Selected Stories (28 page)

“Dennis’ machine has a flat tire 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 on. 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’ to 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 tire 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 ears 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 working’. 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 their 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 you reckon she’s playin’ at?”

“Search me. She seems to want fuel, but I don’t … look at that! She stopped in the hole; … turnin’ … smashing the top corner of the moldboard 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 get 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 tougher ground skillfully, 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 laboring 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 at little more than an idle.

“She’s gonna jump!” screamed Al. “I’m getting’ 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 top-soil 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 her tremendous load, spun around and headed back upward, 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 toward 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.”