The smashed armadillo had long since been stripped of usable parts by the desert's scavengers. The remaining wreckage was widely strewn, half-buried in the sand and eaten by rust.
Torcred searched with a grim intensity, tugging at the projecting steel ribs. Some were deeply buried, others too badly bent, still others too short. At last he found what he was looking for; a narrow T-beam, six straight feet of alloy steel, light but tremendously strong. He hefted it with satisfaction.
"You don't intend to attack the panzer with that!" exclaimed Ladna.
"I do," said Torcred. He looked into her wide blue eyes for a moment, then pointed down at something that had been disturbed when he pried loose the beam. A chalk-white skull with empty eyes. He kicked at it, and it crumbled. "Of such are we made, bird-girl. A fragile framework compared with the machines'. But alive, we have intelligence, and with intelligence and this weapon I mean to take the panzer."
They tramped eastward again, following their own tracks, under a sun already growing hot. After a while the girl asked in a meek voice, "How can you hope to do it?"
Torcred smiled inwardly at the impression his—largely assumed—confidence had made. He answered, "This morning I noticed some of the thing's weaknesses."
"It didn't look weak to me."
"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—"