Dylan nodded.
"They got a franchise, dammit. They got to deliver as long as they's a
colony here."
When Dylan didn't answer, he said almost appealingly: "Some of those
guys would walk barefoot through hell for a buck."
"Maybe," Dylan said. After all, why not let him hope? There were four
long hours left.
* * * * *
Now he began to look down into himself, curiously, because he himself
was utterly without hope and yet he was no longer really afraid. It
was a surprising thing when you looked at it coldly, and he guessed
that, after all, it was because of the thirty years. A part of him
had waited for this. Some crazy part of him was ready--even after all
this time--even excited about being in a fight. Well, what the hell, he
marveled. And then he realized that the rest of him was awakening too,
and he saw that this job was really his ... that he had always been, in
truth, a soldier.
Dylan sat, finding himself in the snow. Once long ago he had read
about some fool who didn't want to die in bed, old and feeble. This
character wanted to reach the height of his powers and then explode
in a grand way--"in Technicolor," the man had said. Explode in
Technicolor. It was meant to be funny, of course, but he had always
remembered it, and he realized now that that was a small part of what
he was feeling. The rest of it was that he was a soldier.
_Barbarian_, said a small voice, _primitive._ But he couldn't listen.
"Say, Cap," Rush was saying, "it's getting a mite chilly. I understand
you got a bottle."
"Sure," he said cheerfully, "near forgot it." He pulled it out and gave
it to Rush. The colonist broke the seal and drank, saying to Dylan
half-seriously, half-humorously: "One for the road."
Beneath them the planet revolved and the night came on. They waited,
speaking briefly, while the unseen sun went down. And faintly, dimly
through the snow, they heard at last the muffled beating of a ship.
It passed overhead and they were sighting their guns before they
recognized it. It was the mailship.
They listened while she settled in a field by the camp, and Rush was
pounding Dylan's arm. "She will take us all," Rush was shouting,
"she'll take us all," and Dylan too was grinning, and then he saw a
thing.
* * * * *
Small and shadowy, white-coated and almost invisible, the thing
had come out of the woods and was moving toward them, bobbing and
shuffling in the silent snow.
Dylan fired instinctively, because the thing had four arms and was
coming right at him. He fired again. This time he hit it and the thing
fell, but almost immediately it was up and lurching rapidly back into
the trees. It was gone before Dylan could fire again.
They both lay flat in the snow, half-buried. From the camp there were
now no sounds at all. For the first time today Dylan could hear the
snow fall.
"Did you get a good look?"
Rush grunted, relaxing. "Should've saved your fire, son. Looked like
one o' them monkeys."
But there was something wrong. There was something that Dylan had heard
in the quickness of the moment which he could not remember but which
was very wrong.
"Listen," he said, suddenly placing it. "Dammit, that was no monkey."
"Easy--"
"I hit it. I hit it cold. It made a _noise_."
Rush was staring at him.
"Didn't you hear?" Dylan cried.
"No. Your gun was by my ear."
And then Dylan was up and running, hunched over, across the snow to
where the thing had fallen. He had seen a piece of it break off when
the bolt struck, and now in the snow he picked up a paw and brought it
back to Rush. He saw right away there was no blood. The skin was real
and furry all right but there was no blood. Because the bone was steel
and the muscles were springs and the thing had been a robot.
* * * * *
The Alien rose up from his cot, whistling with annoyance. When that
ship had come in, his attention had been distracted from one of the
robots, and of course the miserable thing had gone blundering right
out into the humans. He thought for a while that the humans would
overlook it--the seeing was poor and they undoubtedly would still think
of it as animal, even with its firing ports open--but then he checked
the robot and saw that a piece was missing and knew that the humans had
found it. Well, he thought unhappily, flowing into his suit, no chance
now to disable that other ship. The humans would never let another
animal near.
And therefore--for he was, above all, a flexible being--he would
proceed to another plan. The settlement would have to be detonated.
And for that he would have to leave his own shelter and go out in
that miserable cold and lie down in one of his bunkers which was much
farther away. No need to risk blowing himself up with his own bombs,
but still, that awful cold.
He dismissed his regrets and buckled his suit into place. It carried
him up the stairs and bore him out into the snow. After one whiff of
the cold, he snapped his viewplate shut and immediately, as he had
expected, it began to film with snow. Well, no matter, he would guide
the unit by coordinates and it would find the bunker itself. No need
for caution now. The plan was nearly ended.
In spite of his recent setback, the Alien lay back and allowed
himself the satisfaction of a full tremble. The plan had worked very
nearly to perfection, as of course it should, and he delighted in the
contemplation of it.
* * * * *
When the humans were first detected, in the region of Bootes, much
thought had gone into the proper method of learning their technology
without being discovered themselves. There was little purpose in
destroying the humans without first learning from them. Life was really
a remarkable thing--one never knew what critical secrets a star-borne
race possessed. Hence the robots. And it was an extraordinary plan, an
elegant plan. The Alien trembled again.
The humans were moving outward toward the Rim, their base was
apparently somewhere beyond Centaurus. Therefore, a ring of defense was
thrown up on most of the habitable worlds toward which the humans were
coming--oh, a delightful plan--and the humans came down one by one and
never realized that there was any defense at all.
With a cleverness which was almost excruciating, the Aliens had
carefully selected a number of animals native to each world, and then
constructed robot duplicates. So simple then to place the robots down
on a world with a single Director, then wait ... for the humans to
inhabit. Naturally the humans screened all the animals and scouted
a planet pretty thoroughly before they set up a colony. Naturally
their snares and their hunters caught no robots, and never found the
deep-buried Alien Director.
Then the humans relaxed and began to make homes, never realizing that
in among the animals which gamboled playfully in the trees there
was one which did not gambol, but watched. Never once noticing the
monkey-like animals or the small thing like a rabbit which was a camera
eye, or the thing like a rat which took chemical samples, or the thing
like a lizard which cut wires.
The Alien rumbled on through the snow, trembling so much now with
ecstasy and anticipation that the suit which bore him almost lost its
balance. He very nearly fell over before he stopped trembling, and then
he contained himself. In a little while, a very little while, there
would be time enough for trembling.
* * * * *
"They could've been here 'til the sun went out," Rush said, "and we
never would've known."
"I wonder how much they've found out," Dylan said.
Rush was holding the paw.
"Pretty near everything, I guess. This stuff don't stop at monkeys.
Could be any size, any kind ... look, let's get down into camp and tell
'em."
Dylan rose slowly to a kneeling position, peering dazedly out into the
far white trees. His mind was turning over and over, around and around,
like a roulette wheel. But, at the center of his mind, there was one
thought, and it was rising up slowly now, through the waste and waiting
of the years. He felt a vague surprise.
"Gettin' kind of dark," he said.
Rush swore. "Let's go. Let's get out of here." He tugged once at
Dylan's arm and started off on his knees.