y turns,
glowing evilly red.

Dworn braked the beetle to a stop on a patch of high ground, and sat
straining to discern the meaning of those ominous beacons. To his
imagination, rasped raw by expectation and the tension of long travel,
they became red eyes of menace, warnings.... He tried the infrared
viewer, but it showed no more than he could see with the naked eye. Only
ghosts paraded across the screen, ghosts of the folded slopes that rose
to the abrupt wall of the Barrier. Nothing seemed moving there; the
whole sweep of broken and tumbled landscape appeared dead and lifeless
as the moon.

But yonder burned the fires.

Sternly Dworn reminded himself that this night he was mature, a warrior
of the proud beetle race. He thrust his fears resolutely aside; there
was nothing to do but find out.

The beetle drifted forward, but cautiously now, at a stalking pace.
Dworn took advantage of the lie of the land, continually seeking cover
as he advanced, to shield him from whatever eyes might be watching from
the silent slopes above.

Boulders lay ever more thickly strewn as he neared the Barrier cliffs,
and he skirted patches of gravel and loose stones that would have
crunched loudly under his wheels. Only occasionally, emerging into the
open, he glimpsed his objective, but his sense of direction kept him
bearing steadily toward the fires.

Fifteen minutes later, the beetle's blunt nose thrusting from under a
shelf of rock that would disguise its outline if anything was watching,
its motor noiselessly idling, Dworn knew that his premonitions had not
been in vain. He looked out upon a scene that chilled his blood.

The burning machines, scattered for two hundred yards along the talus
slope where destruction had come upon them or where they had plunged out
of control, were beetles. Or they had been. Now they were wrecks,
smashed, overturned, fitfully aflame.

There was no sign of an enemy. But here was the havoc which some
powerful enemy had wrought, it could not have been long ago.

He strove to find identifying marks on the blackened hulks, but in the
uncertain light could make out at first no more than the female
ornaments which had graced two or three of them. Names and faces flashed
through Dworn's mind; he could not know yet who had perished here, which
faces he would not see again....

It hardly occurred to him to speculate that anyone might be left alive
on the scene of the debacle. For one thing, the destru