Part 3

"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 yard-wide 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 prey 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--

The Terrapin 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 something 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? Ex-warrior and hunter, ex-hero, ex-terrapin--he could think of things he had been and was not.

_I am a--_

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 coming 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.

* * * * *