another curious thing. He was
crossing a sandy natural terrace, and the soft soil here was traversed
by a row of indented marks that marched in a straight line across the
open space. They were scuffed depressions, such as a ricocheting
projectile might have made--but oddly regular in shape and spacing,
almost, he thought fancifully, like giant footprints, ten feet apart....

Dworn was growing numbed to riddles. He shrugged impatiently and pressed
the accelerator again.

He would push on northward for a few more miles, he determined, and if
he still found no sign of his people, he would circle back to the
south....

The moonlight shadow of the huge tilted boulder ahead was inky. But
Dworn was keeping to the shadows by preference, remembering the death
from above; so he cut close around the overhanging rock.

Too late to swerve, then, he saw the gleam of something stretched across
his path. A metallic glint of deceptively slender strands which, as the
beetle rolled headlong into them, snapped taut without breaking, sprang
back and flipped the beetle clean over to fetch up against the rock with
an ear-shattering bang.

Half-stunned by the suddenness of it and the violence with which he had
been flung about, Dworn blurrily saw other cables settling from
overhead, coiling almost like living things around his overturned
machine. Then he glimpsed something else; stalking monstrously down from
the unscalable crag above, its armor glimmering in the moonlight, a
machine such as he had never imagined--a machine without wheels or
treads, a nightmare moving on jointed steel legs that flexed and found
holds for clawed steel feet with the smooth precision of well-oiled
pistons. A machine that walked.

Capsized, its vulnerable underside exposed, the beetle was all but
helpless. One hope remained. With wooden fingers Dworn groped for the
emergency button, found it--

The propellant-charge went off beneath him with a deafening roar. The
beetle was hurled upward and sidewise, in an arc that should have
brought it down on its wheels again--but the ensnaring cables tightened
and held, and Dworn's head slammed against something inside the cabin.
The world burst apart into a shower of lights and darkness....

* * * * *

Dworn came awake to a pounding head and blurred light in his eyes. He
moved, and sensed that he was bound.

His vision cleared. He saw that he was in a closed, half-darkened
chamber-