"Those are tales that have lost their substances, fit for the young, the ignorant, and the uncivilized. Certainly the great ancients existed—they were an air-people like us, who ruled the world long ago, as we shall in time to come. But that they were immortal and are still alive, drifting somewhere in midocean out of sight of land—that's nonsense."
"Maybe so," Torcred grunted stolidly. In the cosmogony he knew, the ancients were mighty terrapin heroes of the world's youth, from whose stock all other races had degenerated; they still lived somewhere, and would return to make the terrapins supreme again.... He said matter-of-factly, "If you want to know what I think—we are being watched, by something that is alive and powerful here and now."
Ladna started and looked nervously round. She had begun to respect the Terrapin's shrewd native intelligence. As they plodded on across the desert, she said no more, infected by his dark preoccupation.
But in Torcred's brain the question of the stranger's identity loomed less large than that of his own. What was he? Ex-warrior and hunter, ex-hero, ex-terrapin—he could think of things he had been and was not.
I am a—
He had no word. Outcast, traitor, criminal? A newborn pride in him rebelled against the labels he would have accepted without question before his battle with the panzer. He had earned a name, but he had no name.
The west veiled its face in flame again, and darkness overtook them in the wilderness. Torcred dreamed that he stood naked in the middle of a vast circle of formidable machines that snarled and hooted, demanding his name and lineage; and he had no answer. In desperation he cried, "I am I!"—and a thousand motors roared, the armored mass rolled inward to crush him.
He woke staring into a dawn-lit sky where a black flight of buzzards droned northward thousands of feet overhead.
Ladna was awake too and looking up, the old tense fear-born hatred expressed in every line of her body.