The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (44 page)

The wait then was interminable. Back over the hill they could hear the labouring 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 a little more than an idle.

“She’s gonna jump,” screamed Al. “I’m gettin’ 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 topsoil 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 the last of her tremendous load, spun around and headed back upwards, 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 towards 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.”

“Why me out in the open?”

“Don’t you think those long laigs o’ yours can outrun her in that distance?”

“Reckon they got to,” grinned Kelly. “O.K., Tom.”

They waited tensely.
Daisy Etta
backed close by, started another pass. As the motor blatted under the load, Tom said, “Now!” and they jumped. Kelly, catlike as always, landed on his feet. Tom, whose knees and ankles were black and blue with rope bruises, took two staggering steps and fell. Kelly scooped him to his feet as the dozer’s steel prow came around the bank. Instantly she was in fifth gear and howling down at them. Kelly flung himself to the left and Tom to the right, and they pounded away, Kelly out towards the runway, Tom straight for the shovel.
Daisy Etta
let them diverge for a moment, keeping her course, trying to pursue both; then she evidently sized Tom up as the slower, for she swung towards him. The instant’s hesitation was all Tom needed to get the little lead necessary. He tore up to the shovel, his legs going like pistons, and dived down between the shovel’s tracks.

As he hit the ground, the big manganese-steel mouldboard hit the right track of the shovel, and the impact set all forty-seven tons of the great machine quivering. But Tom did not stop. he scrabbled his way under the rig, stood up behind it, leaped and caught the sill of the rear window, clapped his other hand on it, drew himself up and tumbled inside. Here he was safe for the moment; the huge tracks themselves were higher than the Seven’s blade could rise, and the floor of the cab was a good sixteen inches higher than the top of the track. Tom went to the cab door and peeped outside. The tractor had drawn off and was idling.

“Study away,” gritted Tom, and went to the big Murphy Diesel. He unhurriedly checked the oil with the bayonet gauge, replaced it, took the governor cut-out rod from its rack and inserted it in the governor casing. He set the master throttle at the halfway mark, pulled up the starter-handle, twitched the cutout. The motor spat a wad of the blue smoke out of its hooded exhaust and caught. Tom put the rod back, studied the fuel-flow glass and pressure gauges, and then went to the door and looked out again. The Seven had not moved, but it was revving up and down in that uneven fashion it had shown up on the mesa. Tom had the extraordinary idea that it was gathering itself to spring. He slipped into the saddle, threw the master clutch. The big gears that half-filled the cab obediently began to turn. He kicked the brake-locks loose with his heels, let his feet rest lightly on the pedals as they rose.

Then he reached over his head and snapped back the throttle. As the Murphy picked up he grasped both hoist and swing levers and pulled them back. The engine howled; the two-yard bucket came up off the ground with a sudden jolt as the cold friction grabbed it. The big machine swung hard to the right; Tom snapped his hoist lever forward and checked the bucket’s rise with his foot on the brake. He shoved the crowd lever forward; the bucket ran out to the end of its reach, and the heel of the bucket wiped across the Seven’s hood, taking with it the exhaust stack, muffler and all, and the pre-cleaner on the air intake. Tom cursed. He had figured on the machine’s leaping backwards. If it had, he would have smashed the cast-iron radiator core. But she had stood still, making a split-second decision.

Now she moved, though, and quickly. With that incredibly fast shifting, she leaped backwards and pivoted out of range before Tom could check the shovel’s mad swing. The heavy swing-friction blocks smoked acridly as the machine slowed, stopped and swung back. Tom checked her as he was facing the Seven, hoisted his bucket a few feet, and rehauled, bringing it about halfway back, ready for anything. The four great dipper-teeth gleamed in the sun. Tom ran a practised eye over cables, boom and dipper-stick, liking the black polish of crater compound on the sliding parts, the easy tension of well-greased cables and links. The huge machine stood strong, ready and profoundly subservient for all its brute power.

Tom looked searchingly at the Seven’s ruined engine hood. The gaping end of the broken air-intake pipe stared back at him. “Aha!” he said. “A few cupfuls of nice dry marl down there’ll give you something to chew on.”

Keeping a wary eye on the tractor, he swung into the bank, dropped his bucket and plunged it into the marl. He crowded in deep, and the Murphy yelled for help but kept on pushing. At the peak of the load a terrific jar rocked him in the saddle. He looked back over his shoulder through the door and saw the Seven backing off again. She had run up and delivered a terrific punch to the counter-weight at the back of the cab. Tom grinned tightly. She’d have to do better than that. There was nothing back there but eight or ten tons of solid steel. And he didn’t much care at the moment whether or not she scratched his paint.

He swung back again, white marl running away on both sides of the heaped bucket. The shovel rode perfectly now, for a shovel is counterweighted to balance true when standing level with the bucket loaded. The hoist, swing frictions and the brake linings had heated and dried themselves of the night’s condensation moisture, and she answered the controls in a way that delighted the operator in him. He handled the swing lever lightly, back to swing to the right, forward to swing to the left, following the slow dance the Seven had started to do, stepping warily back and forth like a fighter looking for an opening. Tom kept the bucket between himself and the tractor, knowing that she could not hurt a tool that was built to smash hard rock for twenty hours a day and like it.

Daisy Etta
bellowed and rushed in. Tom snapped the hoist lever back hard, and the bucket rose, letting the tractor run underneath. Tom punched the bucket trip, and the great steel jaw opened, cascading marl down on the broken hood. The tractor’s fan blew it back in a huge billowing cloud. The instant that it took Tom to check and dump was enough, however, for the tractor to dance back out of the way, for when he tried to drop it on the machine to smash the coiled injector tubes on top of the engine block, she was gone.

The dust cleared away, and the tractor moved in again, feinted to the left, then swung her blade at the bucket, which was just clear of the ground. Tom swung to meet her, her feint having got her in a little closer than he liked, and bucket met blade with a shower of sparks and a clank that could be heard for half a mile. She had come in with her blade high, and Tom let out a wordless shout as he saw that the A-frame brace behind the blade had caught between two of his dipper-teeth. He snatched at his hoist lever and the bucket came up, lifting with it the whole front end of the bulldozer.

Daisy Etta
plunged up and down and her tracks dug violently into the earth as she raised and lowered her blade, trying to shake herself free. Tom rehauled, trying to bring the tractor in closer, for the boom was set too low to attempt to lift such a dead weight. As it was, the shovel’s off track was trying its best to get off the ground. But the crowd and rehaul frictions could not handle her alone; they began to heat and slip.

Tom hoisted a little; the shovel’s off track came up a foot off the ground. Tom cursed and let the bucket drop, and in an instant the dozer was free and running clear. Tom swung wildly at her, missed. The dozer came in on a long curve; Tom swung to meet her again, took a vicious swipe at her which she took on her blade. But this time she did not withdraw after being hit, but bored right in, carrying the bucket before her. Before Tom realized what she was doing, his bucket was around in front of the tracks and between them, on the ground. It was as swift and skilful a manoeuvre as could be imagined, and it left the shovel without the ability to swing as long as
Daisy Etta
could hold the bucket trapped between the tracks.

Tom crowded furiously, but that succeeded only in lifting the boom higher in the air, since there is nothing to hold a boom down but its own weight. Hoisting did nothing but make his frictions smoke and rev the engine down dangerously close to the stalling point.

Tom swore again and reached down to the cluster of small levers at his left. These were the gears. On this type of shovel, the swing lever controls everything except crowd and hoist. With the swing lever, the operator, having selected his gear, controls the travel – that is, power to the tracks – in forward and reverse; booming up and booming down; and swinging. The machine can do only one of these things at a time. If he is in travel gear, she cannot swing. If she is in swing gear, she cannot boom up or down. Not once in years of operating would this inability bother an operator; now, however, nothing was normal.