Dworn swervesharply. An instant later, the ground blew up almost in his face--thebend had brought him into view, under the guns of the enemy above.
He wrenched the beetle around in a skidding turn and raced back for thebend where the overhang afforded shelter. Another shell and anothercrashed into places he had just left, and then he was safe--for themoment.
But it was an uncomfortable spot. The caterpillar rumbling wrathfully onthe slope above him, couldn't see him as long as he hugged the bank,undercut by the water that flowed here in the rainy season; but, by thesame token, he couldn't make a dash for safety without running thegauntlet of a murderous fire in the all-too-narrow way the stream bedoffered. In open country, he would not have hesitated to count on hisability to outmaneuver and outshoot the caterpillar ... but here he wasneatly trapped.
And it was nerve-racking to be unable to see what the enemy was about.It seemed to have halted, judging the situation just as he had beendoing. Now, though, he heard its engine speed up again, and the grindingof its treads came unmistakably closer. His ears strained to gauge itsadvance as it came lurching down the slope, till it sounded only a fewfeet away and Dworn braced himself to shoot fast and straight if itstarted coming down over the bank. Then it paused again, and sat idling,hoping no doubt that he would panic and show himself.
He didn't. The caterpillar's engine raced up once more and began tolabor under a heavy load. There was an increasing clatter of fallingstones. Then Dworn remembered the great digging-blade it carried, andrealized what it was going to try.
Ten feet to his right the bank began giving way. Tons of rubblethundered into the gully. Dworn winced and moved away as far as hedared. He heard the caterpillar back and turn, then it snarled witheffort once more and another section of the overhang caved in with agrinding roar.
Inside minutes at this rate, it would either have driven him from hisrefuge or buried him alive. Now it came rumbling forward for the thirdtime; rocks showered from the rim directly above his head, and he sawthe bank begin to tremble.
* * * * *
Dworn braced himself. Even as the wall of earth and rock began leaningoutward above him, he gave his engine full throttle. The wheels spun forone sickening instant, then the little machine lunged forward frombeneath the fresh landslide and was climbing, bucking and slewing, upthe slope of loose soil created by the ones before.
The caterpillar loomed black and enormous on his left hand, so closethat it could not have brought its guns to bear even if its crew hadexpected the beetle to take this daring way out. With its shovel loweredand half-buried, it could not swing round quickly--Dworn had counted onthat.
As the beetle's flank cleared the corner of the digging blade withinches to spare, Dworn's gun turret passed in line with the spacebetween the blade and the caterpillar's treads, and he jabbed the firingbutton. The explosion wreathed the monster's forward half in smoke anddust, and into that cloud it tilted forward, teetered ponderously andthen slid headlong to the bottom of the wash as the loosened bank gaveway conclusively under its great weight.
Dworn looked back from the hill crest to see it still floundering,treads furiously churning sand, struggling to fight clear of theavalanche it had carried with it. The beetle laughed full-throatedly,without rancor. This hadn't been the first nor the tightest corner he'dbeen in during the dangerous course of his wanderyear; and in that hardschool of life you learned not to worry about danger already past.
At another time, he might have returned to the battle in hope ofcapturing the additional supplies the caterpillar carried and--stillmore valuable booty--the chart it would have, showing the location ofits other caches. But now he was in a hurry--this refueling foray hadcost him a couple of hours, and the moon was already high.
So he slipped quietly away over the ridge and set his course to theeast.
Beyond the hilly land, the terrain ironed out into level alkali flatswhere a vanished lake had been in the long-gone days when the earth wasfertile. There he opened the throttle wide. The plain, white in themoonlight, rolled under the racing wheels at ninety and a hundred milesan hour; air whistled over the carapace....
Impatience surged up in Dworn once more. Eagerly he pictured hisforthcoming reunion with his native horde--and with Yold, his father,chief of the horde.
Countless times in the long wanderyear--in moments when death loomednearer than it had in the brush just past, and he despaired of survivinghis testing, or in other moments, yet harder to bear, when the immensityof of the desert earth seemed about to swallow him up in hisloneliness--he had grasped at that vision now soon to be real: he,Dworn, stood before the assembled horde, the year of his provingtriumphantly completed, and he received before them all the proud,laconic commendation of the chief, his father.
Hungrily he scanned the horizon ahead, saw with leaping heart that itwas no longer flat. Along it a black line rose, and grew ragged as itcame nearer, and became an endless line of cliffs, marching straightnorth and south as far as the eye could see.... The Barrier!
Dworn recognized familiar landmarks, and altered his direction a littleso as to be heading directly for the year's-end rendezvous. He knew,from childhood memories even, the outline of that vast stone rampart asit appeared by moonlight. Every year the Barrier formed the easternlimit of the beetles' annual migration, as naturally as the shore of thesea was its westward terminus. So it had been for a thousand years ormore, as far back as the oldest traditions reached: generation aftergeneration, hunting, foraging, and fighting--from the Barrier to theocean, from the ocean to the Barrier.
* * * * *
To right and left the serried cliffs stretched out of sight--the edge ofthe world, so far as beetles knew. If you examined the contour of itsrim, you could see how it corresponded point by point to theirregularities of the hilly land on its hither side. Some time,millennia ago, a great fault in the earth's crust had given way, and theunknown lands of the continental interior had been lifted as if on aplatform, five hundred feet above the coastal regions. Or perhaps thecoast had sunk. Legend attributed the event to the ancients' wars, when,it was said, some unimaginable weapon had cleft the continentasunder....
Dworn perforce slowed his breakneck pace as the ground grew unevenagain. He guided his machine with instinctive skill over the ascendingslopes and ridges, eyes combing the moon-shadows for the first sign ofhis people.
Then, a couple of miles ahead, he glimpsed lights. His heart boundedup--then sank with a prescient dismay; there was something wrong--
The fires that winked up there--four, no, five of them, under the veryrim just before the cliffs rose sheer--didn't look like campfires. Theywere unequally spaced, and they flared up and waned oddly by turns,glowing evilly red.
Dworn braked the beetle to a stop on a patch of high ground, and satstraining to discern the meaning of those ominous beacons. To hisimagination, rasped raw by expectation and the tension of long travel,they became red eyes of menace, warnings.... He tried the infraredviewer, but it showed no more than he could see with the naked eye. Onlyghosts paraded across the screen, ghosts of the folded slopes that roseto the abrupt wall of the Barrier. Nothing seemed moving there; thewhole sweep of broken and tumbled landscape appeared dead and lifelessas the moon.
But yonder burned the fires.
Sternly Dworn reminded himself that this night he was mature, a warriorof the proud beetle race. He thrust his fears resolutely aside; therewas nothing to do but find out.
The beetle drifted forward, but cautiously now, at a stalking pace.Dworn took advantage of the lie of the land, continually seeking coveras he advanced, to shield him from whatever eyes might be watching fromthe silent slopes above.
Boulders lay ever more thickly strewn as he neared the Barrier cliffs,and he skirted patches of gravel and loose stones that would havecrunched loudly under his wheels. Only occasionally, emerging into theopen, he glimpsed his objective, but his sense of direction kept himbearing steadily toward the fires.
Fifteen minutes later, the beetle's blunt nose thrusting from under ashelf of rock that would disguise its outline if anything was watching,its motor noiselessly idling, Dworn knew that his premonitions had notbeen in vain. He looked out upon a scene that chilled his blood.
The burning machines, scattered for two hundred yards along the talusslope where destruction had come upon them or where they had plunged outof control, were beetles. Or they had been. Now they were wrecks,smashed, overturned, fitfully aflame.
There was no sign of an enemy. But here was the havoc which somepowerful enemy had wrought, it could not have been long ago.
He strove to find identifying marks on the blackened hulks, but in theuncertain light could make out at first no more than the femaleornaments which had graced two or three of them. Names and faces flashedthrough Dworn's mind; he could not know yet who had perished here, whichfaces he would not see again....
It hardly occurred to him to speculate that anyone might be
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