The bandage finished, he stood up and said brusquely, "We'd better get ready to leave."
"You plan to go on foot again—now that we've captured a machine?"
"It's the only sensible way," asserted Torcred flatly. "Neither of us knows how to repair the caterpillar tread, or, if we managed that, how to maneuver and fight the panzer; if we were attacked, it would be a death trap for us. Afoot, we're in very little danger—what machine of prey would be likely to consider us worthy of notice?"
They looted the best of the provisions, and the girl's deft fingers fashioned for each a strap of sorts from a roil of cellotex fabric. Torcred went up to the driver's cabin, located the engine under the floor, and did things to it that would keep the panzer immobilized until long after the blowing sand should have covered their traces. The woman could untie their men as soon as they gained courage to come out of hiding....
Terrapin and bird-girl set their faces to the east and began to trek again. They trudged on with lightened hearts.
They had gone about a mile when a fold of the land revealed a wide swathe of desert dotted with camouflaged steel hemispheres, mostly buried in the sand—a big colony of the pillbox people.
They ducked back behind the shelter of the sand-hills and began what looked like the shortest detour. Suddenly Ladna, glancing back the way they had come, cried out sharply.
Torcred turned, and saw a plume of dust above the far-off dunes—then a gray scurrying beetle-thing that rose to a crest, vanished, and reappeared on a nearer swell.
It was a terrapin, travelling fast, and as it raced closer there was less and less doubt that it was following their own plainly marked trail. Torcred strained his eyes through the heat-shimmer to make out the identifying mark on its blunt nose; he stiffened, and his hand dropped to the knife he had taken from the panzer.
"Helsed! He's picked up our trail somehow—but what does he want?"