“This is your doing! We never had trouble before—”

“Never mind that! Have you got a field car?”

“We—” Blauvelt checked himself. “What if we have?”

“I can stop it—but I have to be close. It will be into the jungle in another minute. My car can’t navigate there.”

“Let him go,” a man said, breathing hard from his run. “He can’t do no harm out there.”

“Who’d of thought it?” another man said. “Setting there all them years—who’d of thought he could travel like that?”

“Your so-called mascot might have more surprises in store for you,” Crewe snapped. “Get me a car, fast! This is an official requisition, Blauvelt!”

There was a silence, broken only by the distant crashing of timber as the Bolo moved into the edge of the forest. Hundred-foot trees leaned and went down before its advance.

“Let him go,” Blauvelt said. “Like Stinzi says, he can’t hurt anything.”

“What if he turns back?”

“Hell,” a man muttered. “Old Bobby wouldn’t hurt us…”

“That car,” Crewe snarled. “You’re wasting valuable time.”

Blauvelt frowned. “All right—but you don’t make a move unless it looks like he’s going to come back and hit the town. Clear?”

“Let’s go.”

Blauvelt led the way at a trot toward the town garage.

The Bolo’s trail was a twenty-five foot wide swath cut through the virgin jungle; the tread-prints were pressed eighteen inches into the black loam, where it showed among the jumble of fallen branches.

“It’s moving at about twenty miles an hour, faster than we can go,” Crewe said. “If it holds its present track, the curve will bring it back to your town in about five hours.”

“He’ll sheer off,” Blauvelt said.

“Maybe. But we won’t risk it. Pick up a heading of 270°, Blauvelt. We’ll try an intercept by cutting across the circle.”

Blauvelt complied wordlessly. The car moved ahead in the deep green gloom under the huge shaggy-barked trees. Oversized insects buzzed and thumped against the canopy. Small and medium lizards hopped, darted, flapped. Fern leaves as big as awnings scraped along the car as it clambered over loops and coils of tough root, leaving streaks of plant juice across the clear plastic. Once they grated against an exposed ridge of crumbling brown rock; flakes as big as saucers scaled off, exposing dull metal.

“Dorsal fin of a scout-boat,” Crewe said. “That’s what’s left of what was supposed to be a corrosion resistant alloy.”

They passed more evidences of a long-ago battle: the massive, shattered breech mechanism of a platform-mounted Hellbore, the gutted chassis of what might have been a bomb car, portions of a downed aircraft, fragments of shattered armor. Many of the relics were of Terran design, but often it was the curiously curved, spidery lines of a rusted Axorc microgun or implosion projector that poked through the greenery.