He raised one hand on high, palm outward in an immemorial gesture that he could only hope would be seen. He shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop! Don"t shoot! I come in _peace_!"
His heart leaped. The leading spider ground to a halt, and the others behind it. He saw a dim figure move atop the foremost towering machine; and before he could speak again, heard the rasping voice of the Spider Mother herself.
"You! The one who got away--and who seduced one of _us_ from the ways of her ancestors--? What peace can there be between you and us?"
"I bring," cried Dworn clearly, "warning of the Drone."
There was stunned silence.
Dworn sensed the other spiders watching from the height of their machines; and he guessed something of what must be going on in the mind of the fierce old woman staring down at him. She would be wondering if an alien, a mere beetle, would be so far without honor, so anxious to save his own skin, as to lie in such a matter.
Then he felt Qanya"s hand in his, and heard her cry out, her voice vibrant and a.s.sured: "It is true, Mother! I have seen them too. The night-fliers, the raiders--they are the evil things our legends tell of!"
The great machine took two steps forward and knelt low to the ground.
"Come here!" rasped the Spider Mother, and when the two advanced till she could look into their young faces--"You swear to this?"
"We swear!" they said at the same moment.
The Spider Mother"s face was like iron. She looked from one to the other slowly.
"Then," she said stiffly and formally, leaning over to extend a wrinkled hand to Dworn, "let there be peace between us ... between me and mine and you and yours, and among all living peace ... till the evil is no more!"
Dworn took the hand, and answered, hurriedly recalling ancient custom: "Till the evil is no more!" And heard Qanya echo the words.
All night the desert was stirring, with a feverish hastening of messengers. These were at first spiders--then, members of a half dozen, a dozen other races, as the word was pa.s.sed from one people to another--as tribe after tribe of hardbitten, suspicious warriors, fingers, fidgeting on triggers at the open approach of their hereditary mortal foes, heard and were electrified by the news--
_The Coming of the Drone!_
And hand gripped hand, all feuds were forgotten, the peoples mingled in a common effort of hurried mobilization. The desert land below the cliffs crawled with them, a mixed mult.i.tude of constantly increasing numbers, girding themselves for war.
Ferocious predatory machines--spiders, wheel-bugs, scorpions--formidable in their armor and bristling with guns, lay alongside the more pacific slugs and caterpillars and snails which in ordinary times were their natural prey, and were freely fuelled and provisioned out of the stores which normally their possessors would have fought to the death to safeguard against the despoilers....
In the presence of the drones, there were no more natural enmities. For the drones were the Enemy. Their coming meant that all life was kindred; deep in the heritage of every people was the almost instinctive knowledge that, if the drones were not checked as tradition decreed, their blind automatic propagation would end by sweeping every living thing from the face of the Earth.
Toward morning, the chiefs of a score of tribes held council of war in the very shadow of the Barrier. Their consultation was brief; there was no arguable question of what must be done, only of how. And if the drones were about to swarm, they must act promptly. No time to wait for the gathering of more distant peoples; no time to send word to the wasps or the hornets and gain aerial support. They must strike with what they had.
Dworn started awake as a hand touched his shoulder. He sat up, angrily flinging a coverlet from him.
"I didn"t intend to sleep!" he muttered, rubbing his eyes and realizing where he was--below ground in the spiders" colony, whither he and Qanya had been taken and where he had been persuaded to lie down and rest a little while the warning was carried by others.
The tall blonde spider, Purri, was grinning maliciously down at him.
"Hear the beetle talk! I suppose, after a day spent in what, for you was comparative idleness, you felt like doing something really strenuous ...
say going out and demolishing the drones" hive bare handed...?"
Dworn climbed to his feet. With a violent effort he kept from wincing at the protest of stiffened muscles and yesterday"s collection of bruises.
"What"s going on out there now? Where"s Qanya?"
"There"s really nothing more _you_ can do, you know. I merely woke you because I thought you"d want to hear that your beetle-folk have been contacted--they"d holed up to lick their wounds about twenty miles south of here--and have joined the fighting force that"s getting ready to attack the drones at dawn. As for dear little Qanya, she"s sleeping angelically in the next chamber...."
"No, she isn"t," said Qanya from the doorway.
"You, too?" said Purri with irritation. "And what do you want, scapegrace?"
Qanya"s black eyes narrowed dangerously. She moved forward to Dworn"s side and took a grip on his arm. "I might ask what you"re doing here disturbing--"
"Both of you, you"re wasting time," growled Dworn.
He"d heard with a queer pang that his people--those who remained alive--had been located. Not that it made any real difference, of course. His father was dead, and he, Dworn, was dead too as far as his own kind was concerned. Nor, in this world, was there anywhere else he could turn.
For the present, under the threat of the Drone, that didn"t matter. All laws of all peoples were in abeyance for the duration of the great emergency. But once the threat was dissolved, and the old laws resumed their force, the plight of Dworn and of Qanya also would be what it had been--that of outcasts in a world where an outcast had no chance of survival.
Well, it was no use thinking of the future. Dworn said determinedly: "I want to see the end of this business, at least."
"And I!" declared Qanya. "We"ve earned that right."
Purri eyed them sourly, shrugged. "As you like. I"m in command here while the Mother"s busy at the front. I"ll see you get transportation up there." Turning toward the door, she glanced sidelong at Dworn....
"You"ll have to go separately, since a spider will only carry two. I"m leaving right away myself; _you_ may come with me in my machine--"
"No, he won"t," declared Qanya with finality, tightening her hold on Dworn"s arm. "He can ride with old Zimka."
Purri stalked through the doorway before them, grumbling to herself, "Why is it the best ones always get away?"
Earlier in the night, climbing spiders--the only machines which could manage the ascent of the toppled Barrier--had scouted the periphery of the drones" fortress, and discovered the sole possible approach to it.
At a single spot above the slide, a low ridge made it feasible to surmount the rim and steal out onto the table-land beyond without coming in direct view of the enemy"s installations.
Once that was known, the council of chiefs decided on a daring strategy.
Up the thousand-foot slope of tumbled rocks below that one vulnerable point, a fantastic supply line was established. One by one, machines from among those ma.s.sing on the desert below toiled upward until wheels or treads could carry them no further; then they were hoisted bodily over the precipices by the invaluable spiders, who anch.o.r.ed themselves firmly in place with the powerful steel cables they ordinarily used for snaring prey, and used other such cables as pulleys.
Through the remaining hours of darkness the joined forces labored with Herculean devotion to accomplish the seemingly impossible task. There were brushes with the enemy, for the wingless drones still came and went about the mountainside and from time to time their winged kindred flew overhead. But strict orders had gone out to all the allied peoples--avoid opening fire, avoid precipitating a general engagement, and freeze motionless whenever the fliers pa.s.sed over. This last instruction rested on the observation that the robot predators, with whatever sensory devices they used, apparently had difficulty in spotting anything but a moving target.
In this wise, when dawn began to break, close to three hundred first-line fighting machines of a dozen different species had been raised to the summit of the Barrier. Thence they filtered cautiously out across the plateau, in a great arc moving to enclose the hollow of the drones.
The sky was lightening when Dworn and Qanya settled themselves to watch from the crest of the rocky ridge which had shielded the attacking forces" deployment not far from the brink of the cliffs.
Behind them, the spiders which had brought them here melted stealthily away toward the east, going to take their places in the battle line.
The two were alone once more, looking out over the vast circular depression infested by the enemy, just as they had yesterday at sunset.
But today, as the sun rose, the situation was very different. For miles around the circ.u.mference of the great hive, there were furtive stirrings, last-minute movements of preparation for the imminent a.s.sault. From behind every outcropping and fold of the ground, grim gun-muzzles pointed inward, ready to begin spitting fire when the zero second came.