War with the Robots

It was a brief meal, none of them were very hungry. Stane sat at the chart table afterward pushing the hard green fruit around with his forefinger. "This is what she was doing in the tree — why she couldn’t pull the vanishing act like the others. Picking fruit. She had nothing else in the pouch. Our landing next to the tree and trapping her was pure accident." He glanced at Dall’s face, then turned quickly away

"It’s too dark to see now, do we wait for morning?" Arnild asked. He had a hand gun disassembled on the table, adjusting and oiling the parts.

Commander Stane nodded. "It can’t do any harm — and it’s better than stumbling around in the dark. Leave an Eye with an infra-red projector and filter over the village and make a recording. Maybe we can find out where they all went."

"I’ll stay at the Eye controls," Dall said suddenly. "I’m not… sleepy. I might find something out."

The Commander hesitated for a moment, then agreed. "Wake me if you see anything. Otherwise, get us up at dawn."

The night was quiet and nothing moved in the silent village of huts. At first light Commander Stane and Dall walked down the hill, an Eye floating ahead to cover them. Arnild stayed behind in the locked ship, at the controls.

"Over this way, sir," Dall said. "Something I found during the night when I was making sweeps with the Eye."

The pit edges had been softened and rounded by the weather, large trees grew on the slopes. At the bottom, projecting from a pool of water, were the remains of rusted machinery.

"I think they’re excavation machines," Dall said. "Though it’s hard to tell, they’ve been down there so long."

The Eye dropped down to the bottom of the pit and nosed close to the wreckage. It sank below the water and emerged after a minute, trailing a wet stream.

"Digging machines, all right," Arnild reported. "Some of them turned over and half buried, like they fell in the hole. And all of them Slaver built."

Commander Stane looked up intently. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"Sure as I can read a label."

"Let’s get on to the village," the Commander said, chewing thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek.

Dali the Younger discovered where the villagers had gone. It was really no secret, they found out in the first hut they entered. The floor was made of pounded dirt, with a circle of rocks for a fireplace. All the other contents were of the simplest and crudest. Heavy, unfired clay pots, untanned furs, some eating utensils chipped out of hard wood. Dall was poking through a heap of woven mats behind the fireplace when he found the hole.

"Over here, sir!" he called.

The opening was almost a metre in diameter and sank into the ground at an easy angle. The floor of the tunnel was beaten as hard as the floor of the hut.

"They must be hiding out in there," Commander Stane said. "Flash a light down and see how deep it is."

There was no way to tell. The hole was really a smooth walled tunnel that turned at a sharp angle five metres inside the entrance. The Eye swooped down and hung, humming, above the opening.

"I took a look in some of the other huts," Arnild said from the ship. "The Eye found a hole like this in every one of them. Want me to take a look inside?"

"Yes, but take it slowly," Commander Stane told him. "If there are people hiding down there we don’t want to frighten them more. Drift down and pull back if you find anything."

The humming died as the Eye floated down the tunnel and out of sight.

"Joined another tunnel," Arnild reported. "And now an-other junction. Getting confused…don’t know if I can get it back the way I sent it in."

"The Eye is expendable," the Commander told him. "Keep going."

"Must be dense rock around… signal is getting weaker and I have a job holding control. A bigger cavern of some sort… wait! There’s someone! Caught a look at a man going into one of the side tunnels."

"Follow him," Stane said.

"Not easy," Arnild said after a moment’s silence. "Looks like a dead end. A rock of some kind blocking the tunnel. He must have rolled it back and blocked the passage after he went by. I’ll back out… Blast!"

"What’s wrong?"

"Another rock behind the Eye — they’ve got it trapped in that hunk of tunnel. Now the screen’s dead, and all I can get is an out-of-operation signal!" Arnild sounded exasperated and angry.

"Very neat," Commander Stane said. "They lured it in, trapped it — then probably collapsed the roof of the tunnel. These people are very suspicious of strangers and seem to have a certain efficiency at getting rid of them."

"But why?" Dall asked, frankly puzzled, looking around at the crude construction of the hut. "What do these people have that the Slavers could have wanted so badly? It’s obvious that the Slavers put a lot of time and effort into trying to dig down there. Did they ever find what they were looking for? Did they try to destroy this planet because they had found it — or hadn’t found it?"