And not far away, among loose heaps of sand on the rim of the blast crater, he saw a strange thing. A massive cone of metal, with the spiral grooves and flanges of a screw, thrust slantingly from the ground; it was turning slowly, earth dropping from it, and as he stared it turned faster and moved forward and upward, drawing after it a glistening rounded back.
Dazedly Torcred walked toward the thing, and as he did so a port-cover lifted in the armored back and a man's head thrust out. He blinked at Torcred with a look of stunned confusion.
"What happened?" demanded the mole in a shaken voice. "I was coming up for a breath of air, then—bang!" He looked around wildly. "My garden! What have they done to my garden?"
The moles, Torcred knew, made gardens—sheets of cellotex impregnated, like the sun-screens of the trailers and like machines, with photosynthetic chemicals. Even the predators left them alone, for the most part, since the moles were a peaceful and harmless race. That, then, had been the bomb's target.
The mole peered at Torcred, seemed to come to himself. "What are you?" he gasped, and without waiting for an answer, ducked inside. The hatch-cover slammed, the great screw reversed and revolved furiously, and the burrowing machine slowly sank from sight under the sand.
"Now do you believe me—about them?" demanded Ladna's stifled voice.
Torcred nodded slowly, feeling sorry for the poor frightened mole, and rather surprised at himself for it, as he had been when he had spared the beaten crew of the panzer.... Torcred the Terrapin was never like that. Mechanically his fingers caressed the half-healed mark on his forehead.
The girl's tongue seemed loosened by their near escape, and as they journeyed on, she talked, with a calm bitterness now, of the enemy. Torcred knew vaguely that, somewhere far to the north, was Buzzard Base, an immense fortress with subterranean dwellings and hangars where the black monsters bred and swarmed. Ladna enlightened him further. "Some of our spies"—the word meant nothing to Torcred—"got inside the place not long ago. They reported things stirring, the buzzards building airframes and engines at a furious rate, obviously planning a new move. Naturally, we increased our construction tempo to keep pace with them, but we've been puzzled; you see, there were rumors that the chief buzzards were worried about something else, besides the old dragging stalemate. But whatever it was, they were keeping it secret even from their own rank and file."
Torcred shook his head bewilderedly; he was lost in her world with its vastness and complexity of organization and politics and schemes for domination. With the openmindedness of confusion he had to admit that the civilization of the air was such as the free terrapins did not dream of.... And he felt an inward hurt as, in the girl's talk of her people and their life, he sensed the widening of the distance between them, which had almost dwindled away while they wandered and struggled to survive and nearly died together in the desert.