that he was still looking on at the moment when the trapwas sprung.
A star, it seemed, fell almost vertically from the zenith, falling andexpanding with the uncanny silence of flight faster than sound. Thescavengers had no time to act. Dworn caught one faint glimpse of awinged shape against the sky, limned by the flashes that stabbed from itas it leveled out of its terrific dive.
One scavenger shuddered with the force of a heavy explosion somewherewithin it, and subsided, smoking. The other too staggered undercrippling impacts, but ground somehow into motion, spinning and slidingcrazily down the gravel slope. Then, as the first attacker's shock-wavemade the very earth tremble, a second and a third plunged from the blackheights, and as the last one rose screeching from its swoop the wholelower face of the hillside boomed into a holocaust of flame and oilysmoke. The fleeing scavenger was gone, enveloped somewhere in an acre offiery hell.
Dworn, two hundred yards away, felt a searing breath of heat, and witha great effort controlled the impulse to whirl round and race for openerground. He sat still, hands cramped sweating on the beetle's controls,while the sky whistled vindictively with the flight of things thatcircled in search of further targets.
When, after a seeming eon, their screaming died away, he released heldbreath in a long sigh. He found himself trembling with reaction. Stillhe didn't stir. He was ransacking his memory for something he should beable to recall but which eluded him--a myth, perhaps, heard as a childbeside the campfires of the horde--
The old men would know; Yold would have known. At thought of his father,the grief and fury rose up again in Dworn, and this time he knew theobject of his vengeful anger. There was small doubt now in his mind thatthose flying machines which struck so swiftly and so murderously hadbeen the beetles' attackers.
But he didn't know what they were. He knew, of course, about themachines called hornets, which could fly and strike at fearful speedslike that, outracing sound. But the hornets flew only in daylight, andmade no trouble for the nocturnal race of beetles. These--were somethingelse.
And more--between the deadly night-fliers and the harmless-lookingaluminum crawlers he had seen, Dworn sensed some connection, someunnatured symbiosis. He had heard vague rumors about such arrangements,but had half-discounted them; any of the peoples whom he knew at firsthand would have scorned to enter into alliance with an alien species.
Lastly, he realized bitterly, he didn't even know where the enemy'slair, their base on the ground, might be....
* * * * *
The moon stood high now. But the Barrier, close at hand now, rose likean immense black wall, folded in shadows, revealing no secrets--wallingoff the world the beetles knew from the unknown beyond. InvoluntarilyDworn shivered. He couldn't be sure--but it seemed to him that thedestroyers had come from over the Barrier and had flown back there.
He set his machine in cautious motion again and stole along, makingnorthward and keeping close to the Barrier. It occurred to him that thebeetle horde, routed and fleeing, might well have hugged the cliffs forprotection against flying foes.
The going here was not easy. The terrain seemed increasingly unfamiliarthough he should have known every foot of it. But--he remembered nosuch tumbled crags, no such great heaps of stony detritus as blocked hisway and forced him into long detours....
Finally he halted to take his bearings, and, looking up, discovered whathad happened. The black rampart of the Barrier was notched and broken.Sometime in the past year, since Dworn had left this place to begin hiswandering, a quarter-mile-wide section of the upper crags, hollowed andloosened by the slow working of millennial erosion, had fallen andspilled millions of tons of rock crashing and shattering onto the slopesbelow. Here now water would run when the rains fell, and in ten ortwenty thousand years, perhaps, a river-course would have completed thebreach.
Dworn wondered fleetingly whether any living thing had been here whenthe cliffs fell. If so, it was buried now, crumbling bone and corrodingmetal, under the mountain for all time to come.
He set about skirting the rockfall, still searching the ground fortraces of beetle wheels. But there were very few wheel or tread marks ofany description to be seen--and that was strange in itself.
Impulsively he halted again and listened, his amplifier turned up. Heshould have heard faroff engine-mutterings, occasional explosions fromthe desert to the west, where normally the predatory machines and theirvictims prowled and fought all night long over the sandy tracts and thedesolate ridges.... But there was nothing. A silence, vast andunnatural, lay upon the wastes in the shadow of the high plateau.
He looked up again at the fallen rampart of the Barrier. The greatlandship had opened, as it were, a gateway to the unknown lands in theeast--a gateway for what?
There was a strangeness here since last year, and the strangeness creptchillingly into Dworn's blood, made the mountain air seem thin and cold.
As he started again, he noticed yet another curious thing. He wascrossing a sandy natural terrace, and the soft soil here was traversedby a row of indented marks that marched in a straight line across theopen space. They were scuffed depressions, such as a ricochetingprojectile might have made--but oddly regular in shape and spacing,almost, he thought fancifully, like giant footprints, ten feet apart....
Dworn was growing numbed to riddles. He shrugged impatiently and pressedthe accelerator again.
He would push on northward for a few more miles, he determined, and ifhe still found no sign of his people, he would circle back to thesouth....
The moonlight shadow of the huge tilted boulder ahead was inky. ButDworn was keeping to the shadows by preference, remembering the deathfrom above; so he cut close around the overhanging rock.
Too late to swerve, then, he saw the gleam of something stretched acrosshis path. A metallic glint of deceptively slender strands which, as thebeetle rolled headlong into them, snapped taut without breaking, sprangback and flipped the beetle clean over to fetch up against the rock withan ear-shattering bang.
Half-stunned by the suddenness of it and the violence with which he hadbeen flung about, Dworn blurrily saw other cables settling fromoverhead, coiling almost like living things around his overturnedmachine. Then he glimpsed something else; stalking monstrously down fromthe unscalable crag above, its armor glimmering in the moonlight, amachine such as he had never imagined--a machine without wheels ortreads, a nightmare moving on jointed steel legs that flexed and foundholds for clawed steel feet with the smooth precision of well-oiledpistons. A machine that walked.
Capsized, its vulnerable underside exposed, the beetle was all buthelpless. One hope remained. With wooden fingers Dworn groped for theemergency button, found it--
The propellant-charge went off beneath him with a deafening roar. Thebeetle was hurled upward and sidewise, in an arc that should havebrought it down on its wheels again--but the ensnaring cables tightenedand held, and Dworn's head slammed against something inside the cabin.The world burst apart into a shower of lights and darkness....
* * * * *
Dworn came awake to a pounding head and blurred light in his eyes. Hemoved, and sensed that he was bound.
His vision cleared. He saw that he was in a closed, half-darkenedchamber--and that discovery alone made him shudder, he who as a freebeetle had spent his whole life under desert skies. His feet rested on afloor of hard-packed sand, and his back, behind which his wrists werelashed together was propped uncomfortably against a wall ribbed withmetal girders. The room was circular and its walls converged upward,into tangled shadows overhead; the chamber was roughly bottle-shaped.
To one side a door stood ajar, and it was thence that the lightstreamed, but from where he was Dworn couldn't see into the spacebeyond.
He tried hard to collect his thoughts. When had everything stoppedmaking sense? When he had first glimpsed the fires that were burningbeetles on the mountainside, or....
The converging lines of the wall-girders led his eyes upward.
Theshadows overhead resolved themselves as he studied them, and Dworn'sheart pounded as he commenced to understand what manner of place he wasin. The roof of the bottle-shaped chamber--he was sure it must beunderground--was no roof, but was the underside of a great machinecomplex with gear-housings and levers connected with the six powerfulmetal legs radiating from it, their cleated feet resting on a shelf thatencircled the bottle-neck. It squatted there, motionless above him,sealing the entrance to its burrow....
Trapped. For some reason he couldn't guess at, he had been takenalive--his human body, at least; he didn't know what had become of therest of him, the machine that was part and parcel of him too.
The light suddenly brightened. The door at one side was swinging open.
Dworn blinked at the glare from the lighted room beyond. Against it afigure stood in silhouette, and he saw that it was a woman.
She was slender, not very tall, and her hair was jet-black, a strikingframe for a startlingly pale face. Here beneath the earth she must notget much