Something in the solemn tones of the big man’s voice reached into Fors. He had never had a real friend, his alien blood had set him too far apart from the other boys of the Eyrie. And his relationship with his father had been that of pupil with teacher. But he knew now that he would never willingly let this dark-skinned warrior go out of his life again, and that where Arskane chose to go, there he would follow.
When the sun was almost overhead they were in a wilderness of trees where it was necessary to go slowly to avoid gaping cellar holes and lengths of moldering beams.
But in this maze Lura picked up the trail of a wild heifer and within the hour they had brought it down and were .broiling fresh meat. With enough for perhaps two more meals packed in the raw hide they went on, Fors’ small compass their guide.
Abruptly they came out on the edge of the old place of flying men. So abruptly they were almost shocked into dodging back into the screen of trees when they first saw what lay there.
Both were familiar with the pictures of such machines. But here they were real, standing in ordered rows—some of them. And the rest were piled in battered confusion, torn and rent or half engulfed in shell holes.
“Planes!” Arskane’s eyes gleamed. “The sky-riding planes of my fathers’ fathers! Before we fled the shaking of the mountains we went to look our last upon the ones which brought the first men of our clan to that land-and they were like unto some of these. But here is a whole field of planes!” ,
“These were struck dead before they reached the sky,” Fors pointed out. A queer feeling of excitement burned inside him. The ground machines, even the truck which had helped them out of the city, never moved him so. These winged monsters—how great—how very great in knowledge must the Old Ones have been! That they could ride among the clouds in these—where now their sons must crawl upon the ground! Hardly knowing what he did Fors ventured out and drew his hand sadly along the body of the nearest plane. He was so small beside it— a whole family clan might have once ridden in its belly—
“It was with such as these that the Old Ones sowed death over the world—”
“But to ride in the clouds,” Fors refused Arskane’s somber mood, “above the earth—They must have been god-like-the Old Ones!”
“Say rather devil-like! See—” Arskane took him by the arm and led him between the two orderly rows on the edge of the field to look at the series of ragged, ugly craters which made a churned mess of the center of the airport. “Death came thus from the air, and men dropped that death willingly upon their fellows. Let us remember that, brother.”