Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Dworn heard a smothered sound beside him. A tear rolled down Qanya's smudged cheek, and Dworn thought fuzzily, Even spiders can cry. Only, he corrected, she's not a spider any more she's now just a ghost like me.

  If he hadn't been a ghost already, if he hadn't lost his own machine--the idea of jumping clear and saving both their human lives while letting the spider be destroyed would never have occurred to him.

  He came to himself, hissed, "Down! Keep low and maybe they'll overlook us!"

  They huddled together on the slope of the sandhill, while the victorious flying enemy circled round in a miles-wide sweep and began descending toward their base again, wing-flaps braking them for landing.

  And on the ground meanwhile, the crawlers which had come from the tunnel were proceeding on their way, leaving two of their number behind with strange indifference to their own casualties.

  "What'll we do?" quavered Qanya.

  Dworn had time to take stock of the situation. The tunnel-mound was, as he had seen before, the only cover--and that a poor one--for a considerable distance. It was all of a quarter mile to the edge beyond which the cliffs fell away.

  He tried to sound hopeful--whether for Qanya's sake or to keep up his own courage, he could hardly have said. "I think we'll have to stay here, and hope we're not noticed, until it gets dark. Then, maybe--"

  Qanya caught her breath sharply and gripped his arm. "Look--there!"

  Still far away across the sloping floor of the great bowl, but rapidly approaching from its center, moved a dust cloud. Beneath it, the expiring sunlight glinted on the aluminum shells of at least a score of the ground machines.

  Dworn said grimly, "Might have expected it; they'll be coming to look over the scene of action and pick up the pieces. We've one chance; keep out of sight behind this little hill, and maybe they won't investigate too closely."

  Qanya nodded, biting her lip. She could reckon as well as he how much that chance was worth.

  * * * * *

  The buzzing motors came nearer. The two cowering in the lee of the mound, almost without daring to breathe, heard them halt, slow to idling speed one by one a little way off, where the wrecked spider lay. From that spot obscure sounds began rising, thuds and gratings and a shrill hissing noise.

  But then--the whine of a single high-speed engine rose again, clear to their hearing. One of the enemy was approaching around the flank of the sandhill.

  They crouched motionless, frozen. No hope in either flight or fight; on the open ground, they would be run down in no time, and they had no weapons--even the notion of a weapon, as something apart from the fighting machine that carried it, was alien to their thinking.

  The enemy vehicle rolled into full view and nosed slowly along the base of the mound; its motor whining questingly, only a few yards of gentle slope between it and the huddled pair. Its vision-ports glinted redly in the sunset glow, and Dworn could almost feel the raking of murderous eyes from behind them.... Like the other machines of this kind he had seen it was small and without armor--it couldn't weigh more than a couple of thousand pounds, and it carried no guns. From the vantage of his armed and armored beetle, he had regarded its like as flimsy and harmless-looking.... But now he realized for the first time how helpless a mere human was against such a thing, and, with an irrepressible shudder, how easily the grappling and cutting-tools this one was equipped with might be employed for--dismantling--flesh and blood.

  The machine paused momentarily. Then its engine revved up again. It rolled on past, giving no sign of excitement, and vanished beyond the hillside.

  "Dworn, Dworn, it didn't see us!" Qanya was sobbing with relief.

  Dworn was staring after the enemy, brows puzzledly drawn downward. The sounds from the other side of the mound went on uninterrupted--a clangor of metal, the prolonged shrilling of a cutting-torch, where evidently they were at work breaking up the smashed spider-vehicle.

  He said huskily, "Something's very queer about them.... Wait. I've got to take a look."

  Qanya glanced at him in quick alarm as he started wriggling to the crest of the sandhill. Then she followed silently, and peered over the top beside him.

  Twilight was descending, but they could still see easily enough what went on out there. Not a hundred yards away, the little machines swarmed about the spider, bringing their various wrecking equipment into play to dismantle it rapidly under the watchers' eyes. Torches flared, winches tugged at fragments of the shattered monster. An aluminum cylinder with a serrated alligator snout rolled triumphantly away, bearing aloft the shank of a great steel leg....

  But Dworn's attention was riveted by what was happening closer at hand. Here, near the tunnel-entrance that opened just below their observation point, lay the two crawlers which the runaway spider had disabled. One of these, the one which had merely been overturned and severely dented, was already being dragged away, wheels still helplessly in the air, by a towing-machine. The other had been smashed beyond repair. Around it several of the new arrivals were busy, callously and efficiently beginning to take it apart.

  Dworn watched them at it, and the dreadful suspicion that had budded in his mind ripened into a monstrous certainty.

  Aluminum skin was swiftly stripped away; frame members of the same metal were clipped neatly asunder by a machine armed with great shearing jaws. The engine came loose and was hoisted aloft carried dangling away by another specialized machine. In an incredibly short time, little but a bare chassis remained, and that too was being attacked by the salvagers.

  And Dworn knew at last beyond all doubt, what manner of things these were.

  Beside him he heard a sharp gasp, and turned to put a warning finger on Qanya's lips. He drew her gently back with him, out of view of the activities on the farther side of the mound.

  "You understand what that means?"

  The girl nodded soberly. "We have the tradition. I think that must be one tradition that all the peoples have in common."

  "Then you know what we have to do."

  She nodded again.

  Between them the word hung unspoken--a word not to be uttered lightly, so awful was it in its connotations, freighted with memories of a terror rooted in the youth of the world.

  Drones.

  * * * * *

  In the beginning--said the stories--there were the ancients, who were great and powerful beyond the imagining of the latter-day peoples. But the ancients were divided among themselves, for some of them were good and some of them were evil.

  So they fought one another, with the terrific weapons of devastation which they owned. And the good triumphed in the end, as it must--though at terrible cost, for in those wars the earth was stripped almost lifeless; searing flame, plague, climatic convulsions wiped out the varied life which once populated the world, and finally there remained only the peoples of the machine, all of whom--diverse though their ways of existence had become, and for all that they lived in ceaseless conflict with each other--were descended from the victors in that primal struggle of men like gods.

  But the evil old ones, though they were vanquished and their seed utterly annihilated, had nevertheless found a way to perpetuate their evil upon the earth. For before the last of them died, as a final act of vindictive atrocity, they created the drones....

  Qanya was shivering uncontrollably. She whispered, "No one remembers when they last came. Some thought there were none left in the world."

  "It's the same among my people," Dworn said hushedly. "There's no record of the drones' having appeared in the time of anyone now living.... But here they are."

  From out of sight came the rattle and clank and whine of machines at work. And from farther away, from the direction of the great windowless buildings, there were hootings and throbbing sounds, and from time to time a deep rumbling that shook the earth.

  Those noises were somehow unspeakably horrible now--now that they knew there was no one there. No one--nothing but the machines, without feeling or thought, without life, with onl
y the blind meaningless activity of unliving mechanism set in motion and made self-subsisting a thousand or two thousand years ago....

  With infinite caution the two humans peeked once again over the summit of the mound. Out there on the flat, the little wingless drones buzzed to and fro with their false seeming of animation, finishing their work.

  From around the great buildings, whose interior no living eyes had ever looked upon, lights winked oddly blue through the thickening dusk. They caught glimpses of immense moving machinery, and heard mysterious sounds. Once and again, it seemed that in the open space before the structures a great door opened in the earth, and against a blue light that streamed upward they saw a vast winged shape rise majestically from underground and roll slowly forward into the shadows to join others already ranked there.

  "What are they doing?"

  "I don't know...." Dworn reflected, grasping at memories of the legends, the traditions he had heard. What he recalled was ominous. "I think I can guess, though. I think they're getting ready to swarm."

  Her stifled exclamation was sign enough that she understood.

  If the guess was right, the danger was on the verge of being multiplied many times over. Soon now, a swarm of queen ships would take to the air and fly in all directions, sowing the seed of the robot plague broadcast far and wide; one such colonizing vessel, no doubt, had founded this great hive only a few months ago. The things worked fast....

  And Dworn's duty, and Qanya's, became all the more clear and urgent. Duty to spread the warning, at whatever risk to themselves. In the face of that, Dworn's mission of personal blood vengeance became unimportant--even if it had been possible to take such vengeance upon a foe with no life to forfeit.

  He whispered to Qanya, "The ground machines are about to leave. When they're gone, we'll have to make a break for it." For some reason, as he pondered the distance they must cross to reach the Barrier cliffs, he recalled the strange revolving thing atop the central tower off yonder, turning constantly with its air of restless searching.... He swallowed painfully, repeated, "Have to."

  The girl nodded silently. Impulsively Dworn put his arm around her; she pressed close against him. They huddled together like that, finding in one another's living warmth some measure of encouragement against the terror of the falling night in which nothing moved but the lifeless machines.

  * * * * *

  They watched while the lights glimmered far off across the flats; while a flight of fighter drones took off from there and howled away into the dark on some roving patrol; while, at last, the salvaging machines finished their work and rolled loot-laden away one by one.

  More than once while they waited, other columns of the wingless drones entered or emerged from the tunnel mouth at the base of the mound. The tempo of activity in the hive was, if anything, increased as night came on. In the deepening darkness a faint blue glow streamed from the tunnel mouth.

  As the whirring of the last salvager receded, Dworn got cautiously to his feet. He said between his teeth, "We'd better move fast, now--"

  "Wait," said Qanya tensely. "They'll sight us in the open, and then what chance will we have?"

  Dworn tried to make out her expression, but in the darkness her face was only a white blur. "We've got to try. There's no other way."

  "Perhaps there is. What about the tunnel?"

  Dworn was brought up short; that idea hadn't occurred to him at all. He said slowly, "I see what you mean, It's only big enough for one-way traffic--and the drones evidently have some system of remote control, so that outbound expeditions aren't using it at the same time as returning ones...."

  "So, if we wait till some of the wingless ones enter from this end, and hurry through the tunnel close behind them--" Qanya left the sentence uncompleted. Dworn knew she could imagine as well as he what would happen if they failed to time it right, and met a drone column coming from the opposite direction. Still, the sound sense of the girl's ideas was obvious.

  "All right," he said. "We'll try it that way."

  It was another nerve-fraying wait until a file of ground machines came winding near and vanished one after another into the tunnel.

  The two watchers gave them a little time--not too much--to get clear of the entrance. Then Dworn clasped Qanya's hand tightly in his own, and together they plunged down the sliding slope of the sandhill. The tunnel mouth yawned in its side, the bore on which it opened slanting steeply down into the earth, inwardly lit with eery blue light.

  Hearts pounding, they raced into the tunnel.

  It was an unreal, nightmare flight. The blue shaft curved and descended endlessly. Endlessly ahead of them echoed the snarling of drone engines.

  They ran with lungs near to bursting, through air heavy and foul with exhaust gases--trying frantically to keep close behind that engine noise, while it receded inexorably before them. And once and again, amid the tricky tunnel echoes, Dworn was almost sure that other drones had entered and were descending the narrow way behind them, and before his eyes flashed hideous visions of the two of them overtaken and run down, here where there was scarcely room to turn, let alone fight or hide.

  The featureless walls were pressing inward to crush them, swimming before eyes filmed with exhaustion, in the blue shimmer which no doubt sufficed for the perceptions of the drones but which hardly served human vision....

  The tunnel was in fact perhaps a thousand yards long.

  But it seemed as if they had been staggering for a lifetime through the nightmare, through the blue glow, and it scarcely seemed real when a patch of night sky showed through the exit before them, and when they stumbled panting out into the clean cold air of the mountainside, and saw the white radiance of moonrise over the Barrier cliffs above them.

  They sank down to catch their breath on a rock not far from the tunnel. They'd made it none too soon--only a minute or two had passed when the night once more buzzed with motor noise, and a column of foraging drones rolled up the trail and plunged at full speed into the mouth of the shaft.

  Qanya buried her face against Dworn's shoulder.

  "Easy, now," Dworn whispered, patting her with clumsy gentleness. "The worst's over. We made it ... Qanya, darling, we made it!"

  She looked up at him and by the moonlight he saw her smile tremulously. She said breathlessly, "Would ... would you mind saying that again, please?"

  * * * * *

  The moon was already high as they trudged across the rolling desert beyond the foot of the great landslip.

  After the tunnel, the rest of the descent had been relatively easy; they had followed the trail used by the wingless drones, being forced off it only once by the passage of a cavalcade of the little marauders. And they had discovered, to their surprise, that the human physique--inferior though it might be to machines in ruggedness, speed, and other respects--was better equipped for traversing rough terrain than the most ingenious vehicle ever constructed.

  But both of them, unaccustomed as they were to walking on their own feet, were dead weary. They tramped on doggedly, searching the shadows, hoping to come upon some living machine-creature--of what race, didn't matter now.

  So far they had seen only abundant evidence that the drones were abroad in force tonight, preparing perhaps for their swarming time. Drones in the air and on the ground, and once the burnt-out shell of an unidentifiable machine with a crew of the wingless salvagers worrying it, and once the light of fires afar off where the winged ones had made a kill....

  Qanya stumbled, and Dworn caught her round the waist as she swayed.

  "Tired," she gasped in a little girl's voice, then stiffened her back with a resolute effort.

  "We'd better rest--"

  "No," she said shakily; and then abruptly: "Listen!"

  Not very far away, lost somewhere among the tricky moon-shadows, there was a stealthy crunching. It was coming nearer.

  With instinctive caution the two hugged the pool of shadow beside a boulder.

  "Spiders!" Qanya recognized
them first.

  They came prowling out of the shadows, crunching rhythmically across an open moonlit space towards a hollow beyond. One, two, four of them, moving with furtive caution through the perilous night.

  They had to be intercepted, the warning given. But it was a critically dangerous moment--suspicious and on edge, they might fire at the first movement they saw.

  "Stay here," said Dworn shortly. He thrust Qanya back into the shadows, and walked steadfastly out into the clear moonlight, in the path of the walking spider machines.

  He raised one hand on high, palm outward in an immemorial gesture that he could only hope would be seen. He shouted at the top of his voice, "Stop! Don't shoot! I come in peace!"

  His heart leaped. The leading spider ground to a halt, and the others behind it. He saw a dim figure move atop the foremost towering machine; and before he could speak again, heard the rasping voice of the Spider Mother herself.

  "You! The one who got away--and who seduced one of us from the ways of her ancestors--? What peace can there be between you and us?"

  "I bring," cried Dworn clearly, "warning of the Drone."

  There was stunned silence.

  Dworn sensed the other spiders watching from the height of their machines; and he guessed something of what must be going on in the mind of the fierce old woman staring down at him. She would be wondering if an alien, a mere beetle, would be so far without honor, so anxious to save his own skin, as to lie in such a matter.

  Then he felt Qanya's hand in his, and heard her cry out, her voice vibrant and assured: "It is true, Mother! I have seen them too. The night-fliers, the raiders--they are the evil things our legends tell of!"

  The great machine took two steps forward and knelt low to the ground. "Come here!" rasped the Spider Mother, and when the two advanced till she could look into their young faces--"You swear to this?"