Part 3 (1/2)

The airlock rested on a gentle slope of dry, yellow gra.s.s. The meadow fell away toward a green-rimmed watercourse a quarter mile away. Beyond the stream, rows of long, narrow hills rose toward whitecapped mountains. Swards of yellow interspersed unevenly with carpets of varitone green.

Trees.

Yes, they looked like real trees, and the sky was blue. White cirrus clouds laced across the almost cyan vault overhead.

For a long moment it was eerily, unnaturally quiet. He realized he had been holding his breath since opening the door. It made him feel lightheaded.

Inhaling, he tasted the crisp, clean air. The breeze brought sounds of brus.h.i.+ng gra.s.s and creaking branches. It also brought odors . . . the unmistakable mustiness of chlorophyll and humus, of dry gra.s.s and what smelled like oak.

Dennis stood in the airlock's combing and looked at the trees. They sure looked like oak. The countryside reminded him of northern California.

Could this place actually be Earth? Dennis wondered. Had the ziev effect played another trick on them all and given them teleportation rather than an interstellar drive?

It would be amusing to hitchhike to a pay phone and call Flaster with the news. Collect, of course.

Dennis felt a sharp stab as tiny claws bit into his shoulder. The pixolet's wing membranes snapped wide with a sound like a shot, and the creature soared off over the meadow, toward the line of trees, ”Hey.. . Pix! Where are you ...”

Dennis's voice caught in his throat as he realized this couldn't be Earth. This was where Pix came from.

He began noticing little things-the shape of the leaves of gra.s.s, a huge, fernlike plant by the riverside, a feeling in the air.

Dennis made sure his bolstered sidearm was unenc.u.mbered, and his boot cuffs well covered by his gaiters. The dry gra.s.s crunched beneath his feet as he stepped out. Tiny, whining insect sounds filled the air.

”Pix!” he called, but the little creature had flown from sight.

Dennis moved cautiously, all senses alert. He guessed the first few moments on an alien world could be the most dangerous of all.

Trying to watch the sky, the forest, and the nearby insects all at once, he didn't even notice the squat little robot until he tripped over it and fell sprawling to the ground.

Dennis instinctively rolled away into a crouch, the needler suddenly in his hand, his pulse pounding in his ears.

He sighed as he recognized the little Sahara Tech exploration drone.

The 'bot's cameras tracked him with a barely discernible whir. Its observing turret slowly turned. Dennis lowered the needler. ”Come here,” he commanded.

The robot seemed to consider the order for a moment. Then it approached on spinning treads to halt a meter away.

”What have you got there?” Dennis pointed.

The robot held something in one of its manipulator grips. It was a s.h.i.+ny bit of metal, with a clawed pincer at one end.

”Isn't that a piece of another robot?” Dennis asked, hoping he was wrong.

Compared with some of the sophisticated machines Dennis had worked with, the exploration 'bot wasn't very bright. But it understood a basic vocabulary. A green light on its turret flashed, indicating a.s.sent.

”Where did you get it?”

The little machine paused, then swiveled and pointed with one of its other sampling arms.

Dennis got up and looked, but he saw nothing in that direction. He moved cautiously through the tall gra.s.s until, at last, he came to a flat area partly hidden by the weeds. There he stopped and stared.

The clearing looked like a wilderness parts store... a Grizzly Adams wrecking yard... a rustic electronics swap meet.

One-no, two-S.I.T. robots had been rather tactlessly disa.s.sembled; their parts lay in neat rows among the clumps of gra.s.s, apparently ordered and sorted by size and shape.

Dennis knelt and picked up a camera turret. It had been ripped out of its housing, and the pieces had been laid out on the ground, like merchandise for sale.

The trampled mud was strewn with scattered bits of straw, wire, and gla.s.s. Dennis looked closer Here and there, mixed in among the tread marks and the torn pieces of plastic machinery, were faint but unmistakable footprints.

Dennis looked down at the neat rows of gears, wheels, panels, and circuit boards-at the faint marks in the clay- and all he could think of was an epitaph he had once read in a New England cemetery.

I knew this would happen someday.

Dennis had always felt he was somehow destined to encounter something really unusual during his life. Well, here it was in front of him-tangible evidence of alien intelligence.

The comforting Earthlike Gestalt finished evaporating around him.

He looked at the ”gra.s.s” and saw it wasn't like any gra.s.s he had ever seen. The line of trees was now a dark, unknown forest filled with malign forces. Dennis felt a crawling sensation on the nape of his neck.

A clicking sound made him whirl, the needler in his hand. But it was only the surviving robot again, poking through-the pieces of its disa.s.sembled fellows.

Dennis picked up an electronics board from the ground. It had been pried out of its housing by main force. It could easily have been separated with just a twist, but it had been roughly sheared away, as if the ent.i.ty doing the dissection had never heard of threaded sleeves or bolts.

Was this the work of primitives, then? Or someone from a race so advanced that they'd forgotten about such simple things as screws?

One thing was certain. The being or beings responsible didn't have a high regard for other people's property.

The robots had been made mostly of plastic. He noted that most of the bigger metal pieces seemed to be missing entirely.

Dennis suddenly had a very unpleasant thought. ”Oh, no,” he murmured. ”Please, don't let it be!” He rose with feeling of numb dread in the pit of his stomach.

Dennis walked back to the airlock. He rounded the corner and stopped suddenly, groaning out loud.

The access panel to the zievatron return mechanism lay ajar. The electronics cabinet was empty; its delicate components lay on the ground, like pieces on display on a store shelf. Most were clearly broken beyond repair.

With an eloquence borne of irony, Dennis simply said ”Argh!” and sagged back against the wall of the airlock.

Another epigram floated around in the despair that seemed to fill his brain-something a friend had once said to him about the phenomenology of life.

'7 think, therefore I scream.”

The robot ”peeped” and played the sequence over again. Dennis concentrated on the three-day-old images displayed on the machine's tiny video plate. Something very strange was going on here.

The small screen showed shapes that looked like blurry humanoid figures moving around the zievatron airlock. The beings walked on two legs and appeared to be accompanied by at least two kinds of quadrupeds. Beyond that, Dennis could hardly make out any detail from the noisy enlargement.

The miracle was that he could see anything at all. According to its inertia! recorder, the robot had been on a distant ridge, several kilometers away, when it detected activity back at the airlock and turned to photograph the shapes cl.u.s.tered about the zievatron portal.

At that distance, the robot shouldn't have been able to see anything at all. Dennis suspected something was wrong with the 'bot's internal tracker. It must have been closer than it thought it was at the time.