeat them in the end, never doubt it. And then—we will have the rule of the sky, which is the rule of the Earth.”

  She sounded very certain, and Torcred could think of no adequate counter-argument. He said brutally, “We? Who do you mean? Your wings are clipped, bird!”

  Then unexpected remorse stung him as he saw how the girl shrank into herself, how the brief glow of enthusiasm left her face. She made no answer, and Torcred too fell sullenly silent.

  IN SILENCE he closed the throttle and the hurtling terrapin slowed. Close ahead, now, the trailer herd was an amorphous black river in the gathering dusk. Earth and air shook to its thunder, the rumbling of countless wheels and engines and couplings and the strident bleating of thousands of horns as the vast herd jostled and protested.

  Closer and closer to the flank of the moving mass rolled the little terrapin, darting over the crests of the dunes and stealing along under their cover. The girl’s eyes grew wide at the glimpses they had of that dark dangerous-looking stream; she seemed to flinch from its pounding clamor.

  Torcred smiled grimly as he brought the terrapin to a poised halt half-sheltered by a low swell. A scant hundred yards away the migrating trailers rolled obliviously past, one close behind the other, huge box-like monsters on wheels behind a tiny cab. Torcred knew their ways of old; the trailer sections housed women and children, who tended the apparatus that made food, fuel, and ammunition from sunlight and water and air and the minerals extracted from the sterile soil. The trailer-men were drivers and gunners; but the great machines were clumsy and ill armed, finding safety against the fierce mechanical predators chiefly in their numbers.

  The Terrapin waited only for moments; then he opened his throttle wide and sent the little combat car swerving into the heart of the herd.

  All around rolled rumbling iron giants; the clank of couplings, the roaring of unmuffled engines were deafening. A hooting of furious horns arose as the terrapin darted and zigzagged between the moving units of the herd. But there was no blaze of gunfire.

  “So we hunt them,” Torcred flung over his shoulder at the breathless girl. “They can’t shoot when we’re in among them; we disable one and shelter behind it until the herd passes on . . .”

  The terrapin dashed through narrowing gaps, slowed and spurted again, as Torcred threaded his way skilfully on an oblique course across the roaring stream. At last he saw open ground ahead; he grinned exultantly and put on a final burst of speed that carried him into the clear. The little car swooped with a sickening rush into a shallow valley, and behind it thundering flashes leaped along the flank of the trailer herd and bullets exploded around or ricocheted screaming overhead.

  As he slowed to a more moderate pace under cover of the farther dunes, Torcred turned, still grinning, to the bird-girl. “That,” he commented, “was the dangerous part.”

  She shivered slightly. “I was afraid,” she admitted candidly.

  “That’s hardly as simple as attacking a mere crawling terrapin from the air, eh?”

  The girl turned her face away. “That was necessary, terrapin . . . I passed my fledgling examination only two days ago; it was my second flight beyond the safety zone. The novice must defeat some machine of prey in single combat, before he is accepted.”

  “And if he fails?” Torcred’s eyes were fixed ahead, where a pale light was reflected by the ground that was flat now and gleamed whitely, encrusted with salt.

  “And if he—or she—fails,” the girl’s voice dropped low, “it is the last time.” A sob came into her voice. “Even if I could go back to my people, I would be degraded to menial labor or breeding—could never fly again.”

  Torcred felt pity for her despite his prejudices; and at the same time her words recalled his own worries, and he frowned blackly. The girl mistook his expression for an indication that she had somehow said too much, and she sank back into brooding silence.

  She glanced up only when the car’s wheels ground to a stop on the salty crust, and Torcred, with a relaxing sigh, was already unsnapping his safety belt and switching off the panting motor. The girl saw flames and shadows amid which black figures moved, and she shrank back in fright, uncomprehending. As the Terrapin flung open his door, mingled sound of clanging metal and hissing fire rushed in to increase her confusion.

  He paused momentarily; his expression was unreadable as he gazed on her white face.

  “Stay where you are and make no noise,” his low voice rasped sternly. “I’ll come back.”

  Torcred closed the door firmly and heard its lock click. The girl, if she foolishly wanted to escape, probably could not find the catch inside, and there was nothing she could hurt herself with if she still felt suicidal. There at least she would be safe from prying eyes, until he could untangle the tumult of unaccustomed emotions that were struggling within him. A terrapin had only one place to himself, the interior of the fighting machine—those with families, of co
urse, knew no such word as privacy.

  He turned, straightening his back resolutely, and advanced into the midst of the terrapin camp.

  III

  SPACED SHADOWS RESOLVED themselves into a double rank of parked terrapins, forming concentric circles about the encampment. Such was the pattern of a terrapin camp from time immemorial; it was safety against attack by other raiders of the wasteland, and on each day one ring could go forth to hunt, the other remain in place to guard the women, the young, and the booty.

  Even here the warm night air quivered ever so faintly with sound from the east, the endless motion of the great trailer herd. By morning it would have passed, and the hunters would follow it southward.

  Within the great circle the women and older children were busy now, while the men lounged about, talking quietly, boasting perfunctorily of the day’s deeds. The first day’s hunt had been only a hit-and-run affair at twilight, but in the midst torches flared sputteringly over the remains of dismantled trailers; there were neat piles of steel beam-lengths and undamaged armor plate, and sprawling heaps of metal scrap that would be abandoned when the troop rolled south. To one side a red glow came from the maw of a small furnace, melting aluminum to be made into castings; the terrapins did not smelt steel, leaving that to the giant scavenger machines that followed the herds at a more respectful distance. Fuel, food, and usable ammunition had naturally been transferred first of all from the captured trailers to the tanks and storage compartments of the terrapins.

  From the shadows of the inner circle a voice hailed Torcred by name, and its owner came out into the light to meet him—a short man, unusually plump for a terrapin, with heavy black eyebrows that seemed pasted high on his round bald forehead, giving him a look of perpetual astonishment.