Jerry made gestures to his furry friends. They gesticulated back extravagantly. He climbed in the vehicle. Borden freed its tiller and Jerry drove.
For people effectively shipwrecked on an inimical planet and with no real hope of ever returning to their home, it was hardly appropriate that they got absorbed in the operation of a local vehicle. But this vehicle, large and roomy, was not a ground car so much as it was a land cruiser. It ran with astonishing smoothness, considering that it lacked pneumatic tires. And though from the outside it seemed to lurch and sway as it covered the rough ground, inside the lurchings were not felt at all.
The bipeds ran and skipped and loped beside it. Jerry picked up a little speed. They strained themselves to keep up.
Jerry had said ten miles. Actually, the distance was nearer twelve. There was snow in patches here and there. The air grew misty. Through the mist the edge of the ice-cap could be seen, a wall of opaque white some sixty or seventy feet high at its rounded melting edge, and rising to greater thickness beyond. And they came to a small running stream some four or five feet wide, the first running water they had seen on this planet.
And there were the clustered vehicles, about forty of them lined up as if on a highway which had come to an end in an ice barrier now melted away.
The vehicles were partly or wholly covered with water-borne clay which had been laid upon them by just such meltings of the ice-cap. They ran on into a small hillock which had formed since they had come to a stop at this place. Some were merely hummocks of clay-covered metal, barely showing above the ground. Some were what could be called only hub-deep in the clay. But it was being buried in the clay which had preserved them.
"You see, sir," Jerry explained, "I got the creatures to help me dig down to the doors, so I got into all that show. For weapons."
But Borden did not compliment him, though a compliment was due. Instead, Borden said in a toneless voice:
"I also see that Sattell has been here. He must have trailed you. He saw where you had driven one vehicle away. So he dug out the tracks of another one—there!—and tried it. And it worked. Sattell is gone."