* * * * *
The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,
and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,
in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the
clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the
misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight
zone.
The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a
hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors
had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,
but he had to try.
At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,
moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark
outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.
Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.
After a while he saw a city.
The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and
they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when
he saw that the city was dead.
He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces
rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center
of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in
diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.
Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and
headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.
The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then
there were more cities--all with the black depression, the circular
stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.
No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for
there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred
years.
The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were
down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became
apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.
After a while Ball said: "Well, which do you figure? Did our friends
from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?"
Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around
to the daylight side.
"We'll go down and look for the answer," he said. "Break out the
radiation suits."
He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to
this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one
of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,
thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was
that Ball's question be answered.
When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens
was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.
Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.
Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.
Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding
down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,
saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and
then the hill was past.
* * * * *
Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and
blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.
Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the
ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding
group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.
Nothing alive but robots, he thought, _robots_. He adjusted to full
close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.
Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.
A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head--it would be the
eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a
single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,
he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now
almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of
the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the
most perfect robots he had ever seen.
The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight
of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the
alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He
tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.
The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden
under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?
The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The
building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any
rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.
While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first
time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.
From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the
sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.
"What were they?" he said blankly. "Lord, they looked like robots!"
"They were."
Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion
of dots in the mist.
"Almost humanoid," Steffens said, "but not quite."
Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly
at Steffens.
"Well, what do we do now?"
Steffens shrugged. "They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite
possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and
see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV."
"_Can_ we go down?"
"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot
constitute a race. But there's another possibility." He tapped his
fingers on the screen confusedly. "They don't have to be robots at all.
They could be the natives."