But he didn't try to answer.
Breathless with sneezing, he ran on with the trembling child until he could see the old search building.
The ruin of it stood on the very lip of a deep new excavation.
The west wall had already been ripped away, and the flat concrete dome had begun to settle, so that it was leaning drunkenly.
The excavating machine was somewhere out of view, however, and he thought the way might still be open to that masked elevator.
Sneezing as he ran, he wiped his eyes with the loose blue sleeve and watched the grounds ahead.
All the straight new walks and neat new lawns seemed oddly empty.
He saw a power mower, stopped and deserted. The mechanical units, he thought, must be hiding from Jane Carter's eyes.
"Stop!" she sobbed abruptly.
"That ship behind us - Mr. Overstreet says the black machines are going to take it up in the air and let it drop on us."
They turned back together and Forester could see the cruiser on the landing stage, mirroring the dawn like a huge silver egg.
He saw two humanoids darting toward it from the blue-and- amber villa, and pointed them out to Jane.
She looked at them, and they fell.
"Come on," she urged. "Before they think of something else."
At the end of the smooth new walk, he helped her across an open ditch.
Not for many years had he moved so violently, and his thin muscles began quivering to the weakness of exhaustion as they ran on across the rough ground beyond.
His labored breath made stabbing pains in his chest, and sharp stones cut his feet.
But they were halfway to the building before Jane Carter began to hang back, whimpering breathlessly. Pale with terror, she was pointing up at a long new ridge of raw soil and broken rock ahead.
"The machine that digs," she whispered. "Coming!"
They sprinted for the building, too late.
That enormous machine which had been slowly slicing the end of the mountain into geometric neatness came lurching over the new embankment, no longer deliberate.
The first sunlight flashed yellow on its huge bright blades and red on its black-and-crimson armor, as it roared down to meet them.
Chapter SEVENTEEN
NO LONGER creeping, that mountain-eating saurian snarled and bellowed with overburdened gears.
The wide cutting blades slashed down wickedly, and cruel metal teeth glittered in its maw.
"Oh, Mr. White!" Jane Carter was calling desperately.
"Please, Mr. Overstreet - please show me what to do.
I don't know how to stop it - I can't find the black thing in it."
Forester paused an instant, waiting for those men in their cavern fastness to stop the machine, but it came plunging on.
Picking up the child, he ran again for the building.
The lurching armored monster swerved instantly to cut him off.
He tried to double back, and it veered again to meet him.
Feinting right, he darted left.
The machine attempted to follow, but its vast whipping tracks failed for a moment to hold in the loose rubble of the new embankment.
He got past it - almost.
The wallowing machine had almost buried itself in clouds of yellow dust and flying rocks, and the leaning wreck of the building was again in view, close behind it, when a round stone turned beneath Forester's foot.
He went to his knees, and the machine had time to climb out of its pit.
Wheeling, it came after him. He ran to the right again, and again it cut him off.
"Can't they stop it?" he panted huskily at Jane.
"Or can't you get the humanoid in it?"
"But there isn't any," she whimpered faintly.
"Mr. White says it is run by beams straight from the brain machine on Wing IV, and there isn't any black thing I can stop."
Now on firm level ground, the excavator came ponderously on, and as he fled with Jane in his arms he saw that it was herding him like some driven animal away from the ruined building, forcing him out along a narrowing shelf between that steep new embankment and the ragged edge of the mesa.
"Please - Mr. White!" the child was begging frantically.
"Please - can't you help?"
But nothing halted that grinding metal avalanche.
Forester tried to climb the embankment and came back down into its path again, floundering in a slide of broken stone.
Dust choked him, and sharp rocks slashed him.
The child had become an impossible burden in his arms, but he somehow lifted her again, still retreating toward the point of that diminishing rocky bench, where the embankment came to the rim. He was cornered, and he saw no way out.
"Climb!" Jane shrieked.