The Terapin swung broadside-on a stone’s throw from them. Its door opened, and Helsed half slid out of the seat. He eyed the pair, swarthy brows rising in seeming amusement.
“Ah, still together,” he observed. “Torcred, my dear fellow—you shouldn’t be traveling in such company, even in your present status. Suppose you run along and let me take care of her.”
Torcred controlled his voice with an effort. “You’re a terrapin in good standing, Helsed. Would you discard your honor—”
The other smirked. “Don’t worry. I’m not a fool like you; I won’t take her home with me.”
Torcred ground his teeth. “You’re crazy!”
“I had to leave the hunt and make good time to catch you—I don’t feel like being disappointed.” The viciousness in Helsed’s smooth voice crept into the open. “And I have a score to settle with you anyway.” He jerked the terrapin’s door shut, and its nose gun started to swing around.
Torcred spun and ran, crouching, knowing the girl would follow. They plunged over the dune-top close together; the terrapin’s gun wavered and did not fire, then its motor snarled into life and it bounded after them.
Torcred, with Ladna close behind, ran panting down the windward slope, straight toward a cluster of domed, sunken structures. Sheer amazement of the pillbox-dwellers must have kept them alive so far; every moment he expected a murderous barrage.
It came. The nearest pillbox erupted flame, and beyond it others. The explosions rolled flatly, echoless across the desert. Torcred caught the girl round the waist and flung her down beside him; hugging the ground, he raised his head slightly and looked back.
The terrapin swerved agilely among spouting columns of sand. Then all its wheels left the ground at once, it tilted in the air and rolled over and over down the long slope of the dune. Black smoke poured from its punctured armor.
VII
TORCRED STARED LONG AT the blackened wreck, hardly noting that the guns were silent, the haze settling. He knew none of the exhilaration that had. been his when he took the panzer; a sickish sensation nested in his stomach. He had killed—by subterfuge, true, but killed all the same—a brother terrapin, and now in his own mind rose up against him a lifetime’s training, all the blood-ties with his own kind . . .
His own kind. The terrapins. But were they? What was he?
The breeze, laden with sharp smoke of explosive, made his eyes twitch and smart. He blinked, and saw the man standing on the dune’s edge above them. Much nearer this time, so that there could be no doubt that the eyes were looking at him, that the lips smiled. That smile, and the careless stance that went with it, seemed to radiate confident power.
Beside Torcred the girl gasped, and he knew with sudden relief that she too had seen the stranger.
And so did the others. The bright air was split again by thunder as some touchy pillbox fired a shell. It struck squarely at the stranger’s feet, and they saw him blown to fragments. But the burst drifted down the wind, things crawled and flickered in the air, and he was there again, smiling more broadly than before. He glanced aside, at the smashed terrapin, then back at Torcred, and raised his right hand in a gesture—thumb and finger forming a circle—that some of the desert peoples used as a sign of approval and encouragement.
Then he rippled slightly, like a reflection in water, and was gone.
Torcred was hardly conscious of how they squirmed out of range of the pillbox people’s venomous annoyance. Ladna, brushing tangled black hair out of her eyes, was first to break the silence.
“Was that what you saw yesterday?”
“Uh-huh,” admitted Torcred glumly. “But you saw. He wasn’t real at all.”
“Did we see the same? He was blown to bits, and reassembled himself unhurt?” Torcred nodded. “Then there was some thing there.”
“What?” he demanded, irked by her superior reasoning.
“I don’t know . . . But I remember something. A month ago, a man in strange clothing like that—a real man of flesh and blood—came to our eyrie. No one knew where he came from, or where he went when they laughed him to scorn.”
“They laughed—why?”
“Because he talked about ‘civilization’ to every one who would listen—but he didn’t seem to realize that the civilization of the air is necessarily the highest. And he said we should make peace with all other creatures—even the buzzards!—and refrain from hunting, and practise photosynthesis like the lesser races.” She wrinkled her peeling nose. “If that weren’t enough, he mixed his talk with old legends—stories of the ancients, and the floating cities.”
“I’ve heard—” Torcred began, looking impressed. The girl smiled loftily.
“Those are tales that have lost their substances, fit for the young, the ignorant, and the uncivilized. Certainly the great ancients existed—they were an air-people like us, who ruled the world long ago, as we shall in time to come. But that they were immortal and are still alive, drifting somewhere in midocean out of sight of land—that’s nonsense.”
“Maybe so,” Torcred grunted stolidly. In the cosmogony he knew, the ancients were mighty terrapin heroes of the world’s youth, from whose stock all other races had degenerated; they still lived somewhere, and would return to make the terrapins supreme again . . . He said matter-of-factly, “If you want to know what I think—we are being watched, by something that is alive and powerful here and now.”
LADNA started and looked nervously round. She had begun to respect the Terrapin’s shrewd native intelligence. As they plodded on across the desert, she said no more, infected by his dark preoccupation.
But in Torcred’s brain the question of the stranger’s identity loomed less large than that of his own. What was he? Exwarrior and hunter, ex-hero, ex-terrapin—he could think of things he had been and was not.
He had no word. Outcast, traitor, criminal? A newborn pride in him rebelled against the labels he would have accepted without question before his battle with the panzer. He had earned a name, but he had no name.
The west veiled its face in flame again, and darkness overtook them in the wilderness. Torcred dreamed that he stood naked in the middle of a vast circle of formidable machines that snarled and hooted, demanding his name and lineage; and he had no answer. In desperation he cried, “I am I!”—and a thousand motors roared, the armored mass rolled inward to crush him.
He woke staring into a dawn-lit sky where a black flight of buzzards droned northward thousands of feet overhead.
Ladna was awake too and looking up, the old tense fear-born hatred expressed in every line of her body.
“They’re insolent,” she murmured half to herself. “So close . . . This is already my people’s land,” she explained to Torcred, and her gaze led his toward the mountains, where gray and red and yellow cliffs and slopes stood out now from the blue haze of the canyons. “I don’t know how those buzzards dare to fly so near.”
“Why do you hate them so?” asked Torcred.
“They’re evil. They want to rule the world.”
“Well—” Torcred scowled, still out of sorts after his nightmare. “Don’t you bird-folk have the same grand plans?”
“That’s different!” she cried vehemently. “Don’t dare to compare us to the buzzards! We’re hunters, like the terrapins, but the buzzards kill and destroy for sport. The milk of their mothers is bitter with cruelty! Oh, if those things should win—” she made a swift gesture to ward off evil—“you’ll learn what terror can be!”
A skeptical part of Torcred’s mind reflected that that was one side’s story. But he wanted to believe the girl when her blue eyes blazed so and her voice trembled with passion. Once he had wanted to hurt her and humble her. That had been long ago . . .
But there was a strained silence between them as they made ready to resume the march.
They had hardly gone fifty paces when they heard again the noise of engines aloft, nearer this time, and looking up saw a second trio of buzzards passing over. But one of
these had left the others and was dropping steeply earthward, heading, it seemed, straight toward them.
Torcred stared stupidly at the great machine—it could not possibly mean to attack them in their utter insignificance. Ladna was less confident; she shrilled, “Down!” and Torcred dropped to all fours and flattened himself to the sand beside her, just as the buzzard leveled off and shot overhead so low that they could see the landing wheels folded like talons under it, could see a door open in its black belly. Something appeared through the aperture and vanished in the speed of its fall. The buzzard had laid an egg, and it hatched mere yards away with a flash and roar that left them blinded, deafened, smothered, feeling that the earth had heaved up to meet the falling sky and pinned them between.
Torcred sat up, swaying, his head a ringing void. He glimpsed Ladna’s face, tears of rage furrowing the grime of sand on her cheeks as she glared after the receding and climbing buzzard.
AND not far away, among loose heaps of sand on the rim of the blast crater, he saw a strange thing. A massive cone of metal, with the spiral grooves and flanges of a screw, thrust slantingly from the ground; it was turning slowly, earth dropping from it, and as he stared it turned faster and moved forward and upward, drawing after it a glistening rounded back.
Dazedly Torcred walked toward the thing, and as he did so a port-cover lifted in the armored back and a man’s head thrust out. He blinked at Torcred with a look of stunned confusion.
“What happened?” demanded the mole in a shaken voice. “I was coining up for a breath of air, then—bang!” He looked around wildly. “My garden! What have they done to my garden?”
The moles, Torcred knew, made gardens—sheets of cellotex impregnated, like the sun-screens of the trailers and like machines, with photosynthetic chemicals. Even the predators left them alone, for the most part, since the moles were a peaceful and harmless race. That, then, had been the bomb’s target.
The mole peered at Torcred, seemed to come to himself. “What are you?” he gasped, and without waiting for an answer, ducked inside. The hatch-cover slammed, the great screw reversed and revolved furiously, and the burrowing machine slowly sank from sight under the sand.
“Now do you believe me—about them?” demanded Ladna’s stifled voice.
Torcred nodded slowly, feeling sorry for the poor frightened mole, and rather surprised at himself for it, as he had been when he had spared the beaten crew of the panzer . . . Torcred the Terrapin was never like that. Mechanically his fingers caressed the half-healed mark on his forehead.
The girl’s tongue seemed loosened by their near escape, and as they journeyed on, she talked, with a calm bitterness now, of the enemy. Torcred knew vaguely that, somewhere far to the north, was Buzzard. Base, an immense fortress with subterranean dwellings and hangars where the black monsters bred and swarmed. Ladna enlightened him further. “Some of our spies”—the word meant nothing to Torcred—“got inside the place not long ago. They reported things stirring, the buzzards building airframes and engines at a furious rate, obviously planning a new move. Naturally, we increased our construction tempo to keep pace with them, but we’ve been puzzled; you see, there were rumors that the chief buzzards were worried about something else, besides the old dragging stalemate. But whatever it was, they were keeping it secret even from their own rank and file.”
Torcred shook his head bewilderedly; he was lost in her world with its vastness and complexity of organization and politics and schemes for domination. With the openmindedness of confusion he had to admit that the civilization of the air was such as the free terrapins did not dream of . . . And he felt an inward hurt as, in the girl’s talk of her people and their life, he sensed the widening of the distance between them, which had almost dwindled away while they wandered and struggled to survive and nearly died together in the desert.
But the mountains were close now, and they made good time that day. They did not need to evade any of the prowling land machines, for the desert here was utterly empty, unmarked by wheels, under the threat of the desolate plateaus above and ahead, from which deadly flying things ranged far and wide.
A couple of times they glimpsed winged squadrons in the sky, and the girl’s eyes shone, and the shadow on Torcred’s face grew deeper.
AS evening came on, the mesas rose bare and sheer before them out of the sandy waste. They climbed laboriously over smooth rock and gravel slides; Ladna led the way upward, trying to sight landmarks that were meant to be seen from the air.
At last she gave a little cry of joy, and pointed up the dry streambed they were ascending. Torcred looked, and saw nothing but the rock-rimmed head of the canyon; but the girl had seen some sign that wholly escaped him. “We’re practically there!” Behind her back Torcred passed a hand across his eyes. “Well, then,” he said with assumed casualness, “you’ll be all right from here on.”
She whirled and gave him a searching look. “What are you talking about?” Torcred’s jaw muscles twitched. “I’m wishing you a happy homecoming,” he answered, “by way of saying goodbye.”
“But you’re coming with me! . . . Aren’t you? . . . What else can you do?”
He shook his head somberly. “I’m too used to freedom, Ladna. I’ll take my chances with the desert again.”
“I told you my people will accept you, and your fate among them will be no worse than mine . . .” Her protest trailed off as she read the inflexible refusal in his impassive face.
“Earth and sky can’t meet.” He looked back down the canyon, toward where a wedge of the barren plain, pink with reflected sunset, showed between the rock walls. Then the girl was in front of him again. Her eyes were very large, and her red lips spoke no more useless words of pleading.
Instead—her hands were on his shoulders, her arms slipped round his neck as her slim body swayed against him, her face blurred with nearness, tilted up . . .
Gravely, according to the terrapin custom, Torcred touched noses with her.
He felt her go tense, and she drew back. Her eyes glistened with a shock and disappointment he was at a loss to understand. She said in a choked voice, “Goodbye!” and turned and fled up the ravine.
Mechanically Torcred picked up the satchel with the remainder of her share of the food and water, which she had remembered to leave behind. His muscles tightened with a violent urge to run after her and bring her back by force.
But how could he hold her with him? She still had her place, however small, in the world of machines that had cast him out . . . Suddenly he hated them all without exception, all the iron monsters that ruled the world in whose sight flesh and blood were helpless, hopeless, as nothing.
He stumbled down the mountain, going into an exile lonelier than that stigmatized by the brand on his forehead. Yet withal, loneliness and hatred, he felt a curious inner peace. His brain was no longer a battlefield of hostile allegiances and longings. He still had no name for what he had become. But it didn’t matter any more.
He reached the bottom of the last rock slide, and looked back; in the failing light he could just make out the mesa rim, above which must be the aeros’ eyrie. Nothing moved up there. She would be at home now, among her own kind.
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.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 29