Geoffrey was a little nettled by The Barbarian's manner. It wasn't, after all, as if anybody claimed there were dragons or monsters or any other such oceanic thing living here. This was good, solid fact--people had actually come up here, tried to bring civilization to the tribes, and failed completely. They were, by all reports, hairy, dirty people equipped with accurate rifles. No one had bothered to press the issue, because obviously it was hardly worth it. Geoffrey had expected to have trouble with them--but he had expected to meet it in an armored vehicle. But now that the mountains had turned out to be so far away, the situation might grow quite serious. And The Barbarian didn't seem to care very much. "Well, now, lad," he was saying, "if the tribesmen're that bad, maybe your friends the nobles won't dare follow us up here." "They'll follow us," Geoffrey answered flatly. "I slapped Dugald's face." "Oh. Oh, I didn't understand that. Code of honor--that sort of thing. All the civilized appurtenances." "It's hardly funny." "No, I suppose not. I don't suppose it occurred to you to kill him on the spot?" "Kill a _noble_ in hot blood?" "Sorry. Code of honor again. Forget I mentioned it." Geoffrey rankled under The Barbarian's barely concealed amusement. To avoid any more of this kind of thing, he pointedly turned and looked at the terrain behind them--something he ought to have done a little earlier. Three tankettes were in sight, only a few miles behind them, laboring down the slope of a hill. And at that moment, as though rivetted iron had a dramatic sense of its own, their tankette coughed, spun lazily on one track as the crankshaft paused with a cam squarely between positions, and burned up the last drops of oil and alcohol in its fuel tank. * * * Geoffrey and Myka crouched down in a brushy hollow. The Barbarian had crawled up to the lip of the depression, and was peering through a clump of weeds at the oncoming trio. "That seems to be all of them," he said with a turn of his head. "It's possible they kept their speed down and nursed themselves along to save fuel. They might even have a fuel waggon coming up behind them. That's the way I'd do it. It would mean these three are all we can expect for a few hours, anyway, but that they'll be heavily reinforced some time later."