Only savage engines roamed that arid world,
charging one another with snarling guns beneath
those grinding treads. And two puny machine-less
humans like Torcred and Ladna should die quickly.
That they suddenly could become the most dangerous
things alive must surely be some dead god's joke.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The terrapin was traveling eighty miles an hour—far too fast forsuch uneven country. Over maddeningly repetitive dunes it scudded,rising with a swoop to each windward slope and hurtling clear of theground beyond each wave-like crest, to plunge through the trough in ahurricane of flying sand.
The wiry little man who crouched tensely, hugged by a padded safetybelt, in the pitching, vibrant interior of the midget combat car,was impatient, furiously so. Thanks to an unusually stubborn case ofengine trouble, he was a full two hours behind the rest of his troop;by now they must have sighted the new camping place on the shore ofthe Salt Sea. And the blazing sun was already sinking toward the dustyhorizon haze. Torcred the Terrapin came of a people unused to fear—buthis shrewd intelligence, calculating the risks he must run before herejoined the others, found the daylight dangers enough and to spare,and nothing attractive in the thought of an encounter with any of thethings that prowled the desolate plain after the sun went down.
So the terrapin fled at reckless speed westward over the dipping dunes,and Torcred's deepset irongray eyes, squinting against the glare thateven the polarized glass in the narrow vision slits could only cutdown, were anxious. Under his breath he chided his own nervousness;probably after all nothing would happen....
Midway in the thought it did happen, and with almost catastrophicsuddenness. The black silhouette of a flying thing materialized outof the sun's glare, diving straight at him. It flattened out and wasgone overhead, while the roar of its passing echoed behind it. And theterrapin had rocked to the impact of bullets all the more fiercelydriven by the aero's terrific velocity; its armor rang and steelsplinters hummed like wasps inside it.
Torcred slammed down one foot pedal and the terrapin slewed crazily andslid sidewise for a score of yards, in a cloud of sand that momentarilyhid it from the eyes above. Coming out of the skid he gave full powerto the spinning wheels, operating the throttle with one hand while theother switched on his radar screen and leaped from it to the firingcontrol of the turret gun. It was long seconds before the scanning beamlocated its flitting target; then, though the terrapin was travelingin the quick swerves and dashes of a desperately evasive course, theautomatic control held the image reasonably well centered on theprojected crosshairs of the turret gun's sight. The image swelled, grewwings, as the aero came in in a second howling dive.
Torcred's reflexes, hardly less automatic than his machine's, depressedthe firing button, and the gun's stammering blast numbed his ears,mingling almost at the same moment with the clang and shriek of steelon steel as the terrapin took more hits. But the flying enemy leveledoff far higher than before and zoomed away more steeply; its greatadvantage had been lost when the first attack failed to cripple or kill.
The Terrapin's eyes burned into the screen as his own wild zigzagsflung him painfully against his safety belt. The aero might let thingsgo at that.... No, the screen's image expanded again. His finger