Stewart had a look too. "It's an Algae Detector. But, since there's no
water around here, it hasn't had a chance to exercise its function.
Electronic atrophy must have set in."
"It's riddled with drill holes," McAllister noted. "Looks like one of
those other puppets worked it over."
Stewart examined the thing. The pilot was right.
"At least _one_ of our robots seems to have overcome its inhibition
against analyzing pure metal," Randall observed, prodding it.
"Or maybe something else has been around here," McAllister said.
The director looked up sharply.
"Something else? Like what?" Carol laughed at the pilot's unreasonable
concern.
McAllister only hunched his bony shoulders.
It was not difficult for Stewart to see that McAllister was afraid.
Neither the pilot nor Mortimer was generally known in the Bureau for
his courage. That their apprehension had grown to visible proportions
out there on this Godforsaken edge of infinity was merely an expected
extension of their characters.
Rather, it was Randall's fear--Randall's and his own--that concerned
Stewart. Both seemed incommunicable. Stewart's reticence was
involuntary, stemming as it did from his inability to find words for
his incomprehensible dread. And he wondered whether the director's
fear, too, was that inexpressible.
He picked up a clod of soil and crumbled it in his gloved hand, as
though symbolizing his anxious desire to come to grips with whatever it
was that hid behind a veil in his mind.
Randall lowered himself on his haunches. "Don't we have any _emergency_
means of bringing that machine under control?"
"Oh, there are a couple of tricks. Manhandling it is one."