by Isaac Asimov
She listened. The WalkingStones chattered to Central endlessly. Reports went in, orders went out. The WalkingStones were concentrated more toward the Hill of Stars where SilverSide suspected Central hid, but they occasionally moved through this area. She waited, patient.
When she heard the sound of a WalkingStone’s tread, she allowed her body to deform slightly, extending an eyestalk around the comer of the building. The approaching WalkingStone was a spindly, gangly thing with arms tipped by mechanical claws rather than fingered hands. It was alone. SilverSide retracted the eyestalk, gathered herself; when the WalkingStone passed the side of the building, she leaped with a BeastTalk growl.
The WalkingStone’s arms came up too late — SilverSide hit it, her jaws clamping around the thin, long neck and her powerful muscles shaking the thing from side to side. She was careful to hold her own great strength back and use no more power than any of the kin possessed.
That strength was enough, as she had suspected. These WalkingStones were far less durable than the Hunters. A support cracked; internal wiring harnesses tore. Just before the main trunk to the brain was severed and the WalkingStone went still under SilverSide’s great bulk, she heard it call out to the distant Central.
Under attack. Damaged...
SilverSide let the thing slump to the ground. Yes, as I thought. The Hunters were designed to be the city’s protection; the workers were strong but not overwhelming for a creature as powerful as the wolf-creatures. The worker WalkingStones, at least, were vulnerable.
And this also revealed another weakness. Not much of one, but it was all SilverSide had.
The voices in her head had gone silent. Replacing the chatter was an amplified voice, loud and commanding, resonating on all the frequencies. Central. My enemy.
And it did what she would have done herself. Central was sending the Hunters to investigate.
SilverSide didn’t intend to be there when the Hunters arrived.
Giving a BeastTalk growl of triumph, she ran back toward the forest, staying where the kin could see her but not heading directly toward them. KeenEye would watch and make certain, then run to PackHome as ordered. SilverSide would make her way there herself, but first she had to make sure there was no latent danger to the kin.
It didn’t matter if such a delay endangered her own self.
She waited until she caught a glimpse of the first Hunter moving swiftly along a walkway toward the area where the attack had occurred. I am here. she called to it in her own head voice, using the VoidTalk. The Hunter stopped, its armored head swiveling around.
SilverSide gave voice to a BeastTalk challenge and ran.
She was just about to duck under the cover of the trees when the laser hit her.
Chapter 12
A JOURNEY BEGINS
IF THIS WAS the afterlife, it was damned uncomfortable.
For one thing, it was wet. He could feel water dripping on his face and body.
For another, being dead hurt.
Derec’s ribs ached as if they’d been kicked repeatedly by an extraordinarily strong and stubborn mule. Most of his skin felt as if it had been scoured by a rough, rusty file, and what hadn’t been scraped raw was parboiled. His head pounded with the great-granddaddy of all headaches, and he was afraid to open his eyes or try to sit up.
If this was eternity, it wasn’t making a nice start.
But he couldn’t lie there forever. Besides, there was a certain curiosity....
There was definitely light beyond his eyelids. And beyond the dripping of water, he could hear a rushing, crackling noise like cellophane being crumpled.
Derec opened his eyes.
And, groaning, closed them again.
He was looking through a jagged hole in the ship’s hull into a dull gray, rain-streaming sky. Through the curtain of rain, he could see a muddy hillside scored by some giant, maniac plow and sown with bright pieces of metal. Despite the storm, there was a fire smoldering in the grass a hundred meters away where one of the ship’s drive engines lay half buried. A thick, greasy plume of black smoke was smeared across the sky under the racing clouds.
It didn’t look good. Being alive was threatening to be more uncomfortable than being dead. “Mandelbrot?” Derec’s voice was a hoarse croak. There was no answer.
“Mandelbrot?”
Still nothing. It looked as if he was going to have to get out by himself. He didn’t like the idea, not one bit. Derec moved to unbuckle his crash webbing. It was a mistake.
He screamed and promptly blacked out again.
It had stopped raining and the grass fire was out when he came back to consciousness again.
“Reality, part two,” he muttered to himself. There was still a throbbing ache in his left arm; his right seemed to be functioning, if badly bruised. He forced himself to look — yes, the left forearm was definitely fractured, the skin puffy and discolored, the arm canted at a slight and very wrong angle. The sight made him nauseous. Great. All you need is to be sick all over yourself. What if you’ve got broken ribs or internal injuries....
Derec leaned his head back and took several deep breaths until his stomach settled again. Reaching over with his good hand, he tightened the left harness of the webbing until his shoulder was tight against the seat. Then he grasped his left arm at the wrist, took a deep breath, and held it.
And let it out again with a shout. He pulled, hard.
Bone grated against bone.
When Derec came to consciousness for the third time, he checked the arm. It was bruising nicely, but it looked straight now. He could wiggle his fingers, make a weak fist. The pain made him want to whimper, but there was nothing he could do about it for the moment.
“Okay,” he breathed. “You got to get out, find the first aid kit, get the painkillers and the quick-knit pills,” he told himself. “You can do it.” Using his right hand, he unbuckled himself — squirming for the right-hand buckle at his shoulder, the pain stabbed at his chest: broken ribs, too, if nothing worse. He was starting to sweat, coldly, and the periphery of his vision was getting dark.
Shock. Take it easy. Just breathe for a few seconds.
Gingerly, Derec tried his legs. His left ankle had been wrenched badly, but he thought he might be able to put weight on it, and his right thigh was bloody under the torn pants, but everything worked.
Fine. Let’s see if we can stand.
He pushed himself up with his one good arm, cradling the other. The movement coupled with the throbbing head made the ship swirl about him. For a moment, the world threatened to go away again. Derec fought to remain conscious. No, he pleaded. The last thing you want to do is fall. You might not make it up again.
After a minute, the landscape stopped its ponderous waltz around him, and he could stand. The cabin was a total loss. The flooring was buckled, gaping holes had been torn in the bulkheads, and everything was sitting at a slight downhill angle. Derec noticed Mandelbrot immediately. The pilot’s seat had been sheared off during impact and lay on its side at the “bottom” of the cabin slope. Mandelbrot was still in the seat, his body dented, dinged, and scratched.
“Mandelbrot?” Derec called again, but there was still no answer. First things first, he told himself. Where’s that kit?
It should have been on the near wall; it wasn’t. After a stumbling search through the nearby rubble, Derec finally located the white-and-red box. He fumbled open the catch and tore open a vial of EndPain. He stabbed the injector into his thigh with a hiss of the air jet; the medication felt cool, and he could feel it spreading. The pain began to fade, the headache to ease. After a few minutes, he was feeling vaguely human again.
He found the quick-knit tabs, read the instructions, and swallowed two. With the pain temporarily subdued, he rigged a splint from a piece of plastic and the cloth covering of one of the seats. The arm felt better secured and placed in a sling. He knotted it with his teeth.
Derec was beginning to feel alive once more. Alive enough to know that he
was still in deep trouble on a world he didn’t know and maybe half a continent or more away from the Robot City and help. He could still hear the central computer via his chemfet link, but the damned thing still didn’t respond to him as had the original — it would have been easy to order a squad of robots to find and rescue them.
And if pigs had wings...
Derec had to have Mandelbrot. Without the robot, this was going to be very, very touchy. The quick-knit tabs would heal his arm in a week or two — if he didn’t refracture it rummaging through the wreckage; if there were no internal injuries that crippled him first; if there was nothing on this planet that decided he looked tasty...
If he was still alive in a week.
Derec made his slow way over the broken hull to the robot. The seat had pinned Mandelbrot to the wall. Derec braced his back against the cabin wall opposite the robot, planted his feet on the seat supports, and shoved: the seat groaned, moved, and dropped back again. Derec gritted his teeth, pushed once more. This time the seat tumbled over, Mandelbrot dangling loosely from the straps. Derec waited until his breath returned and then opened up the robot’s chest cavity.
There were too many things that could have gone wrong with the robot that couldn’t possibly be fixed here. Derec could imagine every last one of them in his mind.
It didn’t look as bad as it might have. The trunk line from the main power source had pulled loose, though backup power to the brain was still intact: good, that meant there would be no memory loss. There was some structural damage, though Mandelbrot’s Avery-type arm looked perfectly fine. The optical circuits had taken quite a jarring; Derec wouldn’t be surprised if there were some problems there when he powered up the robot.
And it was going to be no fun working with one hand. “Only one way to find out...” he muttered, then shook his head. Who in space are you talking to?
It took an hour to find the toolbox; another to one-handedly splice the bad power cable and jury-rig the socket — he had to stop halfway through to hit the painkillers again; the headache was back and his ribs made every breath an agony. The soldering tip trembled in his hand as he made the last connections. He wiped sweat from his eyes and straightened. He closed the chest compartment and touched the power contact.
A status light blinked amber. One eye gleamed fitfully; the entire body shuddered. The head swiveled with a distressing squeal of grinding metal, and Mandelbrot looked in Derec’s general direction.
“Master Derec?”
“Mandelbrot.”
“You are very fuzzy in my optical circuits. It would appear that the landing was not all we had hoped for.”
“It would appear so.” Derec shrugged. “How are you?”
“Checking...” Mandelbrot’s voice trailed off; the eye dimmed. After several seconds it brightened once more. “Systems check program running. Main positronic circuitry intact; two sectors damaged but recovered and backed up. Right optical circuits not functioning; left out of adjustment. Neck sleeve joint misaligned. Main trunk connections damaged but acceptable. Main and auxiliary power circuits acceptable. Three servo motors have cracked casings and will be a problem if the lubricant seals are breached and leaking. Knee servo in left leg burned out and knee locked.” The robot’s fingers clenched and opened. “Other minor damage. Would you prefer the full details?”
“Save it for later.”
“Then I must ask how you are, Master Derec.” Mandelbrot rose to his feet, the left leg extended stiffly. “I note that your arm is splinted and there is blood on your clothing. You grimace when you move, as if your chest hurts you.”
“The arm’s broken; it’ll heal. I’m banged up but alive. I don’t think it’s anything serious. Considering the way we hit, we don’t have anything to complain about.”
“I was not complaining, Master Derec, simply trying to ascertain our status. Your health is of prime importance to me as you know. The First Law...”
Derec waved him silent. “We’ve done all we can do about that. Now we have to get ourselves out of here.”
Gears whined drily as Mandelbrot surveyed the wreckage. “This was not a good landing,” he said without inflection.
Derec laughed aloud despite the pain. After Robot City, he didn’t know what to expect from robots: Mandelbrot had either acquired a certain irony and deadpan humor or come up with a good approximation of it. A First Law response to make him feel more comfortable or not, it worked. Derec grinned.
“Actually, it was probably your best.” he said. “I’m surprised you got us down at all. What in the world happened?”
“I still am not sure, Master Derec. There was an alarm and then the impact. After that, I was too concerned with the ship to pursue the matter.”
“I can believe it,” Derec smiled. “Now let’s see what we can salvage out of this mess.”
It was a long, slow, and painful process. Most of the emergency food stores had been smashed or lost. Mandelbrot dredged up an inflatable survival tent and heater, rope, and a battery-powered lamp. On the down side, the communications gear was hopelessly ruined, as Derec found after an hour of trying to fit together pieces with the few spare parts on board.
The ship was a total loss. It would never see space again.
The salvaging efforts made a pitifully small pile outside the hull. At Derec’s insistence, Mandelbrot split the burden in half; a pack for each of them. “You’re hobbled, too,” Derec pointed out in the face of Mandelbrot’s insistence that the robot carry everything. “You’d be endangering me more by loading yourself up. I’ve got a bad arm; you’ve a bum leg and servos threatening to go at any time. You’re half blind. Consider this a direct order and pick up your half.”
Mandelbrot obeyed. “Good,” Derec said. “Now — just where in the world are we going?”
“The Robot City was inland, Master Derec. I believe we are near the eastern coast. Since the sun is declining toward the hills, I would suggest that direction.”
Derec gazed at the slopes to the west, green with a thick cover of trees. There’d be game under there, and plants to eat if the rations gave out. He sighed. There was little choice. They wouldn’t make it off this planet until they had help, and the only help was Robot City. If the central computer wouldn’t respond to his chemfet link, the robots would still give them any aid they requested, if only because the First Law required it.
We must look a sight. Derec thought as they walked away from the wreckage. A lame robot and a beat-up man. At least the planet looks safe.
Chapter 13
A CHASE THROUGH THE FOREST
THE LASER FROM the Hunter seared SilverSide’s flank. She hadn’t expected it to react so quickly.
With robotic speed, she leapt to one side and behind the cover of a thick tree trunk. The bark smoldered where her side pressed against it, and SilverSide modified her body to spread out thin fan-like structures to radiate away the excess heat. A spot of red gleamed on the tree by her head and SilverSide ducked once more — another Hunter, and this one coming from a different direction. She could see two more of the deadly WalkingStones hurrying along the walkways toward the edge of the city and the confrontation.
SilverSide howled and fled deeper into the woods. Along the ridge, she saw the rest of the pack, following her orders, turn back and flee toward PackHome. Now it was up to her — she had to get rid of the WalkingStones.
Ten minutes later, she was certain she’d lost them.
SilverSide had a decided advantage over the WalkingStones in the forest. Her wolf shape was ideally suited for quick movement and lithe, accurate turns. Low to the ground, she could take advantage of brush and thickets for cover; knowing the forest as only a wolf-creature could, she was at ease finding the convoluted paths of the game animals. The WalkingStones seemed far less capable once they left the arrow-straight walkways and geometric patterns of their city.
SilverSide came to a halt in a glade a kilometer and a half from the valley of the WalkingStones. She halted, liste
ning, scenting, and watching. Large moths flitted silently from tree to tree. A creature with huge suckers for feet hung upside down from a nearby branch. LargeFace spread silver lace patterns on the ground through the branches.
A branch cracked; a silver shape moved in the dark.
Central, the creature is here. The voice came from inside her head. Ten degrees south, unit three. You should have a clear line of fire if you move forward.
The darkness seemed to bother the WalkingStones as little as it did SilverSide, and it seemed that she had underestimated them. They were persistent and excellent trackers or they could not have followed her. They might be slower when moving in the trees, yes, but they seemed to be untiring.
And they had found her again.
Her logic circuits couldn’t know disappointment or irritation or even fear, but the sight of the Hunters through the trees made her pause, made her growl softly in BeastTalk. They were not kin. These WalkingStones lacked all etiquette.
If they were human, she thought, it would be easy. I could challenge their leader, and whomever won would lead all. That is the best way.
But the WalkingStone’s leader was Central, which was only a voice in her head, and the WalkingStones attacked kin like the SharpFangs, from hiding and without a proper challenge.
Like beasts. Like animals.
The Hunters were speaking with one another now, short bursts of high-pitched sound. SilverSide fingered the strands of semiconductors and colored wire around her neck. They were just made-things. Tools. They were less than animals, for all their sophistication. Yes, the technology made SilverSide ache to know more, but they violated all her most primal urges.
She wanted desperately to break these tools.
A crisscrossing of sudden laser fire raked the underbrush. SilverSide pushed to her feet with a howl and ran again. She felt the awful heat of their weapons strike her, and she turned and twisted as she fled so that none of the beams could touch her for more than a few seconds. Even so, she could sense internal damage: automatic alarm circuits overloaded and caused emergency sub-routines to be run, rerouting her nerve signals along undamaged paths to the brain.
