The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

KILLDOZER! Theodore Sturgeon

Before the race was the deluge, and before the deluge another race, whose nature it is not for mankind to understand. Not unearthly, not alien, for this was their earth and their home.

There was a war between this race, which was a great one, and another. The other was truly alien, a sentient cloudform, an intelligent grouping of tangible electrons. It was spawned in mighty machines by some accident of a science beyond our aboriginal conception of technology. And then the machines, servants of the people, became the people’s masters, and great were the battles that followed. The electron-beings had the power to wrap the delicate balances of atom-structure, and their life-medium was mental, which they permeated and used to their own ends. Each weapon the people developed was possessed and turned against them, until a time when the remnants of that vast civilization found a defence—

An insulator. The terminal product or by-product of all energy research — neutronium.

In its shelter they developed a weapon. What it was we shall never know, and our race will live — or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished. Sent to destroy the enemy, it got out of hand and its measureless power destroyed them with it, and their cities, and their possessed machines. The very earth dissolved in flame, the crust writhed and shook and the oceans boiled. Nothing escaped it, nothing that we know as life, and nothing of the pseudolife that had evolved within the mysterious force-fields of their incomprehensible machines, save one hardy mutant.

Mutant it was, and ironically this one alone could have been killed by the first simple measures used against its kind — but it was past time for simple expediences. It was an organized electron-field possessing intelligence and mobility and a will to destroy, and little else. Stunned by the holocaust, it drifted over the grumbling globe, and in a lull in the violence of the forces gone wild on Earth, sank to the steaming ground in its half-conscious exhaustion. There it found shelter — shelter built by and for its dead enemies. An envelope of neutronium. It drifted in, and its consciousness at last fell to its lowest ebb. And there it lay while the neutronium, with its strange constant flux, its interminable striving for perfect balance, extended itself and closed the opening. And thereafter in the turbulent eons that followed, the envelope tossed like a grey bubble on the surface of the roiling sphere, for no substance on Earth would have it or combine with it.

The ages came and went, and chemical action and reaction did their mysterious work, and once again there was life and evolution. And a tribe found the mass of neutronium, which is not a substance but a static force, and were awed by its aura of indescribable chill, and they worshipped it and built a temple around it and made sacrifices to it. And ice and fire and the seas came and went, and the land rose and fell as the years went by, until the ruined temple was on a knoll, and the knoll was an island. Islanders came and went, lived and built and died, and races forgot. So now, somewhere in the Pacific to the west of the archipelago called Islas Revillagigedas, there was an uninhabited island. And one day—

Chub Horton and Tom Jaeger stood watching the Sprite and her squat tow of three cargo lighters dwindle over the glassy sea. The big ocean-going towboat and her charges seemed to be moving out of focus rather than travelling away. Chub spat cleanly around the cigar that grew out of the corner of his mouth.

“That’s that for three weeks. How’s it feel to be a guinea pig?”

“We’ll get it done.” Tom had little crinkles all around the outer ends of his eyes. He was a head taller than Chub and rangy, and not so tough, and he was a real operator. Choosing him as a foreman for the experiment had been wise, for he was competent and he commanded respect. The theory of airfield construction that they were testing appealed vastly to him, for here were no officers-in-charge, no government inspectors, no time-keeping or reports. The government had allowed the company a temporary land grant, and the idea was to put production-line techniques into the layout and grading of the project. There were six operators and two mechanics and more than a million dollars’ worth of the best equipment that money could buy. Government acceptance was to be on a partially completed basis, and contingent on government standards. The theory obviated both gold-bricking and graft, and neatly side-stepped the man-power problem. “When that black-topping crew gets here, I reckon we’ll be ready for ’em,” said Tom.

He turned and scanned the island with an operator’s vision and saw it as it was, and in all the stages it would pass through, and as it would look when they had finished, with five thousand feet of clean-draining runway, hard-packed shoulders, four acres of plane-park, the access road and the short taxiway. He saw the lay of each lift that the power shovel would cut as it brought down the marl bluff, and the ruins on top of it that would give them stone to haul down the salt-flat to the little swamp at the other end, there to be walked in by the dozers.

“We got time to run the shovel up there to the bluff before dark.”

They walked down the beach towards the outcropping where the equipment stood surrounded by crates and drums of supplies. The three tractors were ticking over quietly, the two-cycle Diesel chuckling through their mufflers and the big D-7 whacking away its metronomic compression knock on every easy revolution. The Dumptors were lined up and silent, for they would not be ready to work until the shovel was ready to load them. They looked like a mechanical interpretation of Dr. Dolittle’s “Pushme-pullyou,” the fantastic animal with two front ends. They had two large driving wheels and two small steerable wheels. The motor and the driver’s seat were side by side over the front — or smaller — wheels; but the driver faced the dump body between the big rear wheels, exactly the opposite of the way he would sit in a dump truck. Hence, in travelling from shovel to dumping-ground, the operator drove backwards, looking over his shoulder, and in dumping he backed the machine up but he himself travelled forward — quite a trick for fourteen hours a day! The shovel squatted in the midst of all the others, its great hulk looming over them, humped there with its boom low and its iron chin on the ground, like some great tired dinosaur.

Rivera, the Puerto Rican mechanic, looked up grinning as Tom and Chub approached, and stuck a bleeder wrench into the top pocket of his coveralls.

“She says ‘Signalo,’” he said, his white teeth flashlighting out of the smear of grease across his mouth. “She says she wan’ to get dirt on dis paint.” He kicked the blade of the Seven with his heel.

Tom sent the grin back — always a surprising thing in his grave face.

“That Seven’ll do that, and she’ll take a good deal off her bitin’ edge along with the paint before we’re through. Get in the saddle, Goony. Build a ramp off the rocks down to the flat there, and blade us off some humps from here to the bluff yonder. We’re walking the dipper up there.”

The Puerto Rican was in the seat before Tom had finished, and with a roar the Seven spun in its length and moved back along the outcropping to the inland edge. Rivera dropped his blade and the sandy marl curled and piled up in front of the dozer, loading the blade and running off in two even rolls at the ends. He shoved the load towards the rocky edge, the Seven revving down as it took the load, blat blat blatting and pulling like a supercharged ox as it fired slowly enough for them to count the revolutions.

“She’s a hunk of machine,” said Tom.

“A hunk of operator, too,” gruffed Chub, and added, “for a mechanic.”

“The boy’s all right,” said Kelly. He was standing there with them, watching the Puerto Rican operate the dozer, as if he had been there all along, which was the way Kelly always arrived places. He was tall, slim, with green eyes too long and an easy stretch to the way he moved, like an attenuated cat. He said, “Never thought I’d see the day when equipment was shipped set up ready to run like this. Guess no one ever thought of it before.”

“There’s times when heavy equipment has to be unloaded in a hurry these days,” Tom said. “If they can do it with tanks, they can do it with construction equipment. We’re doin’ it to build something instead, is all. Kelly, crank up the shovel. It’s oiled. We’re walking it over to the bluff.”

Kelly swung up into the cab of the big dipper-stick and, diddling the governor control, pulled up the starting handle. The Murphy Diesel snorted and settled down into a thudding idle. Kelly got into the saddle, set up the throttle a little, and began to boom up.

“I still can’t get over it,” ’ said Chub. “Not more’n a year ago we’d a had two hundred men on a job like this.”

Tom smiled. “Yeah, and the first thing we’d have done would be to build an office building, and then quarters. Me, I’ll take this way. No timekeepers, no equipment-use reports, no progress and yardage summaries, no nothin’ but eight men, a million bucks’ worth of equipment, an’ three weeks. A shovel an’ a mess of tool crates’ll keep the rain off us, an’ army field rations’ll keep our bellies full. We’ll get it done, we’ll get out and we’ll get paid.”

Rivera finished the ramp, turned the Seven around and climbed it, walking the new fill down. At the top he dropped his blade, floated it, and backed down the ramp, smoothing out the rolls. At a wave from Tom he started out across the shore, angling up towards the bluff, beating out the humps and carrying fill into the hollows. As he worked, he sang, feeling the beat of the mighty motor, the micrometric obedience of that vast implacable machine.

“Why doesn’t that monkey stick to his grease guns?”

Tom turned and took the chewed end of a matchstick out of his mouth. He said nothing, because he had for some time been trying to make a habit of saying nothing to Joe Dennis. Dennis was an ex-accountant, drafted out of an office at the last gasp of a defunct project in the West Indies. He had become an operator because they needed operators badly. He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field; for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the fields than they do in an office. Tom, trying so hard to keep his mind on his work, had to admit to himself that of all Dennis’ annoying traits the worst was that he was as good a pan operator as could be found anywhere, and no one could deny it.

Dennis certainly didn’t.

“I’ve seen the day when anyone catching one of those goonies so much as sitting on a machine during lunch, would kick his fanny,” Dennis groused. “Now they give ’em a man’s work and a man’s pay.”

“Doin’ a man’s work, ain’t he?” Tom said.

“He’s a damn Puerto Rican!”

Tom turned and looked at him levelly. “Where was it you said you come from,” he mused. “Oh yeah. Georgia.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Tom was already striding away. “Tell you as soon as I have to,” he flung back over his shoulder. Dennis went back to watching the Seven.

Tom glanced at the ramp and then waved Kelly on. Kelly set his housebrake so the shovel could not swing, put her into travel gear, and shoved the swing lever forward. With a crackling of drive chains and a massive scrunching of compacting coral sand, the shovel’s great flat pads carried her over and down the ramp. As she tipped over the peak of the ramp the heavy manganese steel bucket-door gaped open and closed, like a hungry mouth, slamming up against the bucket until suddenly it latched shut and was quiet. The big Murphy Diesel crooned hollowly under compression as the machine ran downgrade and then the sensitive governor took hold and it took up its belly-beating thud.

Peebles was standing by one of the dozer-pan combines, sucking on his pipe and looking out to sea. He was grizzled and heavy, and from under the bushiest grey brows looked the calmest grey eyes Tom had ever seen. Peebles had never got angry at a machine — a rare trait in a born mechanic — and in fifty-odd years he had learned it was even less use getting angry at a man. Because no matter what, you could always fix what was wrong with a machine. He said around his pipestem:

“Hope you’ll give me back my boy, there.”

Tom’s lips quirked in a little grin. There had been an understanding between old Peebles and himself ever since they had met. It was one of those things which exists unspoken — they knew little about each other because they had never found it necessary to make small talk to keep their friendship extant. It was enough to know that each could expect the best from the other, without persuasion.

“Rivera?” Tom asked. “I’ll chase him back as soon as he finishes that service road for the dipper-stick. Why — got anything on?”

“Not much. Want to get that arc welder drained and flushed and set up a grounded table in case you guys tear anything up.” He paused. “Besides, the kid’s filling his head up with too many things at once. Mechanicing is one thing; operating is something else.”

“Hasn’t got in his way much so far, has it?”

“Nope. Don’t aim t’ let it, either. ’Less you need him.”

Tom swung up on the pan tractor. “I don’t need him that bad, Peeby. If you want some help in the meantime, get Dennis.”

Peebles said nothing. He spat. He didn’t say anything at all.

“What’s the matter with Dennis?” Tom wanted to know.

“Look yonder,” said Peebles, waving his pipestem. Out on the beach Dennis was talking to Chub, in Dennis’ indefatigable style, standing beside Chub, one hand on Chub’s shoulder. As they watched they saw Dennis call his side-kick, Al Knowles.

“Dennis talks too much,” said Peebles. “That most generally don’t amount to much, but that Dennis, he sometimes says too much. Ain’t got what it takes to run a show, and knows it. Makes up for it by messin’ in between folks.”

“He’s harmless,” said Tom.

Still looking up the beach, Peebles said slowly:

“Is, so far.”

Tom started to say something, then shrugged. “I’ll send you Rivera,” he said, and opened the throttle. Like a huge electric dynamo, the two-cycle motor whined to a crescendo. Tom lifted the dozer with a small lever by his right thigh and raised the pan with the long control sprouting out from behind his shoulder. He moved off, setting the rear gate of the scraper so that anything the blade bit would run off to the side instead of loading into the pan. He slapped the tractor into sixth gear and whined up to and around the crawling shovel, cutting neatly in under the boom and running on ahead with his scraper blade just touching the ground, dragging to a fine grade the service road Rivera had cut.

Dennis was saying, “It’s that little Hitler stuff. Why should I take that kind of talk? ‘You come from Georgia,’ he says. What is he — a Yankee or something?”

“A crackah f’m Macon,” chortled Al Knowles, who came from Georgia, too. He was tall and stringy and round-shouldered. All of his skill was in his hands and feet, brains being a commodity he had lived without all his life until he had met Dennis and used him as a reasonable facsimile thereof.

“Tom didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Chub.

“No, he didn’t mean nothin’. Only that we do what he says the way he says it, specially if he finds a way we don’t like it. You wouldn’t do like that, Chub. Al, think Chub would carry on thataway?”

“Sure wouldn’t,” said Al, feeling it expected of him.

“Nuts,” said Chub, pleased and uncomfortable, and thinking, what have I got against Tom? — not knowing, not liking Tom as well as he had. “Tom’s the man here, Dennis. We got a job to do — lets skit and git. Man can take anything for a lousy six weeks.”

“Oh, sho’,” said Al.

“Man can take just so much,” Dennis said. “What they put a man like that on top for, Chub? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know grading and drainage as good as Tom? Can Tom stake out a side hill like you can?”

“Sure, sure, but what’s the difference, long as we get a field built? An’ anyhow, hell with bein’ the boss-man. Who gets the blame if things don’t run right, anyway?”

Dennis stepped back, taking his hand off Chub’s shoulder, and stuck an elbow in Al’s ribs.

“You see that, Al? Now there’s a smart man. That’s the thing Uncle Tom didn’t bargain for. Chub, you can count on Al and me to do just that little thing.”

“Do just what little thing?” asked Chub, genuinely puzzled.

“Like you said. If the job goes wrong, the boss gets blamed. So if the boss don’t behave, the job goes wrong.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Al with the conviction of mental simplicity.

Chub double-took this extraordinary logical process and grasped wildly at anger as the conversation slid out from under him. “I didn’t say any such thing! This job is goin’ to get done, no matter what! There’ll be no damn goldbrick badge on me or anybody else around here if I can help it.”

“That’s the ol’ fight,” feinted Dennis. “We’ll show that guy what we think of his kind of slowdown.”

“You talk too much,” said Chub, and escaped with the remnants of coherence. Every time he talked with Dennis he walked away feeling as if he had an unwanted membership card stuck in his pocket that he couldn’t throw away with a clear conscience.

Rivera ran his road up under the bluff, swung the Seven around, punched out the master clutch and throttled down, idling. Tom was making his pass with the pan, and as he approached, Rivera slipped out of the seat and behind the tractor, laying a sensitive hand on the final drive casing and sprocket bushings, checking for overheating. Tom pulled alongside and beckoned him up on the pan tractor.

“Que pasa, Goony? Anything wrong?”

Rivera shook his head and grinned. “Nothing wrong. She is perfect, that ‘de siete.’ She—”

“That what? ‘Daisy Etta’?”

“De siete. In Spanish, D-7. It means something in English?”

“Got you wrong,” smiled Tom. “But Daisy Etta is a girl’s name in English, all the same.”

He shifted the pan tractor into neutral and engaged the clutch, and jumped off the machine. Rivera followed. They climbed aboard the Seven, Tom at the controls.

Rivera said, “Daisy Etta,” and grinned so widely that a soft little clucking noise came from behind his back teeth. He reached out his hand, crooked his little finger around one of the tall steering clutch levers, and pulled it all the way back. Tom laughed outright.

“You got something there,” he said. “The easiest runnin’ cat ever built. Hydraulic steerin’ clutches and brakes that’ll bring you to a dead stop if you spit on ’em. Forward an’ reverse lever so’s you got all your speeds front and backwards. A little different from the old jobs. They had no booster springs, eight-ten years ago; took a sixty-pound pull to get a steerin’ clutch back. Cuttin’ a side-hill with an angle-dozer really was a job in them days. You try it sometime, dozin’ with one hand, holdin’ her nose out o’ the bank with the other, ten hours a day. And what’d it get you? Eighty cents an hour an’ ” — Tom took his cigarette and butted the fiery end out against the horny palm of his hand — “these.”

“Santa Mariai!”

“Want to talk to you, Goony. Want to look over the bluff, too, at that stone up there. It’ll take Kelly pret’ near an hour to get this far and sumped in, anyhow.”

They growled up the slope, Tom feeling the ground under the four-foot brush, taking her up in a zigzag course like a hairpin road on a mountainside. Though the Seven carried a muffler on the exhaust stack that stuck up out of the hood before them, the blat of four big cylinders hauling fourteen tons of steel upgrade could outshout any man’s conversation, so they sat without talking, Tom driving, Rivera watching his hands flick over the controls.

The bluff started in a low ridge running almost the length of the little island, like a lopsided backbone. Towards the centre it rose abruptly, sent a wing out towards the rocky outcropping at the beach where their equipment had been unloaded, and then rose again to a small, almost square plateau area, half a mile across. It was humpy and rough until they could see all of it, when they realized how incredibly level it was, under the brush and ruins that covered it. In the centre — and exactly in the centre they realized suddenly — was a low, overgrown mound. Tom threw out the clutch and revved her down.

“Survey report said there was stone up here,” Tom said, vaulting out of the seat. “Let’s walk around some.”

They walked towards the knoll, Tom’s eyes casting about as he went. He stooped down into the heavy, short grass and scooped up a piece of stone, blue-grey, hard and brittle.

“Rivera — look at this. This is what the report was talking about. See — more of it. All in small pieces, though. We need big stuff for the bog if we can get it.”

“Good stone?” asked Rivera.

“Yes, boy — but it don’t belong here. Th’ whole island’s sand and marl and sandstone on the outcrop down yonder. This here’s a bluestone, like diamond clay. Harder’n blazes. I never saw this stuff on a marl hill before. Or near one. Anyhow, root around and see if there is any big stuff.”

They walked on. Rivera suddenly dipped down and pulled grass aside.

“Tom — here’s a beeg one.”

Tom came over and looked down at the corner of stone ticking up out of the topsoil. “Yeh. Goony, get your girl-friend over here and we’ll root it out.”

Rivera sprinted back to the idling dozer and climbed aboard. He brought the machine over to where Tom waited, stopped, stood up and peered over the front of the machine to locate the stone, then sat down and shifted gears. Before he could move the machine Tom was on the fender beside him, checking him with a hand on his arm.

“No, boy — no. Not third. First. And half throttle. That’s it. Don’t try to bash a rock out of the ground. Go on up to it easy; set your blade against it, lift it out, don’t boot it out. Take it with the middle of your blade, not the corner — get the load on both hydraulic cylinders. Who told you to do like that?”

“No one tol’ me, Tom. I see a man do it, I do it.”

“Yeah? Who was it?”

“Dennis, but—”

“Listen, Goony, if you want to learn anything from Dennis, watch him while he’s on a pan. He dozes like he talks. That reminds me — what I wanted to talk to you about. You ever have any trouble with him?”

Rivera spread his hands. “How I have trouble when he never talk to me?”

“Well, that’s all right then. You keep it that way. Dennis is O.K., I guess, but you better keep away from him.”

He went on to tell the boy then about what Peebles had said concerning being an operator and a mechanic at the same time. Rivera’s lean dark face fell, and his hand strayed to the blade control, touching it lightly, feeling the composition grip and the machined locknuts that help it. When Tom had quite finished he said:

“O.K., Tom — if you want, you break ’em, I feex ’em. But if you wan’ help some time, I run Daisy Etta for you, no?”

“Sure, kid, sure. But don’t forget, no man can do everything.”

“You can do everything,” said the boy.

Tom leaped off the machine and Rivera shifted into first and crept up to the stone, setting the blade gently against it. Taking the load, the mighty engine audibly bunched its muscles; Rivera opened the throttle a little and the machine set solidly against the stone, the tracks slipping, digging into the ground, piling loose earth up behind. Tom raised a fist, thumb up, and the boy began lifting his blade. The Seven lowered her snout like an ox pulling through mud; the front of the tracks buried themselves deeper and the blade slipped upwards an inch on the rock, as if it were on a ratchet. The stone shifted, and suddenly heaved itself up out of the earth that covered it, bulging the sod aside like a ship’s slow bow-wave. And the blade lost its grip and slipped over the stone. Rivera slapped out the master clutch within an ace of letting the mass of it poke through his radiator core. Reversing, he set the blade against it again and rolled it at last into daylight.

Tom stood staring at it, scratching the back of his neck. Rivera got off the machine and stood beside him. For a long time they said nothing.

The stone was roughly rectangular, shaped like a brick with one end cut at about a thirty-degree angle. And on the angled face was a square-cut ridge, like the tongue on a piece of milled lumber. The stone was about 3 × 2 × 2 feet, and must have weighed six or seven hundred pounds.

“Now that,” said Tom, bug-eyed, “didn’t grow here, and if it did it never grew that way.”

“Una piedra de una casa,” said Rivera softly. “Tom, there was a building here, no?”

Tom turned suddenly to look at the knoll.

“There is a building here — or what’s left of it. Lord on’y knows how old—”

They stood there in the slowly dwindling light, staring at the knoll; and there came upon them a feeling of oppression, as if there were no wind and no sound anywhere. And yet there was wind, and behind them Daisy Etta whacked away with her muttering idle, and nothing had changed and — was that it? That nothing had changed? That nothing would change, or could, here?

Tom opened his mouth twice to speak, and couldn’t, or didn’t want to — he didn’t know which. Rivera slumped suddenly on his hunkers, back erect, and his eyes wide.

It grew very cold. “It’s cold,” Tom said, and his voice sounded harsh to him. And the wind blew warm on them, the earth was warm under Rivera’s knees. The cold was not a lack of heat, but a lack of something else — warmth, but the specific warmth of life-force, perhaps. The feeling of oppression grew as if their recognition of the strangeness of the place had started it, and their increasing sensitivity to it made it grow.

Rivera said something, quietly, in Spanish.

“What are you looking at?” asked Tom.

Rivera started violently, threw up an arm, as if to ward off the crash of Tom’s voice.

“I… there is nothin’ to see, Tom. I feel this way wance before. I dunno—” He shook his head, his eyes wide and blank. “An’ after, there was being wan hell of a thunder-storm—” His voice petered out.

Tom took his shoulder and hauled him roughly to his feet. “Goony! You slap-happy?”

The boy smiled, almost gently. The down on his upper lip held little spheres of sweat. “I ain’t nothin’, Tom. I’m jus’ scare like hell.”

“You scare yourself right back up there on that cat and git to work,” Tom roared. More quietly then, he said, “I know there’s something — wrong — here, Goony, but that ain’t goin’ to get us a runway built. Anyhow, I know what to do about a dawg ’at gits gunshy. Ought to be able to do as much fer you. Git along to th’ mound now and see if it ain’t a cache o’ big stone for us. We got a swamp down there to fill.”

Rivera hesitated, started to speak, swallowed and then walked slowly over to the Seven. Tom stood watching him, closing his mind to the impalpable pressure of something, somewhere near, making his guts cold.

The bulldozer nosed over to the mound, grunting, reminding Tom suddenly that the machine’s Spanish slang name was puerco — pig, boar. Rivera angled into the edge of the mound with the cutting corner of the blade. Dirt and brush curled up, fell away from the mound and loaded from the bank side, out along the mouldboard. The boy finished his pass along the mound, carried the load past it and wasted it out on the flat, turned around and started back again.

Ten minutes later Rivera struck stone, the manganese steel screaming along it, a puff of grey dust spouting from the cutting corner. Tom knelt and examined it after the machine had passed. It was the same kind of stone they had found out on the flat — and shaped the same way. But here it was a wall, the angled faces of the block ends obviously tongued and grooved together.

Cold, cold as—

Tom took one deep breath and wiped sweat out of his eyes.

“I don’t care,” he whispered, “I got to have that stone. I got to fill me a swamp.” He stood back and motioned to Rivera to blade into a chipped crevice in the buried wall.

The Seven swung into the wall and stopped while Rivera shifted into first, throttled down and lowered his blade. Tom looked up into his face. The boy’s lips were white. He eased in the master clutch, the blade dipped and the corner swung neatly into the crevice.

The dozer blatted protestingly and began to crab sideways, pivoting on the end of the blade. Tom jumped out of the way, ran around behind the machine, which was almost parallel with the wall now, and stood in the clear, one hand raised ready to signal, his eyes on the straining blade. And then everything happened at once.

With a toothy snap the block started and came free, pivoting outward from its square end, bringing with it its neighbour. The block above them dropped, and the whole mound seemed to settle. And something whooshed out of the black hole where the rocks had been. Something like a fog, but not a fog that could be seen, something huge that could not be measured. With it came a gust of that cold which was not cold, and the smell of ozone, and the prickling crackle of a mighty static discharge.

Tom was fifty feet from the wall before he knew he had moved. He stopped and saw the Seven suddenly buck like a wild stallion, once, and Rivera turning over twice in the air. Tom shouted some meaningless syllable and tore over to the boy, where he sprawled on the rough grass, lifted him in his arms, and ran. Only then did he realize that he was running from the machine.

It was like a mad thing. Its mouldboard rose and fell. It curved away from the mound, howling governor gone wild, controls flailing. The blade dug repeatedly into the earth, gouging it up in great dips through which the tractor plunged, clanking and bellowing furiously. It raced away in a great irregular arc, turned and came snorting back to the mound, where it beat at the buried wall, slewed and scraped and roared.

Tom reached the edge of the plateau sobbing for breath, and kneeling, laid the boy gently down on the grass.

“Goony, boy… hey—”

The long silken eyelashes fluttered, lifted. Something wrenched in Tom as he saw the eyes, rolled right back so that only the whites showed. Rivera drew a long quivering breath which caught suddenly. He coughed twice, threw his head from side to side so violently that Tom took it between his hands and steadied it.

“Ay… Maria madre… que me pasado, Tom — w’at has happen to me?”

“Fell off the Seven, stupid. You… how you feel?”

Rivera scrabbled at the ground, got his elbows half under him, then sank back weakly. “Feel O.K. Headache like hell. W-w’at happen to my feets?”

“Feet? They hurt?”

“No hurt—” The young face went grey, the lips tightened with effort. “No nothin’, Tom.”

“You can’t move ’em?”

Rivera shook his head, still trying. Tom stood up. “You take it easy. I’ll go get Kelly. Be right back.”

He walked away quickly and when Rivera called to him he did not turn around. Tom had seen a man with a broken back before.

At the edge of the little plateau Tom stopped, listening. In the deepening twilight he could see the bulldozer standing by the mound. The motor was running; she had not stalled herself. But what stopped Tom was that she wasn’t idling, but revving up and down as if an impatient hand were on the throttle — hroom hroooom, running up and up far faster than even a broken governor should permit, then coasting down to near silence, broken by the explosive punctuation of sharp and irregular firing. Then it would run up and up again, almost screaming, sustaining a r.p.m. that threatened every moving part, shaking the great machine like some deadly ague.

Tom walked swiftly towards the Seven, a puzzled and grim frown on his weather-beaten face. Governors break down occasionally, and once in a while you will have a motor tear itself to pieces, revving up out of control. But it will either do that or it will rev down and quit. If an operator is fool enough to leave his machine with the master clutch engaged, the machine will take off and run the way the Seven had — but it will not turn unless the blade corner catches in something unresisting, and then the chances are very strong that it will stall. But in any case, it was past reason for any machine to act this way, revving up and down, running, turning, lifting and dropping the blade.

The motor slowed as he approached, and at last settled down into something like a steady and regular idle. Tom had the sudden crazy impression that it was watching him. He shrugged off the feeling, walked up and laid a hand on the fender.

The Seven reacted like a wild stallion. The big Diesel roared, and Tom distinctly saw the master clutch lever snap back over centre. He leaped clear, expecting the machine to jolt forward, but apparently it was in a reverse gear, for it shot backwards, one track locked, and the near end of the blade swung in a swift vicious arc, breezing a bare fraction of an inch past his hip as he danced back out of the way.

And as if it had bounced off a wall, the tractor had shifted and was bearing down on him, the twelve-foot blade rising, and two big headlights looming over him on their bow-legged supports, looking like the protruding eyes of some mighty toad. Tom had no choice but to leap straight up and grasp the top of the blade in his two hands, leaning back hard to brace his feet against the curved mouldboard. The blade dropped and sank into the soft topsoil, digging a deep little swale in the ground. The earth loading on the mouldboard rose and churned around Tom’s legs; he stepped wildly, keeping them clear of the rolling drag of it. Up came the blade then, leaving a four-foot pile at the edge of the pit; down and up the tractor raced as the tracks went into it; up and up as they climbed the pile of dirt. A quick balance and overbalance as the machine lurched up and over like a motor-cycle taking a jump off a ramp, and then a spine-shaking crash as fourteen tons of metal smashed blade-first into the ground.

Part of the leather from Tom’s tough palms stayed with the blade as he was flung off. He went head over heels backwards, but had his feet gathered and sprang as they touched the ground; for he knew that no machine could bury its blade like that and get out easily. He leaped to the top of the blade, got one hand on the radiator cap, vaulted. Perversely, the cap broke from its hinge and came away in his hand, in that split instant when only that hand rested on anything. Off balance, he landed on his shoulder with his legs flailing the air, his body sliding off the hood’s smooth shoulder towards the track now churning the earth beneath. He made a wild grab at the air intake pipe, barely had it in his fingers when the dozer freed itself and shot backwards up and over the hump. Again that breathless flight pivoting over the top, and the clanking crash as the machine landed, this time almost flat on its tracks.

The jolt tore Tom’s hand away, and as he slid back over the hood the crook of his elbow caught the exhaust stack, the dull red metal biting into his flesh. He grunted and clamped the arm around it. His momentum carried him around it, and his feet crashed into the steering clutch levers. Hooking one with his instep, he doubled his legs and whipped himself back, scrabbling at the smooth warm metal, crawling frantically backwards until he finally fell heavily into the seat.

“Now,” he gritted through a red wall of pain, “You’re gonna git operated.” And he kicked out the master clutch.

The motor wailed, with the load taken off so suddenly. Tom grasped the throttle, his thumb down on the ratchet release, and he shoved the lever forward to shut off the fuel.

It wouldn’t shut off; it went down to a slow idle, but it wouldn’t shut off.

“There’s one thing you can’t do without,” he muttered, “compression.”

He stood up and leaned around the dash, reaching for the compression-release lever. As he came up out of the seat, the engine revved up again. He turned to the throttle, which had snapped back into the “open” position. As his hand touched it the master clutch lever snapped in and the howling machine lurched forward with a jerk that snapped his head on his shoulders and threw him heavily back into the seat. He snatched at the hydraulic blade control and threw it to “float” position; and then as the falling mouldboard touched the ground, into “power down.” The cutting edge bit into the ground and the engine began to labour. Holding the blade control, he pushed the throttle forward with his other hand. One of the steering clutch levers whipped back and struck him agonisingly on the kneecap. He involuntarily let go of the blade control and the mouldboard began to rise. The engine began to turn faster and he realized that it was not responding to the throttle. Cursing, he leaped to his feet; the suddenly flailing steering clutch levers struck him three times in the groin before he could get between them.

Blind with pain, Tom clung gasping to the dash. The oil-pressure gauge fell off the dash to his right, with a tinkling of broken glass, and from its broken quarter-inch line scalding oil drenched him. The shock of it snapped back his wavering consciousness. Ignoring the blows of the left steering clutch and the master clutch which had started the same mad punching, he bent over the left end of the dash and grasped the compression lever. The tractor rushed forward and spun sickeningly, and Tom knew he was thrown. But as he felt himself leave the decking his hand punched the compression lever down. The great valves at the cylinder heads opened and locked open; atomized fuel and superheated air chattered out, and as Tom’s head and shoulders struck the ground the great wild machine rolled to a stop, stood silently except for the grumble of water boiling in the cooling system.

Minutes later Tom raised his head and groaned. He rolled over and sat up, his chin on his knees, washed by wave after wave of pain. As they gradually subsided, he crawled to the machine and pulled himself to his feet, hand over hand on the track. And groggily he began to cripple the tractor, at least for the night.

He opened the cock under the fuel tank, left the warm yellow fluid gushing out on the ground. He opened the drain on the reservoir by the injection pump. He found a piece of wire in the crank box and with it tied down the compression release lever. He crawled up on the machine, wrenched the hood and ball jar off the air intake precleaner, pulled off his shirt and stuffed it down the pipe. He pushed the throttle all the way forward and locked it with the locking pin. And he shut off the fuel on the main line from the tank to the pump.

Then he climbed heavily to the ground and slogged back to the edge of the plateau where he had left Rivera.

They didn’t know Tom was hurt until an hour and a half later — there had been too much to do — rigging a stretcher for the Puerto Rican, building him a shelter, an engine crate with an Army pup tent for a roof. They brought out the first-aid kit and the medical books and did what they could — tied and splinted and dosed with an opiate. Tom was a mass of bruises, and his right arm, where it had hooked the exhaust stack, was a flayed mass. They fixed him up then, old Peebles handling the sulfa powder and bandages like a trained nurse. And only then was there talk.

“I’ve seen a man thrown off a pan,” said Dennis, as they sat around the coffee urn munching C rations. “Sittin’ up on the arm rest on a cat, looking backwards. Cat hit a rock and bucked. Threw him off on the track. Stretched him out ten feet long.” He in-whistled some coffee to dilute the mouthful of food he had been talking around, and masticated noisily. “Man’s a fool to set up there on one side of his butt even on a pan. Can’t see why th’ goony was doin’ it on a dozer.”

“He wasn’t,” said Tom.

Kelly rubbed his pointed jaw. “He set flat on th’ seat an’ was th’owed?”

“That’s right.”

After an unbelieving silence Dennis said, “What was he doin’ — drivin’ over sixty?”

Tom looked around the circle of faces lit up by the over-artificial brilliance of a pressure lantern, and wondered what the reaction would be if he told it all just as it was. He had to say something, and it didn’t look as if it could be the truth.

“He was workin’,” he said finally. “Bucking stone out of the wall of an old building up on the mesa there. One turned loose an’ as it did the governor must’ve gone haywire. She buckled like a loco hoss and run off.”

“Run off?”

Tom opened his mouth and closed it again, and just nodded.

Dennis said, “Well, reckon that’s what happens when you put a mechanic to operatin’.”

“That had nothin’ to do with it,” Tom snapped.

Peebles spoke up quickly. “Tom — what about the Seven? Broke up any?”

“Some,” said Tom. “Better look at the steering clutches. An’ she was hot.”

“Head’s cracked,” said Harris, a burly young man with shoulders like a buffalo and a famous thirst.

“How do you know?”

“Saw it when Al and me went up with the stretcher to get the kid while you all were building the shelter. Hot water runnin’ down the side of the block.”

“You mean you walked all the way out to the mound to look at that tractor while the kid was lyin’ there? I told you where he was!”

“Out to the mound!” Al Knowles’ pop eyes teetered out of their sockets. “We found that cat stalled twenty feet away from where the kid was!”

“What!”

“That’s right, Tom,” said Harris. “What’s eatin’ you? Where’d you leave it?”

“I told you… by the mound… the ol’ building we cut into.”

“Leave the startin’ motor runnin’?”

“Starting motor?” Tom’s mind caught the picture of the small, two-cylinder gasoline engine bolted to the side of the big Diesel’s crankcase, coupled through a Bendix gear and clutch to the flywheel of the Diesel to crank it. He remembered his last glance at the still machine, silent but for the sound of water boiling. “Hell, no!”

Al and Harris exchanged a glance. “I guess you were sort of slap-happy at the time, Tom,” Harris said, not unkindly. “When we were halfway up the hill we heard it, and you know you can’t mistake that racket. Sounded like it was under a load.”

Tom beat softly at his temples with his clenched fists. “I left that machine dead,” he said quietly. “I got compression off her and tied down the lever. I even stuffed my shirt in the intake. I drained the tank. But — I didn’t touch the starting motor.”

Peebles wanted to know why he had gone to all that trouble. Tom just looked vaguely at him and shook his head. “I shoulda pulled the wires. I never thought about the starting motor,” he whispered. Then, “Harris — you say you found the starting motor running when you got to the top?”

“No — she was stalled. And hot — awmighty hot. I’d say the startin’ motor was seized up tight. That must be it, Tom. You left the startin’ motor runnin’ and somehow engaged the clutch an’ Bendix.” His voice lost conviction as he said it — it takes seventeen separate motions to start a tractor of this type. “Anyhow, she was in gear an’ crawled along on the little motor.”

“I done that once,” said Chub. “Broke a con rod on an Eight, on a highway job. Walked her about three-quarters of a mile on the startin’ motor that way. Only I had to stop every hundred yards and let her cool down some.”

Not without sarcasm, Dennis said, “Seems to me like the Seven was out to get th’ goony. Made one pass at him and then went back to finish the job.”

Al Knowles haw-hawed extravagantly.

Tom stood up, shaking his head, and went off among the crates to the hospital they had jury-rigged for the kid.

A dim light was burning inside, and Rivera lay very still, with his eyes closed. Tom leaned in the doorway — the open end of the engine crate — and watched him for a moment. Behind him he could hear the murmur of the crew’s voices; the night was otherwise windless and still. Rivera’s face was the peculiar color that olive skin takes when drained of blood. Tom looked at his chest and for a panicky moment thought he could discern no movement there. He entered and put a hand over the boy’s heart. Rivera shivered, his eyes flew open, and he drew a sudden breath which caught raggedly at the back of his throat. “Tom… Tom!” he cried weakly.

“O.K., Goony… que pasa?”

“She comeen back… Tom!”

“Who?”

“El de siete.”

Daisy Etta — “She ain’t comin’ back, kiddo, You’re off the mesa now. Keep your chin up, fella.”

Rivera’s dark, doped eyes stared up at him without expression. Tom moved back and the eyes continued to stare. They weren’t seeing anything. “Go to sleep,” he whispered. The eyes closed instantly.

Kelly was saying that nobody ever got hurt on a construction job unless somebody was dumb. “An’ most times you don’t realize how dumb what you’re doin’ is until somebody does get hurt.”

“The dumb part was gettin’ a kid, an’ not even an operator at that, up on a machine,” said Dennis in his smuggest voice.

“I heard you try to sing that song before,” said old Peebles quietly. “I hate to have to point out anything like this to a man because it don’t do any good to make comparisons. But I’ve worked with that fella Rivera for a long time now, an’ I’ve seen ’em as good but doggone few better. As far as you’re concerned, you’re O.K. on a pan, but the kid could give you cards and spades and still make you look like a cost accountant on a dozer.”

Dennis half rose and mouthed something filthy. He looked at Al Knowles for backing and got it. He looked around the circle and got none. Peebles lounged back, sucking on his pipe, watching from under those bristling brows. Dennis subsided, running now on another tack.

“So what does that prove? The better you say he is, the less reason he had to fall off a cat and get himself hurt.”

“I haven’t got the thing straight yet,” said Chub, in a voice whose tone indicated “I hate to admit it, but—”

About this time Tom returned, like a sleepwalker, standing with the brilliant pressure lantern between him and Dennis. Dennis rambled right on, not knowing he was anywhere near: “That’s something you never will find out. That Puerto Rican is a pretty husky kid. Could be Tom said somethin’ he didn’t like an’ he tried to put a knife in Tom’s back. They all do, y’know. Tom didn’t get all that bashin’ around just stoppin’ a machine. They must of went round an’ round for a while an’ the goony wound up with a busted back. Tom sets the dozer to walk him down while he lies there and comes on down here and tries to tell us—” His voice fluttered to a stop as Tom loomed over him.

Tom grabbed the pan operator up by the slack of his shirt front with his uninjured arm and shook him like an empty burlap bag.

“Skunk,” he growled. “I oughta lower th’ boom on you.” He set Dennis on his feet and backhanded his face with the edge of his forearm. Dennis went down — cowered down, rather than fell.

“Aw, Tom, I was just talkin’. Just a joke, Tom, I was just—”

“Yellow, too,” snarled Tom, stepping forward, raising a solid Texan boot.

Peebles barked “Tom!” and the foot came back to the ground.

“Out o’ my sight,” rumbled the foreman. “Git!”

Dennis got. Al Knowles said vaguely, “Naow, Tom, y’all cain’t—”

“You, y’wall-eyed string-bean!” Tom raved, his voice harsh and strained. “Go ’long with yer Siamese twin!”

“O.K., O.K.,” said Al, white-faced, and disappeared into the dark after Dennis.

“Nuts to this,” said Chub. “I’m turnin’ in.” He went to a crate and hauled out a mosquito-hooded sleeping bag and went off without another word. Harris and Kelly, who were both on their feet, sat down again. Old Peebles hadn’t moved.

Tom stood staring out into the dark, his arms straight at his sides, his fists knotted.

“Sit down,” said Peebles gently. Tom turned and stared at him.

“Sit down. I can’t change that dressing ’less you do.” He pointed at the bandage around Tom’s elbow. It was red, a widening stain, the tattered tissues having parted as the big Georgian bunched his infuriated muscles. He sat down.

“Talkin’ about dumbness,” said Harris calmly, as Peebles went to work, “I was about to say that I got the record. I done the dumbest thing anybody ever did on a machine. You can’t top it.”

“I could,” said Kelly. “Runnin’ a crane dragline once. Put her in boom gear and started to boom her up. Had an eighty-five-foot stick on her. Machine was standing on wooden mats in th’ middle of a swamp. Heard the motor miss and got out of the saddle to look at the filter-glass. Messed around back there longer than I figured, and the boom went straight up in the air and fell backwards over the cab. Th’ jolt tilted my mats an’ she slid backwards slow and stately as you please, butt-first into the mud. Buried up to the eyeballs, she was.” He laughed quietly. “Looked like a ditching machine!”

“I still say I done the dumbest thing ever, bar none,” said Harris. “It was on a river job, widening a channel. I come back to work from a three-day binge, still rum-dumb. Got up on a dozer an’ was workin’ around on the edge of a twenty-foot cliff. Down at the foot of the cliff was a big hickory tree, an’ growin’ right along the edge was a great big limb. I got the dopey idea I should break it off. I put one track on the limb and the other on the cliff edge and run out away from the trunk. I was about halfway out, an’ the branch saggin’ some, before I thought what would happen if it broke. Just about then it did break. You know hickory — if it breaks at all it breaks altogether. So down we go into thirty feet of water — me an’ the cat. I got out from under somehow. When all them bubbles stopped comin’ up I swum around lookin’ down at it. I was still paddlin’ around when the superintendent came rushin’ up. He wants to know what’s up. I yell at him, ‘Look down there, the way that water is movin’ an’ shiftin’, looks like the cat is workin’ down there.’ He pursed his lips and tsk tsked. My, that man said some nasty things to me.”

“Where’d you get your next job?” Kelly exploded.

“Oh, he didn’t fire me,” said Harris, soberly. “Said he couldn’t afford to fire a man as dumb as that. Said he wanted me around to look at whenever he felt bad.”

Tom said, “Thanks, you guys. That’s as good a way as any of sayin’ that everybody makes mistakes.” He stood up, examining the new dressing, turning his arm in front of the lantern. “You all can think what you please, but I don’t recollect there was any dumbness went on that mesa this evenin’. That’s finished with, anyway. Do I have to say that Dennis’ idea about it is all wet?”

Harris said one foul word that completely disposed of Dennis and anything he might say.

Peebles said, “It’ll be all right. Dennis an’ his popeyed friend’ll hang together, but they don’t amount to anything. Chub’ll do whatever he’s argued into.”

“So you got ’em all lined up, hey?” Tom shrugged. “In the meantime, are we going to get an airfield built?”

“We’ll get it built,” Peebles said. “Only — Tom, I got no right to give you any advice, but go easy on the rough stuff after this. It does a lot of harm.”

“I will if I can,” said Tom gruffly. They broke up and turned in.

Peebles was right. It did no harm. It made Dennis use the word ‘murder’ when they found, in the morning, that Rivera had died during the night.

The work progressed in spite of everything that had happened. With equipment like that, it’s hard to slow things down. Kelly bit two cubic yards out of the bluff with every swing of the big shovel, and Dumptors are the fastest short-haul earth movers yet devised. Dennis kept the service road clean for them with his pan, and Tom and Chub spelled each other on the bulldozer they had detached from its pan to make up for the lack of the Seven, spending their alternate periods with transit and stakes. Peebles was rod-man for the surveys, and in between times worked on setting up his field shop, keeping the water cooler and battery chargers running, and lining up his forge and welding tables. The operators fuelled and serviced their own equipment, and there was little delay. Rocks and marl came out of the growing cavity in the side of the central mesa — a whole third of it had to come out — were spun down to the edge of the swamp, which lay across the lower end of the projected runway, in the hornet-howling dump-tractors, their big driving wheels churning up vast clouds of dust, and were dumped and spread and walked in by the whining two-cycle dozer. When muck began to pile up in front of the fill, it was blasted out of the way with carefully placed charges of sixty percent dynamite and the craters filled with rocks and stone from the ruins, and surfaced with easily compacting marl, run out of a clean deposit by the pan.

And when he had his shop set up, Peebles went up the hill to get the Seven. When he got to it he just stood there for a moment scratching his head, and then, shaking his head, he ambled back down the hill and went for Tom.

“Been looking at the Seven,” he said, when he had flagged the moaning two-cycle and Tom had climbed off.

“What’d you find?”

Peebles held out an arm. “A list as long as that.” He shook his head. “Tom, what really happened up there?”

“Governor went haywire and she run away,” Tom said promptly, deadpan.

“Yeah, but—” For a long moment he held Tom’s eyes. Then he sighed. “O.K., Tom. Anyhow, I can’t do a thing up there. We’ll have to bring her back and I’ll have to have this tractor to tow her down. And first I have to have some help — the track idler adjustment bolt’s busted and the right track is off the track rollers.”

“Oh-h-h. So that’s why she couldn’t get to the kid, running on the starting motor. Track would hardly turn, hey?”

“It’s a miracle she ran as far as she did. That track is really jammed up. Riding right up on the roller flanges. And that ain’t the half of it. The head’s gone, like Harris said, and Lord only knows what I’ll find when I open her up.”

“Why bother?”

“What?”

“We can get along without that dozer,” said Tom suddenly. “Leave her where she is. There’s lots more for you to do.”

“But what for?”

“Well, there’s no call to go to all that trouble.”

Peebles scratched the side of his nose and said, “I got a new head, track master pins — even a spare starting motor. I got tools to make what I don’t stock.” He pointed at the long row of dumps left by the hurtling dump-tractors while they had been talking. “You got a pan tied up because you’re using this machine to doze with, and you can’t tell me you can’t use another one. You’re gonna have to shut down one or two o’ those Dumptors if you go on like this.”

“I had all that figured out as soon as I opened my mouth,” Tom said sullenly. “Let’s go.”

They climbed on the tractor and took off, stopping for a moment at the beach outcropping to pick up a cable and some tools.

Daisy Etta sat at the edge of the mesa, glowering out of her stilted headlights at the soft sward which still bore the impression of a young body and the tramplings of the stretcher-bearers. Her general aspect was woebegone — there were scratches on her olive-drab paint and the bright metal of the scratches was already dulled red by the earliest powder-rust. And though the ground was level, she was not, for her right track was off its lower rollers, and she stood slightly canted, like a man who has had a broken hip. And whatever passed for consciousness within her mulled over that paradox of the bulldozer that every operator must go through while he is learning his own machine.

It is the most difficult thing of all for the beginner to understand, that paradox. A bulldozer is a crawling power-house, a behemoth of noise and toughness, the nearest thing to the famous irresistible force. The beginner, awed and with the pictures of unconquerable Army tanks printed on his mind from the news-reels, takes all in his stride and with a sense of limitless power treats all obstacles alike, not knowing the fragility of a cast-iron radiator core, the mortality of tempered manganese, the friability of over-heated babbitt, and most of all the ease with which a tractor can bury itself in mud. Climbing off to stare at a machine which he has reduced in twenty seconds to a useless hulk, or which was running a half-minute before on ground where it now has its tracks out of sight, he has that sense of guilty disappointment which overcomes any man on having made an error in judgment.

So, as she stood, Daisy Etta was broken and useless. These soft persistent bipeds had built her, and if they were like any other race that built machines, they could care for them. The ability to reverse the tension of a spring, or twist a control rod, or reduce to zero the friction in a nut and lock-washer, was not enough to repair the crack in a cylinder head nor bearings welded to a crankshaft in an overheated starting motor. There had been a lesson to learn. It had been learned. Daisy Etta would be repaired, and the next time — well, at least she would know her own weaknesses.

Tom swung the two-cycle machine and edged in next to the Seven, with the edge of his blade all but touching Daisy Etta’s push-beam. They got off and Peebles bent over the drum-tight right track.

“Watch yourself,” said Tom.

“Watch what?”

“Oh — nothin’, I guess.” He circled the machine, trained eyes probing over frame and fittings. He stepped forward suddenly and grasped the fuel-tank drain cock. It was closed. He opened it; golden oil gushed out. He shut it off, climbed up on the machine and opened the fuel cap on top of the tank. He pulled out the bayonet gauge, wiped it in the crook of his knee, dipped and withdrew it.

The tank was more than three-quarters full.

“What’s the matter?” asked Peebles, staring curiously at Tom’s drawn face.

“Peeby, I opened the cock to drain this tank. I left it with oil runnin’ out on the ground. She shut herself off.”

“Now, Tom, you’re lettin’ this thing get you down. You just thought you did. I’ve seen a main-line valve shut itself off when it’s worn bad, but only ’cause the pump pulls it shut when the motor’s runnin’. But not a gravity drain.”

“Main-live valve?” Tom pulled the seat up and looked. One glance was enough to show him that this one was open.

“She opened this one, too.”

“O.K. — O.K. Don’t look at me like that!” Peebles was as near to exasperation as he could possible get. “What difference does it make?”

Tom did not answer. He was not the type of man who, when faced with something beyond his understanding, would begin to doubt his own sanity. His was a dogged insistence that what he saw and sensed was what had actually happened. In him was none of the fainting fear of madness that another, more sensitive, man might feel. He doubted neither himself nor his evidence, and so could free his mind for searching out the consuming “why” of a problem. He knew instinctively that to share “unbelievable” happenings with anyone else, even if they had really occurred, was to put even further obstacles in his way. So he kept his clamlike silence and stubbornly, watchfully, investigated.

The slipped track was so tightly drawn up on the roller flanges that there could be no question of pulling the master pin and opening the track up. It would have to be worked back in place — a very delicate operation, for a little force applied in the wrong direction would be enough to run the track off altogether. To complicate things, the blade of the Seven was down on the ground and would have to be lifted before the machine could be manoeuvred, and its hydraulic hoist was useless without the motor.

Peebles unhooked twenty feet of half-inch cable from the rear of the smaller dozer, scratched a hole in the ground under the Seven’s blade, and pushed the eye of the cable through. Climbing over the mouldboard, he slipped the eye on to the big towing hook bolted to the underside of the bellyguard. The other end of the cable he threw out on the ground in front of the machine. Tom mounted the other dozer and swung into place, ready to tow. Peebles hooked the cable on to Tom’s drawbar, hopped up on the Seven. He put her in neutral, disengaged the master clutch and put the blade control over into “float” position, then raised an arm.

Tom perched upon the arm rest of his machine, looking backwards, moved slowly, taking up the slack in the cable. It straightened and grew taut, and as it did it forced the Seven’s blade upwards. Peebles waved for slack and put the blade control into “hold.” The cable bellied downwards away from the blade.

“Hydraulic system’s O.K., anyhow,” called Peebles, as Tom throttled down. “More over and take a strain to the right, sharp as you can without fouling the cable on the track. We’ll see if we can walk this track on.”

Tom backed up, cut sharply to the right, and drew the cable out almost at right angles to the other machine. Peebles held the right track of the Seven with the brake and released both steering cluches. The left track now could turn free, the right not at all. Tom was running at a quarter throttle in his lowest gear, so that his machine barely crept along, taking the strain. The Seven shook gently and began to pivot on the taut right track, unbelievable foot-pounds of energy coming to bear on the front of the track where it rode high up on the idler wheel. Peebles released the right brake with his foot and applied it again in a series of skilled, deft jerks. The track would move a few inches and stop again, force being applied forwards and sidewards alternately, urging the track persuasively back in place. Then, a little jolt and she was in, riding true on the five truck rollers, the two track carrier rollers, the driving sprocket and the idler.

Peebles got off and stuck his head in between the sprocket and the rear carrier, squinting down and sideways to see if there were any broken flanges or roller bushes. Tom came over and pulled him out by the seat of his trousers. “Time enough for that when you get her in the shop,” he said, masking his nervousness. “Reckon she’ll roll?”

“She’ll roll. I never saw a track in that condition come back that easy. By gosh, it’s as if she was tryin’ to help!”

“They’ll do it sometimes,” said Tom stiffly. “You better take the tow-tractor, Peeby. I’ll stay with this’n.”

“Anything you say.”

And cautiously they took the steep slope down, Tom barely holding the brakes, giving the other machine a straight pull all the way. And so they brought Daisy Etta down to Peebles’ out-door shop, where they pulled her cylinder head off, took off her starting motor, pulled out a burned clutch facing, had her quite helpless—

And put her together again.

“I tell you it was outright, cold-blooded murder,” said Dennis hotly. “An’ here we are takin’ orders from a guy like that. What are we goin’ to do about it?” They were standing by the cooler — Dennis had run his machine there to waylay Chub.

Chub Horton’s cigar went down and up like a semaphore with a short circuit. “We’ll skip it. The black-topping crew will be here in another two weeks or so, an’ we can make a report. Besides, I don’t know what happened up there any more than you do. In the meantime we got a runway to build.”

“You don’t know what happened up there? Chub, you’re a smart man. Smart enough to run this job better than Tom Jaeger even if he wasn’t crazy. And you’re surely smart enough not to believe all that cock and bull about that tractor runnin’ out from under that grease-monkey. Listen—” He learned forward and tapped Chub’s chest. “He said it was the governor. I saw that governor myself an’ heard ol’ Peebles say there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Th’ throttle control rod had slipped off its yoke, yeah — but you know what a tractor will do when the throttle control goes out. It’ll idle or stall. It won’t run away, whatever.”

“Well, maybe so, but—”

“But nothin’! A guy that’ll commit murder ain’t sane. If he did it once, he can do it again and I ain’t fixin’ to let that happen to me.”

Two things crossed Chub’s steady but not bright mind at this. One was that Dennis, whom he did not like but could not shake, was trying to force him into something that he did not want to do. The other was that under all of his swift talk Dennis was scared spitless.

“What do you want to do — call up the sheriff?”

Dennis ha-ha-ed appreciatively — one of the reasons he was so hard to shake. “I’ll tell you what we can do. As long as we have you here, he isn’t the only man who knows the work. If we stop takin’ orders from him, you can give ’em as good or better. An’ there won’t be anything he can do about it.”

“Doggone it, Dennis,” said Chub, with sudden exasperation. “What do you think you’re doin’ — handin’ me over the keys to the kingdom or something? What do you want to see me bossin’ around here for?” He stood up. “Suppose we did what you said? Would it get the field built any quicker? Would it get me any more money in my pay envelope? What do you think I want — glory? I passed up a chance to run for council-man once. You think I’d raise a finger to get a bunch of mugs to do what I say — when they do it anyway?”

“Aw, Chub — I wouldn’t cause trouble just for the fun of it. That’s not what I mean at all. But unless we do something about that guy we ain’t safe. Can’t you get that through your head?”

“Listen, windy. If a man keeps busy enough he can’t get into trouble. That goes for Tom — you might keep that in mind. But it goes for you, too. Get back up on that rig an’ get back to the marl pit.” Dennis, completely taken by surprise, turned to his machine.

“It’s a pity you can’t move earth with your mouth,” said Chub as he walked off. “They could have left you to do this job single-handed.”

Chub walked slowly towards the outcropping, switching at beach pebbles with a grade stake and swearing to himself. He was essentially a simple man and believed in the simplest possible approach to everything. He liked a job where he could do everything required and where nothing turned up to complicate things. He had been in the grading business for a long time as an operator and survey party boss, and he was remarkable for one thing — he had always held aloof from the cliques and internecine politics that are the breath of life to most construction men. He was disturbed and troubled at the backstabbing that went on around him on various jobs. If it was blunt, he was disgusted, and subtlety simply left him floundering and bewildered. He was stupid enough so that his basic honesty manifested itself in his speech and actions, and he had learned that complete honesty in dealing with men above and below him was almost invariably painful to all concerned, but he had not the wit to act otherwise, and did not try to. If he had a bad tooth, he had it pulled out as soon as he could. If he got a raw deal from a superintendent over him, that superintendent would get told exactly what the trouble was, and if he didn’t like it, there were other jobs. And if the pulling and hauling of cliques got in his hair, he had always said so and left. Or he had sounded off and stayed; his completely selfish reaction to things that got in the way of his work had earned him a lot of regard from men he had worked under. And so, in this instance, he had no hesitation about choosing a course of action. Only — how did you go about asking a man if he was a murderer?

He found the foreman with an enormous wrench in his hand, tightening up the new track adjustment bolt they had installed in the Seven.

“Hey, Chub! Glad you turned up. Let’s get a piece of pipe over the end of this thing and really bear down.” Chub went for the pipe, and they fitted it over the handle of the four-foot wrench and hauled until the sweat ran down their backs, Tom checking the track clearance occasionally with a crowbar. He finally called it good enough and they stood there in the sun gasping for breath.

“Tom,” panted Chub, “did you kill that Puerto Rican?”

Tom’s head came up as if someone had burned the back of his neck with a cigarette.

“Because,” said Chub, “if you did you can’t go on runnin’ this job.”

Tom said, “That’s a lousy thing to kid about.”

“You know I ain’t kiddin’. Well, did you?”

“No!” Tom sat down on a keg, wiped his face with a bandanna. “What’s got into you?”

“I just wanted to know. Some of the boys are worried about it.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Some of the boys, huh? I think I get it. Listen to me, Chub. Rivera was killed by that thing there.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the Seven, which was standing ready now, awaiting only the building of a broken cutting corner on the blade. Peebles was winding up the welding machine as he spoke. “If you mean, did I put him up on the machine before he was thrown, the answer is yes. That much I killed him, and don’t think I don’t feel it. I had a hunch something was wrong up there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and I certainly didn’t think anybody was going to get hurt.”

“Well, what was wrong?”

“I still don’t know.” Tom stood up. “I’m tired of beatin’ around the bush, Chub, and I don’t much care any more what anybody thinks. There’s somethin’ wrong with that Seven, something that wasn’t built into her. They don’t make tractors better’n that one but whatever it was happened up there on the mesa has queered this one. Now go ahead and think what you like, and dream up any story you want to tell the boys. In the meantime you can pass the word — nobody runs that machine but me, understand? Nobody!”

“Tom—”

Tom’s patience broke. “That’s all I’m going to say about it! If anybody else gets hurt it’s going to be me, understand? What more do you want?”

He strode off, boiling. Chub stared after him, and after a long moment reached up and took the cigar from his lips. Only then did he realize that he had bitten it in two; half the butt was still inside his mouth. He spat and stood there shaking his head.

“How’s she going, Peeby?”

Peebles looked up from the welding machine. “Hi, Chub, have her ready for you in twenty minutes.” He gauged the distance between the welding machine and the big tractor. “I should have forty feet of cable,” he said, looking at the festoons of arc and ground cables that hung from the storage hooks in the back of the welder. “Don’t want to get a tractor over here to move the thing, and don’t feel like cranking up the Seven just to get it close enough.” He separated the arc cable and threw it aside, walked to the tractor, paying the ground cable off his arm. He threw out the last of his slack and grasped the ground clamp when he was eight feet from the machine. Taking it in his left hand, he pulled hard, reaching out with his right to grasp the mouldboard of the Seven, trying to get it far enough to clamp on to the machine.

Chub stood there watching him, chewing on his cigar, absent-mindedly diddling with the controls on the arc-welder. He pressed the starter-button, and the six-cylinder motor responded with a purr. He spun the work-selector dials idly, threw the arc generator switch—

A bolt of incredible energy, thin, searing, blue-white, left the rod-holder at his feet, stretched itself fifty feet across to Peebles, whose fingers had just touched the mouldboard of the tractor. Peebles’ head and shoulders were surrounded for a second by a violet nimbus, and then he folded over and dropped. A circuit breaker clacked behind the control board of the welder, but too late. The Seven rolled slowly backwards, without firing, on level ground, until it brought up against a road-roller.

Chub’s cigar was gone, and he didn’t notice it. He had the knuckles of his right hand in his mouth, and his teeth sunk into the pudgy flesh. His eyes protruded; he crouched there and quivered, literally frightened out of his mind. For old Peebles was burned almost in two.

They buried him next to Rivera. There wasn’t much talk afterwards; the old man had been a lot closer to all of them than they had realized until now. Harris, for once in his rum-dumb, lightheaded life, was quiet and serious, and Kelly’s walk seemed to lose some of its litheness. Hour after hour Dennis’ flabby mouth worked, and he bit at his lower lip until it was swollen and tender. Al Knowles seemed more or less unaffected, as was to be expected from a man who had something less than the brains of a chicken. Chub Horton had snapped out of it after a couple of hours and was very nearly himself again. And in Tom Jaeger swirled a black, furious anger at this unknowable curse that had struck the camp.

And they kept working. There was nothing else to do. The shovel kept up its rhythmic swing and dig, swing and dump, and the Dumptors screamed back and forth between it and the little that there was left of the swamp. The upper end of the runway was grassed off; Chub and Tom set grade stakes and Dennis began the long job of cutting and filling the humpy surface with his pan. Harris manned the other and followed him, a cut behind. The shape of the runway emerged from the land, and then that of the paralleling taxiway; and three days went by. The horror of Peebles’ death wore off enough so that they could talk about it, and very little of the talk helped anybody. Tom took his spells at everything, changing over with Kelly to give him a rest from the shovel, making a few rounds with a pan, putting in hours on a Dumptor. His arm was healing slowly but clean, and he worked grimly in spite of it, taking a perverse sort of pleasure from the pain of it. Every man on the job watched his machine with the solicitude of a mother with her first-born; a serious skilled mechanic.

The only concession that Tom allowed himself in regard to Peebles’ death was to corner Kelly one afternoon and ask him about the welding machine. Part of Kelly’s rather patchy past had been spent in a technical college, where he had studied electrical engineering and women. He had learned a little of the former and enough of the latter to get him thrown out on his ear. So, on the off-chance that he might know something about the freak arc, Tom put it to him.

Kelly pulled off his high-gauntlet gloves and batted sand-flies with them. “What sort of an arc was that? Boy, you got me there. Did you ever hear of a welding machine doing like that before?”

“I did not. A welding machine just don’t have that sort o’ push. I saw a man get a full jolt from a 400-amp welder once, an’ although it sat him down it didn’t hurt him any.”

“It’s not amperage that kills people,” said Kelly, “it’s voltage. Voltage is the pressure behind a current, you know. Take an amount of water, call it amperage. If I throw it in your face, it won’t hurt you. If I put it through a small hose you’ll feel it. But if I pump it through them tiny holes on a Diesel injector nozzle at about twelve hundred pounds, it’ll draw blood. But a welding arc generator just is not wound to build up that kind of voltage. I can’t see where any short circuit anywhere through the armature of field windings could do such a thing.”

“From what Chub said, he had been foolin’ around with the work selector. I don’t think anyone touched the dials after it happened. The selector dial was run all the way over to the low current application segment, and the current control was around the halfway mark. That’s not enough juice to get you a good bead with a quarter-inch rod, let alone kill somebody — or roll a tractor back thirty feet on level ground.”

“Or jump fifty feet,” said Kelly. “It would take thousands of volts to generate an arc like that.”

“Is it possible that something in the Seven could have pulled that arc? I mean, suppose the arc wasn’t driven over, but was drawn over? I tell you, she was hot for four hours after that.”

Kelly shook his head. “Never heard of any such thing. Look, just to have something to call them, we call direct current terminals positive and negative, and just because it works in theory we say that current flows from negative to positive. There couldn’t be any more positive attraction in one electrode than there is negative drive in the other; see what I mean?”

“There couldn’t be some freak condition that would cause a sort of oversize positive field? I mean one that would suck out the negative flow all in a heap, make it smash through under a lot of pressure like the water you were talking about through an injector nozzle?”

“No, Tom. It just don’t work that way, far as anyone knows. I dunno, though — there are some things about static electricity that nobody understands. All I can say is that what happened couldn’t happen and if it did it couldn’t have killed Peebles. And you know the answer to that.”

Tom glanced away at the upper end of the runway, where the two graves were. There was bitterness and turbulent anger naked there for a moment, and he turned and walked away without another word. And when he went back to have another look at the welding machine, Daisy Etta was gone.

Al Knowles and Harris squatted together near the water cooler.

“Bad,” said Harris.

“Nevah saw anythin’ like it,” said Al. “Ol’ Tom come back f’m the shop theah jus’ raisin’ Cain. ‘Weah’s ’at Seven gone? Weah’s ‘at Seven?’ I never heered sech cah’ins on.”

“Dennis did take it, huh?”

“Sho’ did.”

Harris said, “He came spoutin’ around to me a while back, Dennis did. Chub’d told him Tom said for everybody to stay off that machine. Dennis was mad as a wet hen. Said Tom was carryin’ that kind o’ business too far. Said there was probably somethin’ about the Seven Tom didn’t want us to find out. Might incriminate him. Dennis is ready to say Tom killed the kid.”

“Reckon he did, Harris?”

Harris shook his head. “I’ve known Tom too long to think that. If he won’t tell us what really happened up on the mesa, he has a reason for it. How’d Dennis come to take the dozer?”

“Blew a front tyre on his pan. Came back heah to git anothah rig — maybe a Dumptor. Saw th’ Seven standin’ theah ready to go. Stood theah lookin’ at it and cussin’ Tom. Said he was tired of bashin’ his kidneys t’pieces on them othah rigs an’ bedamned if he wouldn’t take suthin’ that rode good fo’ a change. I tol’ him ol’ Tom’d raise th’ roof when he found him on it. He had a couple mo’ things t’say ’bout Tom then.”

“I didn’t think he had the guts to take the rig.”

“Aw, he talked hisself blind mad.”

They looked up as Chub Horton trotted up, panting. “Hey, you guys, come on. We better get up there to Dennis.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Harris, climbing to his feet.

“Tom passed me a minute ago lookin’ like the wrath o’ God and hightailin’ it for the swamp fill. I asked him what was the matter and he hollered that Dennis had taken the Seven. Said he was always talkin’ about murder and he’d get his fill of it foolin’ around that machine.” Chub went wall-eyed, licked his lips beside his cigar.

“Oh-oh,” said Harris quietly. “That’s the wrong kind o’ talk for just now.”

“You don’t suppose he—”

“Come on!”

They saw Tom before they were halfway there. He was walking slowly, with his head down. Harris shouted. Tom raised his face, stopped, stood there waiting with a peculiarly slumped stance.

“Where’s Dennis?” barked Chub.

Tom waited until they were almost up to him and then weakly raised an arm and thumbed over his shoulder. His face was green.

“Tom — is he—”

Tom nodded, and swayed a little. His granite jaw was slack.

“Al, stay with him. He’s sick. Harris, let’s go.”

Tom was sick, then and there. Very. Al stood gaping at him, fascinated.

Chub and Harris found Dennis. All of twelve square feet of him, ground and churned and rolled out into a torn-up patch of earth. Daisy Etta was gone.

Back at the outcropping, they sat with Tom while All Knowles took a Dumptor and roared away to get Kelly.

“You saw him?” he said dully after a time.

Harris said, “Yeah.”

The screaming Dumptor and a mountainous cloud of dust arrived, Kelly driving. Al holding on with a death-grip to the dumpbed guards. Kelly flung himself off, ran to Tom. “Tom — what is all this? Dennis dead? And you… you—”

Tom’s head came up slowly, the slackness going out of his long face, a light suddenly coming into his eyes. Until this moment it had not crossed his mind what these men might think.

“I — what?”

“Al says you killed him.”

Tom’s eyes flicked at Al Knowles, and Al winced as if the glance had been a quirt.

Harris said, “What about it, Tom?”

“Nothing about it. He was killed by that Seven. You saw that for yourself.”

“I stuck with you all along,” said Harris slowly. “I took everything you said and believed it.”

“This is too strong for you?” Tom asked.

Harris nodded. “Too strong, Tom.”

Tom looked at the grim circle of faces and laughed suddenly. He stood up, put his back against a tall crate. “What do you plan to do about it?”

There was a silence. “You think I went up there and knocked that windbag off the machine and ran over him?” More silence. “Listen. I went up there and saw what you saw. He was dead before I got there. That’s not good enough either?” He paused and licked his lips. “So after I killed him I got up on the tractor and drove it far enough away so you couldn’t see or hear it when you got there. And then I sprouted wings and flew back so’s I was halfway here when you met me — ten minutes after I spoke to Chub on my way up!”

Kelly said vaguely, “Tractor?”

“Well,” said Tom harshly to Harris, “was the tractor there when you and Chub went up and saw Dennis?”

“No—”

Chub smacked his thigh suddenly. “You could of drove it into the swamp, Tom.”

Tom said angrily, “I’m wastin’ my time. You guys got it all figured out. Why ask me anything at all?”

“Aw, take it easy,” said Kelly. “We just want the facts. Just what did happen? You met Chub and told him that Dennis would get all the murderin’ he could take if he messed around that machine. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what?”

“Then the machine murdered him.”

Chub, with remarkable patience, asked, “What did you mean the day Peebles was killed when you said that something had queered the Seven up there on the mesa?”

Tom said furiously, “I meant what I said. You guys are set to crucify me for this and I can’t stop you. Well, listen. Somethings’s got into that Seven. I don’t know what it is and I don’t think I ever will know. I thought that after she smashed herself up that it was finished with. I had an idea that when we had her torn down and helpless we should have left her that way. I was dead right but it’s too late now. She’s killed Rivera and she’s killed Dennis and she sure had something to do with killing Peebles. And my idea is that she won’t stop as long as there’s a human being alive on this island.”

“Whaddaya know!” said Chub.

“Sure, Tom, sure,” said Kelly quietly. “That tractor is out to get us. But don’t worry; we’ll catch it and tear it down. Just don’t you worry about it any more; it’ll be all right.”

“That’s right, Tom,” said Harris. “You just take it easy around camp for a couple of days till you feel better. Chub and the rest of us will handle things for you. You had too much sun.”

“You’re a swell bunch of fellows,” gritted Tom, with the deepest sarcasm. “You want to live,” he shouted, “git out there and throw that maverick bulldozer!”

“That maverick bulldozer is at the bottom of the swamp where you put it,” growled Chub. His head lowered and he started to move in. “Sure we want to live. The best way to do that is to put you where you can’t kill anybody else. Get him!”

He leaped. Tom straightened him with his left and crossed with his right. Chub went down, tripping Harris. Al Knowles scuttled to a toolbox and dipped out a fourteen-inch crescent wrench. He circled around, keeping out of trouble, trying to look useful. Tom loosened a haymaker at Kelly, whose head seemed to withdraw like a turtle’s; it whistled over, throwing Tom badly off balance. Harris, still on his knees, tackled Tom’s legs; Chub hit him in the small of the back with a meaty shoulder, and Tom went on his face. Al Knowles, holding the wrench in both hands, swept it up and back like a baseball bat; at the top of its swing Kelly reached over, snatched it out of his hands and tapped Tom delicately behind the ear with it. Tom went limp.

It was late, but nobody seemed to feel like sleeping. They sat around the pressure lantern, talking idly. Chub and Kelly played an inconsequential game of casino, forgetting to pick up their points; Harris paced up and down like a man in a cell, and Al Knowles was squinched up close to the light, his eyes wide and watching, watching–

“I need a drink,” said Harris.

“Tens,” said one of the casino players.

Al Knowles said, “We shoulda killed him. We oughta kill him now.”

“There’s been too much killin’ already,” said Chub. “Shut up, you.” And to Kelly, “With big casino,” sweeping up cards.

Kelly caught his wrist and grinned. “Big casino’s the ten of diamonds, not the ten of hearts. Remember?”

“Oh.”

“How long before the black-topping crew will be here?” quavered Al Knowles.

“Twelve days,” said Harris. “And they better bring some likker.”

“Hey, you guys.”

They fell silent.

“Hey!”

“It’s Tom,” said Kelly. “Building sixes, Chub.”

“I’m gonna go kick his ribs in,” said Knowles, not moving.

“I heard that,” said the voice from the darkness. “If I wasn’t hogtied—”

“We know what you’d do,” said Chub. “How much proof do you think we need?”

“Chub, you don’t have to do any more to him!” It was Kelly, flinging his cards down and getting up. “Tom, you want water?”

“Yes.”

“Siddown, siddown,” said Chub.

“Let him lay there and bleed,” Al Knowles said.

“Nuts!” Kelly went and filled a cup and brought it to Tom. The big Georgian was tied thoroughly, wrists together, taut rope between elbow and elbow behind his back, so that his hands were immovable over his solar plexus. His knees and ankles were bound as well, although Knowles’ little idea of a short rope between ankles and throat hadn’t been used.

“Thanks, Kelly.” Tom drank greedily, Kelly holding his head. “Goes good.” He drank more. “What hit me?”

“One of the boys. ’Bout the time you said the cat was haunted.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tom rolled his head and blinked with pain.

“Any sense asking you if you blame us?”

“Kelly, does somebody else have to get killed before you guys wake up?”

“None of us figure there will be any more killin’ — now.”

The rest of the men drifted up. “He willing to talk sense?” Chub wanted to know.

Al Knowles laughed, “Hyuk! hyuk! Don’t he look dangerous now!”

Harris said suddenly, “Al, I’m gonna hafta tape your mouth with the skin off your neck.”

“Am I the kind of guy that makes up ghost stories?”

“Never have that I know of, Tom.” Harris kneeled down beside him. “Never killed anyone before, either.”

“Oh, get away from me. Get away,” said Tom tiredly.

“Get up and make us,” jeered Al.

Harris got up and backhanded him across the mouth. Al squeaked, took three steps backward and tripped over a drum of grease. “I told you,” said Harris almost plaintively. “I told you, Al.”

Tom stopped the bumble of comment. “Shut up!” he hissed. “SHUT UP!” he roared.

They shut.

“Chub,” said Tom, rapidly, evenly. “What did you say I did with that Seven?”

“Buried it in the swamp.”

“Yeh. Listen.”

“Listen at what?”

“Be quiet and listen!”

So they listened. It was another still, windless night, with a thin crescent of moon showing nothing true in the black and muffled silver landscape. The smallest whisper of surf drifted up from the beach, and from far off to the right, where the swamp was, a scandalized frog croaked protest at the manhandling of his mud-hole. But the sound that crept down, freezing their bones, came from the bluff behind their camp.

It was the unmistakable staccato of a starting engine.

“The Seven!”

“ ’At’s right, Chub,” said Tom.

“Wh-who’s crankin’ her up?”

“Are we all here?”

“All but Peebles and Dennis and Rivera,” said Tom.

“It’s Dennis’ ghost,” moaned Al.

Chub snapped, “Shut up, lamebrain.”

“She’s shifted to Diesel,” said Kelly, listening.

“She’ll be here in a minute,” said Tom. “Y’know, fellas, we can’t all be crazy, but you’re about to have a time convincin’ yourself of it.”

“You like this, doncha?”

“Some ways. Rivera used to call that machine Daisy Etta, ’cause she’s de siete in Spig. Daisy Etta, she wants her a man.”

“Tom,” said Harris, “I wish you’d stop that chatterin’. You make me nervous.”

“I got to do somethin’. I can’t run,” Tom drawled.

“We’re going to have a look,” said Chub. “If there’s nobody on that cat, we’ll turn you loose.”

“Mighty white of you. Reckon you’ll get back before she does?”

“We’ll get back. Harris, come with me. We’ll get one of the pan tractors. They can outrun a Seven. Kelly, take Al and get the other one.”

“Dennis’ machine has a flat tyre on the pan,” said Al’s quivering voice.

“Pull the pin and cut the cables, then! Git!” Kelly and Al Knowles ran off.

“Good huntin’, Chub.”

Chub went to him, bent over. “I think I’m goin’ to have to apologize to you, Tom.”

“No you ain’t. I’d a done the same. Get along now, if you think you got to. But hurry back.”

“I got to. An’ I’ll hurry back.”

Harris said, “Don’t go ’way, boy.” Tom returned the grin, and they were gone. But they didn’t hurry back. They didn’t come back at all.

It was Kelly who came pounding back, with Al Knowles on his heels, a half hour later. “Al — gimme your knife.”

He went to work on the ropes. His face was drawn.

“I could see some of it,” whispered Tom. “Chub and Harris?”

Kelly nodded. “There wasn’t nobody on the Seven like you said.” He said it as if there was nothing else in his mind, as if the most rigid self-control was keeping him from saying it over and over.

“I could see the lights,” said Tom. “A tractor angling up the hill. Pretty soon another, crossing it, lighting up the whole slope.”

“We heard it idling up there somewhere,” Kelly said. “Olive-drab paint — couldn’t see it.”

“I saw the pan tractor turn over — oh, four, five times down the hill. It stopped, lights still burning. Then something hit it and rolled it again. That sure blacked it out. What turned it over first?”

“The Seven. Hanging up there just at the brow of the bluff. Waited until Chub and Harris were about to pass, sixty, seventy feet below. Tipped over the edge and rolled down on them with her clutches out. Must’ve been going thirty miles an hour when she hit. Broadside. They never had a chance. Followed the pan as it rolled down the hill and when it stopped booted it again.”

“Want me to rub yo’ ankles?” asked Al.

“You! Get outa my sight!”

“Aw, Tom—” whimpered Al.

“Skip it, Tom,” said Kelly. “There ain’t enough of us left to carry on that way. Al, you mind your manners from here on out, hear?”

“Ah jes’ wanted to tell y’all. I knew you weren’t lyin’ ’bout Dennis, Tom, if only I’d stopped to think. I recollect when Dennis said he’d take that tractuh out… ’membah, Kelly?… He went an’ got the crank and walked around to th’ side of th’ machine and stuck it in th’ hole. It was barely in theah befo’ the startin’ engine kicked off. ‘Whadda ya know!’ he says t’me. ‘She started by herse’f! I nevah pulled that handle!’ And I said, ‘She sho’ rarin’t’ go!’ ”

“You pick a fine time to ‘recollec’ ’ something,” gritted Tom. “C’mon — let’s get out of here.”

“Where to?”

“What do you know that a Seven can’t move or get up on?”

“That’s a large order. A big rock, maybe.”

“Ain’t nothing that big around here,” said Tom.

Kelly thought a minute, then snapped his fingers. “Up on the top of my last cut with the shovel,” he said. “It’s fourteen feet if it’s an inch. I was pullin’ out small rock an’ topsoil, and Chub told me to drop back and dip out marl from a pocket there. I sumped in back of the original cut and took out a whole mess o’ marl. That left a big neck of earth sticking thirty feet or so out of the cliff. The narrowest part is only about four feet wide. If Daisy Etta tries to get us from the top, she’ll straddle the neck and hang herself. If she tries to get us from below, she can’t get traction to climb; it’s too loose and too steep.”

“And what happens if she builds herself a ramp?”

“We’ll be gone from there.”

“Let’s go.”

Al agitated for the choice of a Dumptor because of its speed, but was howled down. Tom wanted something that could not get a flat tyre and that would need something really powerful to turn it over. They took the two-cycle pan tractor with the bulldozer blade that had been Dennis’ machine and crept out into the darkness.

It was nearly six hours later that Daisy Etta came and woke them up. Night was receding before a paleness in the east, and a fresh ocean breeze had sprung up. Kelly had taken the first lookout and Al the second, letting Tom rest the night out. And Tom was far too tired to argue the arrangement. Al had immediately fallen asleep on his watch, but fear had such a sure, cold hold on his vitals that the first faint growl of the big Diesel engine snapped him erect. He tottered on the edge of the tall neck of earth that they slept on and squeaked as he scrabbled to get his balance.

“What’s giving?” asked Kelly, instantly wide awake.

“It’s coming,” blubbered Al. “Oh, my, oh my—”

Kelly stood up and stared into the fresh, dark dawn. The motor boomed hollowly, in a peculiar way heard twice at the same time as it was thrown to them and echoed back by the bluffs under and around them.

“It’s coming and what are we goin’ to do?” chanted Al. “What is going to happen?”

“My head is going to fall off,” said Tom sleepily. He rolled to a sitting position, holding the brutalized member between his hands. “If that egg behind my ear hatches, it’ll come out a full-sized jack-hammer.” He looked at Kelly. “Where is she?”

“Don’t rightly know,” said Kelly. “Somewhere down around the camp.”

“Probably pickin’ up our scent.”

“Figure it can do that?”

“I figure it can do anything,” said Tom. “Al, stop your moanin’.”

The sun slipped its scarlet edge into the thin slot between sea and sky, and rosy light gave each rock and tree a shape and a shadow. Kelly’s gaze swept back and forth, back and forth, until, minutes later, he saw movement.

“There she is!”

“Where?”

“Down by the grease rack.”

Tom rose and stared. “What’s she doin’?”

After an interval Kelly said, “She’s workin’. Diggin’ a swale in front of the fuel drums.”

“You don’t say. Don’t tell me she’s goin’ to give herself a grease job.”

“She don’t need it. She was completely greased and new oil put in the crankcase after we set her up. But she might need fuel.”

“Not more’n half a tank.”

“Well, maybe she figures she’s got a lot of work to do today.” As Kelly said this Al began to blubber. They ignored him.

The fuel drums were piled in a pyramid at the edge of the camp, in forty-four-gallon drums piled on there sides. The Seven was moving back and forth in front of them, close up, making pass after pass, gouging earth up and wasting it out past the pile. She soon had a huge pit scooped out, about fourteen feet wide, six feet deep and thirty feet long, right at the very edge of the pile of drums.

“What do you reckon she’s playin’ at?”

“Search me. She seems to want fuel, but I don’t… look at that! She’s stopped in the hole;… turnin’… smashing the top corner of the mouldboard into one of the drums on the bottom!”

Tom scraped the stubble on his jaw with his nails. “An’ you wonder how much that critter can do! Why, she’s got the whole thing figured out. She knows if she tried to punch a hole in a fuel drum that she’d only kick it around. If she did knock a hole in it, how’s she going to lift it? She’s not equipped to handle hose, so… see? Look at her now! She just gets herself lower than the bottom drum on the pile, and punches a hole. She can do that then, with the whole weight of the pile holding it down. Then she backs her tank under the stream of fuel runnin’ out!”

“How’d she get the cap off?”

Tom snorted and told them how the radiator cap had come off its hinges as he vaulted over the hood the day Rivera was hurt.

“You know,” he said after a moment’s thought, “if she knew as much then as she does now, I’d be snoozin’ beside Rivera and Peebles. She just didn’t know her way around then. She run herself like she’d never run before. She’s learned plenty since.”

“She has,” said Kelly, “and here’s where she uses it on us. She’s headed this way.”

She was. Straight out across the roughed-out runway she came, grinding along over the dew-sprinkled earth, yesterday’s dust swirling up from under her tracks. Crossing the shoulder line, she took the rougher ground skilfully, angling up over the occasional swags in the earth, by-passing stones, riding free and fast and easily. It was the first time Tom had actually seen her clearly running without an operator, and his flesh crept as he watched. The machine was unnatural, her outline somehow unreal and dreamlike purely through the lack of the small silhouette of a man in the saddle. She looked hulked, compact, dangerous.

“What are we gonna do?” wailed Al Knowles.

“We’re gonna sit and wait,” said Kelly, “and you’re gonna shut your trap. We won’t know for five minutes yet whether she’s going to go after us from down below or from up here.”

“If you want to leave,” said Tom gently, “go right ahead.” Al sat down.

Kelly looked ruminatively down at his beloved power shovel, sitting squat and unlovely in the cut below them and away to their right. “How do you reckon she’d stand up against the dipper stick?”

“If it ever came to a rough-and-tumble,” said Tom, “I’d say it would be just too bad for Daisy Etta. But she wouldn’t fight. There’s no way you could get the shovel within punchin’ range; Daisy’d just stand there and laugh at you.”

“I can’t see her now,” whined Al.

Tom looked. “She’s taken the bluff. She’s going to try it from up here. I move we sit tight and see if she’s foolish enough to try to walk out here over that narrow neck. If she does, she’ll drop on her belly with one track on each side. Probably turn herself over trying to dig out.”

The wait then was interminable. Back over the hill they could hear the labouring motor; twice they heard the machine stop momentarily to shift gears. Once they looked at each other hopefully as the sound rose to a series of bellowing roars, as if she were backing and filling; then they realized that she was trying to take some particularly steep part of the bank and having trouble getting traction. But she made it; the motor revved up as she made the brow of the hill, and she shifted into fourth gear and came lumbering out into the open. She lurched up to the edge of the cut, stopped, throttled down, dropped her blade on the ground and stood there idling. Al Knowles backed away to the very edge of the tongue of earth they stood on, his eyes practically on stalks.

“O.K. — put up or shut up,” Kelly called across harshly.

“She’s looking the situation over,” said Tom. “That narrow pathway don’t fool her a bit.”

Daisy Etta’s blade began to rise, and stopped just clear of the ground. She shifted without clashing her gears, began to back slowly, still a little more than an idle.

“She’s gonna jump,” screamed Al. “I’m gettin’ out of here!”

“Stay here, you fool,” shouted Kelly. “She can’t get us as long as we’re up here! If you go down, she’ll hunt you down like a rabbit.”

The blast of the Seven’s motor was the last straw for Al. He squeaked and hopped over the edge, scrambling and sliding down the almost sheer face of the cut. He hit the bottom running.

Daisy Etta lowered her blade and raised her snout and growled forward, the blade loading. Six, seven, seven and a half cubic yards of dirt piled up in front of her as she neared the edge. The loaded blade bit into the narrow pathway that led out to their perch. It was almost all soft, white, crumbly marl, and the great machine sank nose down into it, the monstrous overload of topsoil spilling down on each side.

“She’s going to bury herself!” shouted Kelly.

“No — wait.” Tom caught his arm. “She’s trying to turn — she made it! She made it! She’s ramping herself down to the flat!”

“She is — and she’s cut us off from the bluff!”

The bulldozer, blade raised as high as it could possibly go, the hydraulic rod gleaming clean in the early light, freed herself of the last of her tremendous load, spun around and headed back upwards, sinking her blade again. She made one more pass between them and the bluff, making a cut now far too wide for them to jump, particularly to the crumbly footing at the bluff’s edge. Once down again, she turned to face their haven, now an isolated pillar of marl, and revved down, waiting.

“I never thought of this,” said Kelly guiltily. “I knew we’d be safe from her ramping up, and I never thought she’d try it the other way!”

“Skip it. In the meantime, here we sit. What happens — do we wait up here until she idles out of fuel, or do we starve to death?”

“Oh, this won’t be a siege, Tom. That thing’s too much of a killer. Where’s Al? I wonder if he’s got guts enough to make a pass near here with our tractor and draw her off?”

“He had just guts enough to take our tractor and head out,” said Tom. “Didn’t you know?”

“He took our — what?” Kelly looked out towards where they had left their machine the night before. It was gone. “Why, the dirty little yellow rat!”

“No sense cussin’,” said Tom steadily, interrupting what he knew was the beginning of some really flowery language. “What else could you expect?”

Daisy Etta decided, apparently, how to go about removing their splendid isolation. She uttered the snort of too-quick throttle, and moved into their peak with a corner of her blade, cutting out a huge swipe, undercutting the material over it so that it fell on her side and track as she passed. Eight inches disappeared from that side of their little plateau.

“Oh-oh. That won’t do a-tall,” said Tom.

“Fixin’ to dig us down,” said Kelly grimly. “Take her about twenty minutes. Tom, I say leave.”

“It won’t be healthy. You just got no idea how fast that thing can move now. Don’t forget, she’s a good deal more than she was when she had a man runnin’ her. She can shift from high to reverse to fifth speed forward like that” — he snapped his fingers—“And she can pivot faster’n you can blink and throw that blade just where she wants it.”

The tractor passed under them, bellowing, and their little table was suddenly a foot shorter.

“Awright,” said Kelly. “So what do you want to do? Stay here and let her dig the ground out from under our feet?”

“I’m just warning you,” said Tom. “Now listen. We’ll wait until she’s taking a load. It’ll take her a second to get rid of it when she knows we’re gone. We’ll split — she can’t get both of us. You head out in the open, try to circle the curve of the bluff and get where you can climb it. Then come back over here to the cut. A man can scramble off a fourteen-foot cut faster’n any tractor ever built. I’ll cut in close to the cut, down at the bottom. If she takes after you, I’ll get clear all right. If she takes after me, I’ll try to make the shovel and at least give her a run for her money. I can play hide an’ seek in an’ around and under that dipper-stick all day if she wants to play.”

“Why me out in the open?”

“Don’t you think those long laigs o’ yours can outrun her in that distance?”

“Reckon they got to,” grinned Kelly. “O.K., Tom.”

They waited tensely. Daisy Etta backed close by, started another pass. As the motor blatted under the load, Tom said, “Now!” and they jumped. Kelly, catlike as always, landed on his feet. Tom, whose knees and ankles were black and blue with rope bruises, took two staggering steps and fell. Kelly scooped him to his feet as the dozer’s steel prow came around the bank. Instantly she was in fifth gear and howling down at them. Kelly flung himself to the left and Tom to the right, and they pounded away, Kelly out towards the runway, Tom straight for the shovel. Daisy Etta let them diverge for a moment, keeping her course, trying to pursue both; then she evidently sized Tom up as the slower, for she swung towards him. The instant’s hesitation was all Tom needed to get the little lead necessary. He tore up to the shovel, his legs going like pistons, and dived down between the shovel’s tracks.

As he hit the ground, the big manganese-steel mouldboard hit the right track of the shovel, and the impact set all forty-seven tons of the great machine quivering. But Tom did not stop. he scrabbled his way under the rig, stood up behind it, leaped and caught the sill of the rear window, clapped his other hand on it, drew himself up and tumbled inside. Here he was safe for the moment; the huge tracks themselves were higher than the Seven’s blade could rise, and the floor of the cab was a good sixteen inches higher than the top of the track. Tom went to the cab door and peeped outside. The tractor had drawn off and was idling.

“Study away,” gritted Tom, and went to the big Murphy Diesel. He unhurriedly checked the oil with the bayonet gauge, replaced it, took the governor cut-out rod from its rack and inserted it in the governor casing. He set the master throttle at the halfway mark, pulled up the starter-handle, twitched the cutout. The motor spat a wad of the blue smoke out of its hooded exhaust and caught. Tom put the rod back, studied the fuel-flow glass and pressure gauges, and then went to the door and looked out again. The Seven had not moved, but it was revving up and down in that uneven fashion it had shown up on the mesa. Tom had the extraordinary idea that it was gathering itself to spring. He slipped into the saddle, threw the master clutch. The big gears that half-filled the cab obediently began to turn. He kicked the brake-locks loose with his heels, let his feet rest lightly on the pedals as they rose.

Then he reached over his head and snapped back the throttle. As the Murphy picked up he grasped both hoist and swing levers and pulled them back. The engine howled; the two-yard bucket came up off the ground with a sudden jolt as the cold friction grabbed it. The big machine swung hard to the right; Tom snapped his hoist lever forward and checked the bucket’s rise with his foot on the brake. He shoved the crowd lever forward; the bucket ran out to the end of its reach, and the heel of the bucket wiped across the Seven’s hood, taking with it the exhaust stack, muffler and all, and the pre-cleaner on the air intake. Tom cursed. He had figured on the machine’s leaping backwards. If it had, he would have smashed the cast-iron radiator core. But she had stood still, making a split-second decision.

Now she moved, though, and quickly. With that incredibly fast shifting, she leaped backwards and pivoted out of range before Tom could check the shovel’s mad swing. The heavy swing-friction blocks smoked acridly as the machine slowed, stopped and swung back. Tom checked her as he was facing the Seven, hoisted his bucket a few feet, and rehauled, bringing it about halfway back, ready for anything. The four great dipper-teeth gleamed in the sun. Tom ran a practised eye over cables, boom and dipper-stick, liking the black polish of crater compound on the sliding parts, the easy tension of well-greased cables and links. The huge machine stood strong, ready and profoundly subservient for all its brute power.

Tom looked searchingly at the Seven’s ruined engine hood. The gaping end of the broken air-intake pipe stared back at him. “Aha!” he said. “A few cupfuls of nice dry marl down there’ll give you something to chew on.”

Keeping a wary eye on the tractor, he swung into the bank, dropped his bucket and plunged it into the marl. He crowded in deep, and the Murphy yelled for help but kept on pushing. At the peak of the load a terrific jar rocked him in the saddle. He looked back over his shoulder through the door and saw the Seven backing off again. She had run up and delivered a terrific punch to the counter-weight at the back of the cab. Tom grinned tightly. She’d have to do better than that. There was nothing back there but eight or ten tons of solid steel. And he didn’t much care at the moment whether or not she scratched his paint.

He swung back again, white marl running away on both sides of the heaped bucket. The shovel rode perfectly now, for a shovel is counterweighted to balance true when standing level with the bucket loaded. The hoist, swing frictions and the brake linings had heated and dried themselves of the night’s condensation moisture, and she answered the controls in a way that delighted the operator in him. He handled the swing lever lightly, back to swing to the right, forward to swing to the left, following the slow dance the Seven had started to do, stepping warily back and forth like a fighter looking for an opening. Tom kept the bucket between himself and the tractor, knowing that she could not hurt a tool that was built to smash hard rock for twenty hours a day and like it.

Daisy Etta bellowed and rushed in. Tom snapped the hoist lever back hard, and the bucket rose, letting the tractor run underneath. Tom punched the bucket trip, and the great steel jaw opened, cascading marl down on the broken hood. The tractor’s fan blew it back in a huge billowing cloud. The instant that it took Tom to check and dump was enough, however, for the tractor to dance back out of the way, for when he tried to drop it on the machine to smash the coiled injector tubes on top of the engine block, she was gone.

The dust cleared away, and the tractor moved in again, feinted to the left, then swung her blade at the bucket, which was just clear of the ground. Tom swung to meet her, her feint having got her in a little closer than he liked, and bucket met blade with a shower of sparks and a clank that could be heard for half a mile. She had come in with her blade high, and Tom let out a wordless shout as he saw that the A-frame brace behind the blade had caught between two of his dipper-teeth. He snatched at his hoist lever and the bucket came up, lifting with it the whole front end of the bulldozer.

Daisy Etta plunged up and down and her tracks dug violently into the earth as she raised and lowered her blade, trying to shake herself free. Tom rehauled, trying to bring the tractor in closer, for the boom was set too low to attempt to lift such a dead weight. As it was, the shovel’s off track was trying its best to get off the ground. But the crowd and rehaul frictions could not handle her alone; they began to heat and slip.

Tom hoisted a little; the shovel’s off track came up a foot off the ground. Tom cursed and let the bucket drop, and in an instant the dozer was free and running clear. Tom swung wildly at her, missed. The dozer came in on a long curve; Tom swung to meet her again, took a vicious swipe at her which she took on her blade. But this time she did not withdraw after being hit, but bored right in, carrying the bucket before her. Before Tom realized what she was doing, his bucket was around in front of the tracks and between them, on the ground. It was as swift and skilful a manoeuvre as could be imagined, and it left the shovel without the ability to swing as long as Daisy Etta could hold the bucket trapped between the tracks.

Tom crowded furiously, but that succeeded only in lifting the boom higher in the air, since there is nothing to hold a boom down but its own weight. Hoisting did nothing but make his frictions smoke and rev the engine down dangerously close to the stalling point.

Tom swore again and reached down to the cluster of small levers at his left. These were the gears. On this type of shovel, the swing lever controls everything except crowd and hoist. With the swing lever, the operator, having selected his gear, controls the travel — that is, power to the tracks — in forward and reverse; booming up and booming down; and swinging. The machine can do only one of these things at a time. If he is in travel gear, she cannot swing. If she is in swing gear, she cannot boom up or down. Not once in years of operating would this inability bother an operator; now, however, nothing was normal.

Tom pushed the swing gear control down and pulled up on the travel. The clutches involved were jaw clutches, not frictions, so that he had to throttle down on an idle before he could make the castellations mesh. As the Murphy revved down, Daisy Etta took it as a signal that something could be done about it, and she shoved furiously into the bucket. But Tom had all controls in neutral and all she succeeded in doing was to dig herself in, her sharp new cleats spinning deep into the dirt.

Tom set his throttle up again and shoved the swing lever forward. There was a vast crackling of drive chains; and the big tracks started to turn.

Daisy Etta had sharp cleats; her pads were twenty inches wide and her tracks were fourteen feet long, and there were fourteen tons of steel on them. The shovel’s big flat pads were three feet wide and twenty feet long, and forty-seven tons aboard. There was simply no comparison. The Murphy bellowed the fact that the work was hard, but gave no indications of stalling. Daisy Etta performed the incredible feat of shifting into a forward gear while she was moving backwards, but it did her no good. Round and round her tracks went, trying to drive her forward, gouging deep; and slowly and surely she was forced backward towards the cut wall by the shovel.

Tom heard a sound that was not a part of a straining machine; he looked out and saw Kelly up on top of the cut, smoking, swinging his feet over the edge, making punching motions with his hands as if he had a ringside seat at a big fight — which he certainly had.

Tom now offered the dozer little choice. If she did not turn aside before him, she would be borne back against the bank and her fuel tank crushed. There was every possibility that, having her pinned there, Tom would have time to raise his bucket over her and smash her to pieces. And if she turned before she was forced against the bank, she would have to free Tom’s bucket. This she had to do.

The Murphy gave him warning, but not enough. It crooned as the load came off, and Tom knew then that the dozer was shifting into a reverse gear. He whipped the hoist lever back and the bucket rose as the dozer backed away from him. He crowded it out and let it come smashing down — and missed. For the tractor danced aside — and while he was in travel gear he could not swing to follow it. Daisy Etta charged then, put one track on the bank and went over almost on her beam-ends, throwing one end of her blade high in the air. So totally unexpected was it that Tom was quite unprepared. The tractor flung itself on the bucket, and the cutting edge of the blade dropped between the dipper teeth. This time there was the whole weight of the tractor to hold it there. There would be no way for her to free herself — but at the same time she had trapped the bucket so far out from the center pin of the shovel that Tom couldn’t hoist without overbalancing and turning the monster over.

Daisy Etta ground away in reverse, dragging the bucket out until it was checked by the bumper-blocks. Then she began to crab sideways, up against the bank, and when Tom tried tentatively to rehaul, she shifted and came right with him, burying one whole end of her blade deep into the bank.

Stalemate. She had hung herself up on the bucket, and she had immobilized it. Tom tried to rehaul, but the tractor’s anchorage in the bank was too solid. He tried to swing, to hoist. All the overworked frictions could possibly give out was smoke. Tom grunted and throttled to an idle, leaned out of the window. Daisy Etta was idling too, loudly without her muffler, the stackless exhaust giving out an ugly flat sound. But after the roar of the two great motors the partial silence was deafening.

Kelly called down, “Double knockout, hey?”

“Looks like it. What say we see if we can’t get close enough to her to quiet her down some?”

Kelly shrugged. “I dunno. If she’s really stopped herself, it’s the first time. I respect that rig, Tom. She wouldn’t have got herself into that spot if she didn’t have an ace up her sleeve.”

“Look at her, man! Suppose she was a civilized bulldozer and you had to get her out of there. She can’t raise her blade high enough to free it from those dipper-teeth, y’know. Think you’d be able to do it?”

“It might take several seconds,” Kelly drawled. “She’s sure high and dry.”

“O.K., let’s spike her guns.”

“Like what?”

“Like taking a bar and prying out her tubing.” He referred to the coiled brass tubing that carried the fuel, under pressure, from the pump to the injectors. There were many feet of it, running from the pump reservoir, stacked in expansion coils over the cylinder head.

As he spoke Daisy Etta’s idle burst into that maniac revving up and down characteristic of her.

“What do you know!” Tom called above the racket. “Eavesdropping!”

Kelly slid down the cut, stood up on the track of the shovel and poked his head in the window. “Well, you want to get a bar and try?”

“Let’s go!”

Tom went to the toolbox and pulled out the pinch bar that Kelly used to replace cables on his machine, and swung to the ground. They approached the tractor warily. She revved up as they came near, began to shudder. The front end rose and dropped and the tracks began to turn as she tried to twist out of the vice her blade had dropped into.

“Take it easy, sister,” said Tom. “You’ll just bury yourself. Sit still and take it, now, like a good girl. You got it comin’.”

“Be careful,” said Kelly. Tom hefted the bar and laid a hand on the fender.

The tractor literally shivered, and from the rubber hose connection at the top of the radiator, a blinding stream of hot water shot out. It fanned and caught both full in the face. They staggered back, cursing.

“You O.K., Tom?” Kelly gasped a moment later. He had got most of it across the mouth and cheek. Tom was on his knees, his shirt tail out, blotting at his face.

“My eyes… oh, my eyes—”

“Let’s see!” Kelly dropped down beside him and took him by the wrists, gently removing Tom’s hands from his face. He whistled. “Come on,” he gritted. He helped Tom up and led him away a few feet. “Stay here,” he said hoarsely. He turned, walked back towards the dozer, picking up the pinch bar. “You dirty — !” he yelled, and flung it like a javelin at the tube coils. It was a little high. It struck the ruined hood, made a deep dent in the metal. The dent promptly inverted with a loud thung-g-g! and flung the bar back at him. He ducked; it whistled over his head and caught Tom in the calves of his legs. He went down like a poled ox, but staggered to his feet again.

“Come on!” Kelly snarled, and taking Tom’s arm, hustled him around the turn of the cut. “Sit down! I’ll be right back.”

“Where you going? Kelly — be careful!”

“Careful and how!”

Kelly’s long legs ate up the distance back to the shovel. He swung into the cab, reached back over the motor and set up the master throttle all the way. Stepping up behind the saddle, he opened the running throttle and the Murphy howled. Then he hauled back on the hoist lever until it knuckled in, turned and leaped off the machine in one supple motion.

The hoist drum turned and took up slack; the cable straightened as it took the strain. The bucket stirred under the dead weight of the bulldozer that rested on it; and slowly, then, the great flat tracks began to lift their rear ends off the ground. The great obedient mass of machinery teetered forward on the tips of her tracks, the Murphy revved down and under the incredible load, but it kept the strain. A strand of the two-part hoist cable broke and whipped around, singing; and then she was balanced — over-balanced—

And the shovel had hauled herself right over and had fallen with an earth-shaken crash. The boom, eight tons of solid steel, clanged down on to the blade of the bulldozer, and lay there, crushing it down tightly on to the imprisoning row of dipper-teeth.

Daisy Etta sat there, not trying to move now, racing her motor impotently. Kelly strutted past her, thumbing his nose, and went back to Tom.

“Kelly! I thought you were never coming back! What happened?”

“Shovel pulled herself over on her nose.”

“Good boy! Fall on the tractor?”

“Nup. But the boom’s laying across the top of her blade. Caught like a rat in a trap.”

“Better watch out the rat don’t chew its leg off to get out,” said Tom, drily. “Still runnin’, is she?”

“Yep. But we’ll fix that in a hurry.”

“Sure. Sure. How?”

“How? I dunno. Dynamite, maybe. How’s the optics?”

Tom opened one a trifle and grunted. “Rough. I can see a little, though. My eyelids are parboiled, mostly. Dynamite, you say? Well, let’s think first. Think.”

Tom sat back against the bank and stretched out his legs. “I tell you, Kelly, I been too blessed busy these last few hours to think much, but there’s one thing that keeps comin’ back to me — somethin’ I was mullin’ over long before the rest of you guys knew anything was up at all, except Rivera had got hurt in some way I wouldn’t tell you all about. But I don’t reckon you’ll call me crazy if I open my mouth now and let it all run out?”

“From now on,” Kelly said fervently, “nobody’s crazy. After this I’ll believe anything.” He sat down.

“O.K. Well, about the tractor. What do you suppose has got into her?”

“Search me. I dunno.”

“No — don’t say that. I just got an idea we can’t stop at ‘I dunno.’ We got to figure all the angles on this thing before we know just what to do about it. Let’s just get this thing lined up. When did it start? On the mesa. How? Rivera was opening an old building with the Seven. This thing came out of there. Now here’s what I’m getting at. We can dope these things out about it: It’s intelligent. It can only get into a machine and not into a man. It—”

“What about that? How do you know it can’t?”

“Because it had the chance to and didn’t. I was standing right by the opening when it kited out. Rivera was up on the machine at the time. It didn’t directly harm either of us. It got into the tractor, and the tractor did. By the same token, it can’t hurt a man when it’s out of a machine, but that’s all it wants to do when it’s in one. O.K.?

“To get on: once it’s in one machine it can’t get out again. We know that because it had plenty of chances and didn’t take them. That scuffle with the dipper-stick, f’r instance. My face woulda been plenty red if it had taken over the shovel — and you can bet it would have if it could.”

“I got you so far. But what are we going to do about it?”

“That’s the thing. You see, I don’t think it’s enough to wreck the tractor. We might burn it, blast it, and still not hurt whatever it was that got into it up on the mesa.”

“That makes sense. But I don’t see what else we can do than just break up the dozer. We haven’t got a line on actually what the thing is.”

“I think we have. Remember I asked you all those screwy questions about the arc that killed Peebles. Well, when that happened, I recollected a flock of other things. One — when it got out of that hole up there, I smelled that smell that you notice when you’re welding; sometimes when lightning strikes real close.”

“Ozone,” said Kelly.

“Yeah — ozone. Then, it likes metal, not flesh. But most of all, there was that arc. Now, that was absolutely screwy. You know as well as I do — better — that an arc generator simply don’t have the push to do a thing like that. It can’t kill a man, and it can’t throw an arc no fifty feet. But it did. An’ that’s why I asked you if there could be something — a field, or some such — that could suck current out of a generator, all at once, faster than it could flow. Because this thing’s electrical; it fits all around.”

“Electronic,” said Kelly doubtfully, thoughtfully.

“I wouldn’t know. Now then. When Peebles was killed, a funny thing happened. Remember what Chub said? The Seven moved back — straight back, about thirty feet, until it bumped into a roadroller that was standing behind it. It did that with no fuel in the starting engine — without even using the starting engine, for that matter — and with the compression valves locked open!

“Kelly, that thing in the dozer can’t do much, when you come right down to it. It couldn’t fix itself up after that joyride on the mesa. It can’t make the machine do too much more than the machine can do ordinarily. What it actually can do, seems to me, is to make a spring push instead of pull, like the control levers, and make a fitting slip when it’s supposed to hold, like the ratchet on the throttle lever. It can turn a shaft, like the way it cranks its own starting motor. But if it was so all-fired highpowered, it wouldn’t have to use the starting motor! The absolute biggest job it’s done so far, seems to me, was when it walked back from that welding machine when Peebles got his. Now, why did it do that just then?”

“Reckon it didn’t like the brimstone smell, like it says in the Good Book,” said Kelly sourly.

“That’s pretty close, seems to me. Look, Kelly — this thing feels things. I mean, it can get sore. If it couldn’t it never woulda kept driving in at the shovel like that. It can think. But if it can do all those things, then it can be scared!?”

“Scared? Why should it be scared?”

“Listen. Something went on in that thing when the arc hit it. What’s that I read in a magazine once about heat — something about molecules runnin’ around with their heads cut off when they got hot?”

“Molecules do. They go into rapid motion when heat is applied. But—”

“But nothin’. That machine was hot for four hours after that. But she was hot in a funny way. Not just around the place where the arc hit, like as if it was a welding arc. But hot all over — from the mouldboard to the fuel-tank cap. Hot everywhere. And just as hot behind the final drive housings as she was at the top of the blade where the poor guy put his hand.

“And look at this.” Tom was getting excited, as his words crystallized his ideas. “She was scared — scared enough to back off from that welder, putting everything she could into it, to get back from that welding machine. And after that, she was sick. I say that because in the whole time she’s had that whatever-ya-call-it in her, she’s never been near men without trying to kill them, except for those two days after the arc hit her. She had juice enough to start herself when Dennis came around with the crank, but she still needed someone to run her till she got her strength back.”

“But why didn’t she turn and smash up the welder when Dennis took her?”

“One of two things. She didn’t have the strength, or she didn’t have the guts. She was scared, maybe, and wanted out of there, away from that thing.”

“But she had all night to go back for it!”

“Still scared. Or… oh, that’s it! She had other things to do first. Her main idea is to kill men — there’s no other way you can figure it. It’s what she was built to do. Not the tractor — they don’t build ’em sweeter’n that machine; but the thing that’s runnin’ it.”

“What is that thing?” Kelly mused. “Coming out of that old building — temple — what have you — how old is it? How long was it there? What kept it in there?”

“What kept it in there was some funny grey stuff that lined the inside of the buildin’,” said Tom. “It was like rock, an’ it was like smoke.

“It was a colour that scared you to look at it, and it gave Rivera and me the creeps when we got near it. Don’t ask me what it was. I went up there to look at it, and it’s gone. Gone from the building, anyhow. There was a little lump of it on the ground. I don’t know whether that was a hunk of it, or all of it rolled up into a ball. I get the creeps again thinkin’ about it.”

Kelly stood up. “Well, the heck with it. We been beatin’ our gums up here too long anyhow. There’s just enough sense in what you say to make me want to try something nonsensical, if you see what I mean. If that welder can sweat the Ol’ Nick out of that tractor, I’m on. Especially from fifty feet away. There should be a Dumptor around here somewhere; let’s move from here. Can you navigate now?”

“Reckon so, a little.” Tom rose and together they followed the cut until they came on the Dumptor. They climbed on, cranked it up and headed towards camp.

About halfway there Kelly looked back, gasped, and putting his mouth close to Tom’s ear, bellowed against the screan of the motor, “Tom! ’Member what you said about the rat in the trap biting off a leg? Well, Daisy did too! She’s left her blade an’ pushbeams an’ she’s followin’ us in!”

They howled into the camp, gasping against the dust that followed when they pulled up by the welder.

Kelly said, “You cast around and see if you can find a draw-pin to hook that rig up to the Dumptor with. I’m goin’ after some water an’ chow!”

Tom grinned. Imagine old Kelly forgetting that a Dumptor had no drawbar! He groped around to a tool box, peering out of the narrow slit beneath swollen lids, felt behind it and located a shackle. He climbed up on the Dumptor, turned it around and backed up to the welding machine. He passed the shackle through the ring at the end of the steering tongue of the welder, screwed in the pin and dropped the shackle over the front towing hook of the Dumptor. A Dumptor being what it is, having no real front and no real rear, and direct reversing gears in all speeds, it was no trouble to drive it “backwards” for a change.

Kelly came pounding back, out of breath. “Fix it? Good. Shackle? No drawbar! Daisy’s closin’ up fast; I say let’s take the beach. We’ll be concealed until we have a good lead out o’ this pocket, and the going’s pretty fair, long as we don’t bury this jalopy in the sand.”

“Good,” said Tom as they climbed on and he accepted an open tin of K. “Only go easy; bump around too much and the welder’ll slip off the hook. An’ I somehow don’t want to lose it just now.”

They took off, zooming up the beach. A quarter of a mile up, they sighted the Seven across the flat. It immediately turned and took a course that would intercept them.

“Here she comes,” shouted Kelly, and stepped down hard on the accelerator. Tom leaned over the back of the seat, keeping his eye on their tow. “Hey! Take it easy! Watch it!”

“Hey!”

But it was too late. The tongue of the welding machine responded to that one bump too many. The shackle jumped up off the hook, the welder lurched wildly, slewed hard to the left. The tongue dropped to the sand and dug in; the machine rolled up on it and snapped it off, finally stopped, leaning crazily askew. By a miracle it did not quite turn over.

Kelly tramped on the brakes and both their heads did their utmost to snap off their shoulders. They leaped off and ran back to the welder. It was intact, but towing it was now out of the question.

“If there’s going to be a showdown, it’s gotta be here.”

The beach here was about thirty yards wide, the sand almost level, and undercut banks of sawgrass forming the landward edge in a series of little hummocks and headlands. While Tom stayed with the machine, testing starter and generator contacts, Kelly walked up one of the little mounds, stood up on it and scanned the beach back the way he had come. Suddenly he began to shout and wave his arms.

“What’s got into you?”

“It’s Al!” Kelly called back. “With the pan tractor!”

Tom dropped what he was doing, and came to stand beside Kelly. “Where’s the Seven? I can’t see.”

“Turned on the beach and followin’ our track. Al! Al! You little skunk, c’mere!”

Tom could now dimly make out the pan tractor cutting across directly towards them and the beach.

“He don’t see Daisy Etta,” remarked Kelly disgustedly, “or he’d sure be headin’ the other way.”

Fifty yards away Al pulled up and throttled down. Kelly shouted and waved to him. Al stood up on the machine, cupped his hands around his mouth, “Where’s the Seven?”

“Never mind that! Come here with that tractor!”

Al stayed where he was. Kelly cursed and started out after him.

“You stay away from me,” he said, when Kelly was closer.

“I ain’t got time for you now,” said Kelly. “Bring that tractor down to the beach.”

“Where’s that Daisy Etta?” Al’s voice was oddly strained.

“Right behind us.” Kelly tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “On the beach.”

Al’s pop eyes clicked wide almost audibly. He turned on his heel and jumped off the machine and started to run. Kelly uttered a wordless syllable that was somehow more obscene than anything else he had ever uttered, and vaulted into the seat of the machine. “Hey!” he bellowed after Al’s rapidly diminishing figure. “You’re runnin’ right into her.” Al appeared not to hear, but went pelting down the beach.

Kelly put her into fifth gear and poured on the throttle. As the tractor began to move he whacked out the master clutch, snatched the overdrive lever back to put her into sixth, rammed the clutch in again, all so fast that she did not have time to stop rolling. Bucking and jumping over the rough ground the fast machine whined for the beach.

Tom was fumbling back to the welder, his ears telling him better than his eyes how close the Seven was — for she was certainly no nightingale, particularly without her exhaust stack. Kelly reached the machine as he did.

“Get behind it,” snapped Tom. “I’ll jamb the tierod with the shackle, and you see if you can’t bunt her up into that pocket between those two hummocks. Only take it easy — you don’t want to tear up that generator. Where’s Al?”

“Don’t ask me. He run down the beach to meet Daisy.”

“He what?”

The whine of the two-cycle drowned out Kelly’s answer, if any. He got behind the welder and set his blade against it. Then in a low gear, slipping his clutch in a little, he slowly nudged the machine towards the place Tom had indicated. It was a little hollow in between two projecting banks. The surf and the high-tide mark dipped inland here to match it; the water was only a few feet away.

Tom raised his arm and Kelly stopped. From the other side of the projecting shelf, out of their sight now, came the flat roar of the Seven’s exhaust. Kelly sprang off the tractor and went to help Tom, who was furiously throwing out coils of cable from the rack back of the welder. “What’s the game?”

“We got to ground that Seven some way,” panted Tom. He threw the last bit of cable out to clear it of kinks and turned to the panel. “How was it — about sixty volts and the amperage on ‘special appreciation’?” He spun the dials, pressed the starter button. The motor responded instantly. Kelly scooped up ground lamp and rod holder and tapped them together. The solenoid governor picked up the load and the motor hummed as a good live spark took the jump.

“Good,” said Tom, switching off the generator. “Come on, Lieutenant General Electric, figure me out a way to ground that maverick.”

Kelly tightened his lips, shook his head. “I dunno — unless somebody actually clamps this thing on her.”

“No, boy, can’t do that. If one of us gets killed—”

Kelly tossed the ground clamp idly, his lithe body taut. “Don’t give me that, Tom. You know I’m elected because you can’t see good enough to handle it. You know you’d do it if you could. You—”

He stopped short, for the steadily increasing roar of the approaching Seven had stopped, was blatting away now in that extraordinary irregular throttling that Daisy Etta affected.

“Now what’s got into her?”

Kelly broke away and scrambled up the bank. “Tom!” he gasped. “Tom — come up here!”

Tom followed, and they lay side by side, peering out over the top of the escarpment at the remarkable tableau.

Daisy Etta was standing on the beach, near the water, not moving. Before her, twenty or thirty feet away, stood Al Knowles, his arms out in front of him, talking a blue streak. Daisy made far too much racket for them to hear what he was saying.

“Do you reckon he’s got guts enough to stall her off for us?” said Tom.

“If he has, it’s the queerest thing that’s happened yet on this old island,” Kelly breathed, “an’ that’s saying something.”

The Seven revved up till she shook, and then throttled back. She ran down so low then that they thought she had shut herself down, but she caught on the last two revolutions and began to idle quietly. And then they could hear.

Al’s voice was high, hysterical. “—I come t’ he’p you, I come t’ he’p you, don’ kill me, I’ll he’p you—” He took a step forward; the dozer snorted and he fell to his knees. “I’ll wash you an’ grease you and change yo’ ile,” he said in a high singsong.

“The guy’s not human,” said Kelly wonderingly.

“He ain’t housebroke either,” Tom chuckled.

“—lemme he’p you. I’ll fix you when you break down. I’ll he’p you kill those other guys—”

“She don’t need any help!” said Tom.

“The louse,” growled Kelly. “The rotten little double-crossing polecat!” He stood up. “Hey, you Al! Come out o’ that. I mean now! If she don’t get you I will, if you don’t move.”

Al was crying now. “Shut up!” he screamed. “I know who’s bawss hereabouts, an’ so do you!” He pointed at the tractor. “She’ll kill us all if’n we don’t do what she wants!” He turned back to the machine. “I’ll k-kill ’em fo’ you. I’ll wash you and shine you up and f-fix yo’ hood. I’ll put yo’ blade back on…”

Tom reached out and caught Kelly’s leg as the tall man started out, blind mad. “Git back here,” he barked. “What you want to do — get killed for the privilege of pinnin’ his ears back?”

Kelly subsided and came back, threw himself down beside Tom, put his face in his hands. He was quivering with rage.

“Don’t take on so,” Tom said. “The man’s plumb loco. You can’t argue with him any more’n you can with Daisy, there. If he’s got to get his, Daisy’ll give it to him.”

“Aw, Tom, it ain’t that. I know he ain’t worth it, but I can’t sit up here and watch him get himself killed. I can’t, Tom.”

Tom thumped him on the shoulder, because there were simply no words to be said. Suddenly he stiffened, snapped his fingers.

“There’s our ground,” he said urgently, pointing seaward. “The water — the wet beach where the surf runs. If we can get our ground clamp out there and her somewhere near it—”

“Ground the pan tractor. Run it out into the water. It ought to reach — partway, anyhow.”

“That’s it — c’mon.”

They slid down the bank, snatched up the ground clamp, attached it to the frame of the pan tractor.

“I’ll take it,” said Tom, and as Kelly opened his mouth, Tom shoved him back against the welding machine. “No time to argue,” he snapped, swung on to the machine, slapped her in gear and was off. Kelly took a step towards the tractor, and then his quick eyes saw a bight of the ground cable about to foul a wheel of the welder. He stooped and threw it off, spread out the rest of it so it would pay off clear. Tom, with the incredible single-mindedness of the trained operator, watched only the black line of the trailing cable on the sand behind him. When it straightened, he stopped. The front of the tracks were sloshing in the gentle surf. He climbed off the side away from the Seven and tried to see. There was movement, and the growl of her motor now running at a bit more than idle, but he could not distinguish much.

Kelly picked up the rod-holder and went to peer around the head of the protruding bank. Al was on his feet, still crooning hysterically, sliding over towards Daisy Etta. Kelly ducked back, threw the switch on the arc generator, climbed the bank and crawled along through the sawgrass paralleling the beach until the holder in his hand tugged and he knew he had reached the end of the cable. He looked out at the beach, measured carefully with his eye the arc he would travel if he left his position and, keeping the cable taut, went out on the beach. At no point would he come within seventy feet of the possessed machine, let alone fifty. She had to be drawn in closer. And she had to be manoeuvred out to the wet sand, or in the water—

Al Knowles, encouraged by the machine’s apparent decision not to move, approached, though warily, and still running off at the mouth. “—we’ll kill ’em off an’ then we’ll keep it a secret and th’ bahges’ll come an’ take us often th’ island and we’ll go to anothah job an’ kill us lots mo’… an’ when yo’ tracks git dry an’ squeak we’ll wet ’em with blood, and you’ll be rightly king o’ the hill… look yondah, look yondah, Daisy Etta, see them theah, by the otheh tractuh, theah they are, kill ’em, Daisy, kill ’em, Daisy, an’ lemme he’p… heah me. Daisy, heah me, say you heah me—” and the motor roared in response. Al laid a timid hand on the radiator guard, leaning far over to do it, and the tractor still stood there grumbling but not moving. Al stepped back, motioned with his arm, began to walk off slowly towards the pan tractor looking backwards as he did so like a man training a dog. “C’mon, c’mon, theah’s one theah, le’s kill’m, kill’m, kill’m ”

And with a snort the tractor revved up and followed.

Kelly licked his lips without effect because his tongue was dry, too. The madman passed him, walking straight up the centre of the beach, and the tractor, now no longer a bulldozer, followed him; and there the sand was bone dry, sun-dried, dried to powder. As the tractor passed him, Kelly got up on all fours, went over the edge of the bank on to the beach, crouched there.

Al crooned, “I love ya, honey, I love ya, ’deed I do—”

Kelly ran crouching, like a man under machine-gun fire, making himself as small as possible and feeling as big as a barn door. The torn-up sand where the tractor had passed was under his feet now; he stopped, afraid to get too much closer, afraid that a weakened, badly grounded arc might leap from the holder in his hand and serve only to alarm and infuriate the thing in the tractor. And just then Al saw him.

“There!” he screamed; and the tractor pulled up short.

“Behind you! Get’m Daisy! Kill’m, kill’m, kill’m.”

Kelly stood up almost wearily, fury and frustration too much to be borne. “In the water,” he yelled, because it was what his whole being wanted, “Get ’er in the water! Wet her tracks, Al!”

“Kill’m, kill’m—”

As the tractor started to turn, there was a commotion over by the pan tractor. It was Tom, jumping, shouting, waving his arms, swearing. He ran out from behind his machine, straight at the Seven. Daisy Etta’s motor roared and she swung to meet him, Al barely dancing back out of the way. Tom cut sharply, sand spouting under his pumping feet, and ran straight into the water. He went out to about waist deep, suddenly disappeared. He surfaced, spluttering, still trying to shout. Kelly took a better grip on his rod holder and rushed.

Daisy Etta, in following Tom’s crazy rush, had swung in beside the pan tractor, not fifteen feet away; and she, too, was now in the surf. Kelly closed up the distance as fast as his long legs would let him; and as he approached to within that crucial fifty feet, Al Knowles hit him.

Al was frothing at the mouth, gibbering. The two men hit full tilt; Al’s head caught Kelly in the midriff as he missed a straight-arm, and the breath went out of him in one great whoosh! Kelly went down like all timber, the whole world turned to one swirling red-grey haze. Al flung himself on the bigger man, clawing, smacking, too berserk to ball his fists.

“Ah’m go’ to kill you,” he gurgled. “She’ll git one, I’ll git t’other, an’ then she’ll know—”

Kelly covered his face with his arms, and as some wind was sucked at last into his labouring lungs, he flung them upward and sat up in one mighty surge. Al was hurled upward and to one side, and as he hit the ground Kelly reached out a long arm, and twisted his fingers into the man’s coarse hair, raised him up, and came across with his other fist in a punch that would have killed him had it landed square. But Al managed to jerk to one side enough so that it only amputated a cheek. He fell and lay still. Kelly scrambled madly around in the sand for his welding-rod holder, found it and began to run again. He couldn’t see Tom at all now, and the Seven was standing in the surf, moving slowly from side to side, backing out, ravening. Kelly held the rod-clamp and its trailing cable blindly before him and ran straight at the machine. And then it came — that thin, soundless bolt of energy. But this time it had its full force, for poor old Peebles’ body had not been the ground that this swirling water offered. Daisy Etta literally leaped backwards towards him, and the water around her tracks spouted upward in hot steam. The sound of her engine ran up and up, broke, took on the rhythmic, uneven beat of a swing drummer. She threw herself from side to side like a cat with a bag over its head. Kelly stepped a little closer, hoping for another bolt to come from the clamp in his hand, but there was none, for—

“The circuit breaker!” cried Kelly.

He threw the holder up on the deck plate of the Seven in front of the seat, and ran across the little beach to the welder. He reached behind the switchboard, got his thumb on the contact hinge and jammed it down.

Daisy Etta leaped again, and then again, and suddenly her motor stopped. Heat in turbulent waves blurred the air over her. The little gas tank for the starting motor went out with a cannon’s roar, and the big fuel tank, still holding thirty-odd gallons of Diesel oil, followed. It puffed itself open rather than exploded, and threw a great curtain of flame over the ground behind the machine. Motor or no motor, then, Kelly distinctly saw the tractor shudder convulsively. There was a crawling movement of the whole frame, a slight wave of motion away from the fuel tank, approaching the front of the machine, and moving upward from the tracks. It culminated in the crown of the radiator core, just in front of the radiator cap; and suddenly an area of six or seven square inches literally blurred around the edges. For a second, then, it was normal, and finally it slumped molten, and liquid metal ran down the sides, throwing out little sparks as it encountered what was left of the charred paint. And only then was Kelly conscious of agony in his left hand. He looked down. The welding machine’s generator had stopped, though the motor was still turning, having smashed the friable coupling on its drive shaft. Smoke poured from the generator, which had become little more than a heap of slag. Kelly did not scream, though, until he looked and saw what had happened to his hand—

When he could see straight again, he called for Tom, and there was no answer. At last he saw something out in the water, and plunged in after it. The splash of cold salt water on his left hand he hardly felt, for the numbness of shock had set in. He grabbed at Tom’s shirt with his good hand, and then the ground seemed to pull itself out from under his feet. That was it, then — a deep hole right off the beach. The Seven had run right to the edge of it, had kept Tom there out of his depth and—

He flailed wildly, struck out for the beach, so near and so hard to get to. He gulped a stinging lungful of brine, and only the lovely shock of his knee striking solid beach kept him from giving up to the luxury of choking to death. Sobbing with effort, he dragged Tom’s dead weight inshore and clear of the surf. It was then that he became conscious of a child’s shrill weeping; for a mad moment he thought it was he himself, and then he looked and saw that it was Al Knowles. He left Tom and went over to the broken creature.

“Get up, you,” he snarled. The weeping only got louder. Kelly rolled him over on his back — he was quite unresisting — and belted him back and forth across the mouth until Al began to choke. Then he hauled him to his feet and led him over to Tom.

“Kneel down, scum. Put one of your knees between his knees.” Al stood still. Kelly hit him again and he did as he was told.

“Put your hands on his lower ribs. There. O.K. Lean, you rat. Now sit back.” He sat down, holding his left wrist in his right hand, letting the blood drop from the ruined hand. “Lean. Hold it — sit back. Lean. Sit. Lean. Sit.”

Soon Tom sighed and began to vomit weakly, and after that he was all right.

This is the story of Daisy Etta, the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the missile test that they don’t talk about except to refer to it as the missile test that they don’t talk about. But you may have heard about it for all that — rumors, anyway. The rumor has it that an early IRBM tested out a radically new controls system by proving conclusively that it did not work. It was a big bird and contained much juice, and flew far, far afield. Rumor goes on to assert that (a) it alighted somewhere in the unmapped rain forests of South America and that (b) there were no casualties. What they really don’t talk about is the closely guarded report asserting that both (a) and (b) are false. There are only two people (aside from yourself, now) who know for sure that though (a) is certainly false, (b) is strangely true, and there were indeed no casualties.

Al Knowles may well know it too, but he doesn’t count.

It happened two days after the death of Daisy Etta, as Tom and Kelly sat in (of all places) the cool of the ruined temple. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was back in the shadows, tied up, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe Daisy was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like Daisy Etta, they found life too sweet to want any part of it spent under observation or in jail.

The warhead of the missile struck near the edge of their camp, just between the pyramid of fuel drums and the dynamite stores. The second stage alighted a moment later two miles away, in the vicinity of the five graves. Kelly and Tom stumbled out to the rim of the mesa, and for a long while watched the jetsam fall and the flotsam rise. It was Kelly who guessed what must have happened, and “Bless their clumsy little hearts,” he said happily. And he took the scribbled papers from Tom and tore them across.

But Tom shook his head, and thumbed back at the mound. “He’ll talk.”

“Him?” said Kelly, with such profound eloquence in his tone that he clearly evoked the image of Al Knowles, with his mumbling voice and his drooling mouth and his wide glazed eyes. “Let him,” Kelly said, and tore the papers again.

So they let him.