Laura jumped out under the hammer blow of sun. A haze of heat distorted the horizons, marooning the convoy in a shimmering plaza of cracked red rock. The convoy had three trucks: the first carried soldiers, the second radio equipment, the third was theirs. And the two armored half-tracks in the rear. No one came out of the halftracks or offered any food to their crews. Laura began to suspect that they had no crews. They were robots, big carnivorous versions of a common taxi-bus.