The Dead-Star Rover

Too Long; Didn't Read

The terrapin was traveling eighty miles an hour—far too fast for such uneven country. Over maddeningly repetitive dunes it scudded, rising with a swoop to each windward slope and hurtling clear of the ground beyond each wave-like crest, to plunge through the trough in a hurricane of flying sand. The wiry little man who crouched tensely, hugged by a padded safety belt, in the pitching, vibrant interior of the midget combat car, was impatient, furiously so. Thanks to an unusually stubborn case of engine trouble, he was a full two hours behind the rest of his troop; by now they must have sighted the new camping place on the shore of the Salt Sea. And the blazing sun was already sinking toward the dusty horizon haze. Torcred the Terrapin came of a people unused to fear—but his shrewd intelligence, calculating the risks he must run before he rejoined the others, found the daylight dangers enough and to spare, and nothing attractive in the thought of an encounter with any of the things that prowled the desolate plain after the sun went down.