The trip could be shortened by crossing two intervening maria. Flandry refused. “I prefer to skulk,” he said, laving out a circuitous path through foothills and a mountain range that offered hiding places. While it would often make the going tough, and Djana was inexperienced and not in training, and they would be burdened with Ammon’s supplies and planetside gear, he hoped they could average thirty or forty kilometers per twenty-four hours. A pitiful few factors worked in their favor. There was the mild gravity and the absence of rivers to ford and brush to struggle through. There was the probably steady weather. Since Wayland always turned the same face to Regin, there was continuous daylight for the span of their journey, except at high noon when the planet would eclipse Mimir. There was an ample supply of stimulants. And, Flandry reflected, it helps to travel scared.
He decreed a final decent meal before departure, and music and lovemaking and a good sleep while the boat’s sensors kept watch. The party fell rather flat; Djana was too conscious that this might be the last time. Flandry made no reproaches. He did dismiss any vague ideas he might have entertained about trying for a long-term liaison with her.
They loaded up and marched. More accurately, they scrambled, across the crater wall and into a stretch of sharp hills and wind-polished slippery glaciers. Flandry allowed ten minutes rest per hour. He spent most of those periods with map, gyrocompass, and sextant, making sure they were still headed right. When Djana declared she could do no more, he said calculatedly, “Yes, I understand; you’re no use off your back.” She spat her rage and jumped to her feet.
I mustn’t drive her too hard, Flandry realized. Gradual strengthening will get us where we’re going faster. In fact, without that she might not make it at all.
Does that matter?
Yes, it does, I can’t abandon her.
Why not? She’d do the same for me.
Um-m-m…I don’t know exactly why…let’s say that in spite of everything, she’s a woman. Waste not, want not.
When she did begin reeling as she walked, he agreed to pitch camp and did most of the chores alone.
First he selected a spot beneath an overhanging cliff. “So our winged chums won’t see us,” he explained chattily, “or drop on us their equivalent of what winged chums usually drop. You will note, however, that an easy route will take us onto the top of the cliff, if we should have groundborne callers. From there we can shoot, throw rocks, and otherwise hint to them that they’re not especially welcome.” Slumped in exhaustion against a boulder, she paid him no heed.
He inflated the insulating floor of the sealtent and erected its framework. The wind gave him trouble, flapping the fabric he stretched across until he got it secured. Because the temperature had risen to about minus fifty, he didn’t bother with extra layers, but merely filled the cells of the one skin with air.
To save accumulator charge, he worked the pump by hand, and likewise when it evacuated the tent’s interior. Extreme decompression wasn’t needed, since the Waylander atmosphere was mostly noble gases and nitrogen. The portable air renewer he had placed inside, together with a glower for heat, took care of remaining poisonous vapors and excess carbon dioxide, once he had refilled the tent with oxygen at 200 millibars. (The equipment for all this was heavy. But it was indispensable, at least until Djana got into such condition that she didn’t frequently need the relief of shirtsleeve environment. And she’d better! Given the limitations of what they could carry, they could make possibly fifteen stops that utilized it.) While renewer and glower did their work, Flandry chipped water ice to melt for drinking and cooking.
They entered through the plastic airlock. He showed Djana how to bleed her spacesuit down to ambient pressure. When they had taken off their armor, she lay on the floor and watched him with eyes glazed by fatigue. He fitted together his still, put it on the glower, and filled it with ice. “Why are you doing that?’ she whispered.
“Might have unpleasant ingredients,” he answered. “Gases like ammonia come off first and are taken up by the activated colloids in this bottle. We can’t let them contaminate our air; our one renewer’s busy handling the stuff we breathe out; and besides, when we strike camp I must pump as big a fraction as I can manage back into its tank. When the water starts boiling, I shut the valve to the gas-impurity flask and open the one to the water can. We can’t risk heavy metal salts, especially on a world where they must be plentiful. Doesn’t take but a micro quantity of plutonium, say, this far from medical help, to kill you in quite a nasty fashion. A propos, I suppose you know we daren’t smoke in a pure oxy atmosphere.”
She shuddered and turned her glance from the desolation in the ports.
Dinner revived her somewhat. Afterward she sat hugging her legs, chin on knees, and watched him clean the utensils. In the cramped space, his movements were economical. “You were right,” she said gravely. “I wouldn’t have a prayer without you.”
“A hot meal, albeit freeze-dried, does beat pushing a concentrate bar through your chowlock and calling it lunch, eh?”
“You know what I mean, Nicky. What can I do?”
“You can take your turn watching for monsters,” he said immediately.
She winced. “Do you really think—”
“No. I don’t think. Too few data thus far to make it worth the trouble. Unhappily, though, one datum is the presence of two or more kinds of critter whose manners are as deplorable as they are inexplicable.”
“But they’re machines!”
“Are they?”
She stared at him from under tangled tawny bangs. He said while he labored: “Where does ‘robot’ leave off and ‘organism’ begin? For hundreds of years there’ve been sensor-computer-effector systems more intricate and versatile than some kinds of organic life. They function, perceive, ingest, have means to repair damage and to be reproduced; they homeostatize, if that horrible word is the one I want; certain of them think. None of it works identically with the systems evolved by organic animals and sophonts—but it works, and toward very similar ends.
“Those bugs that attacked me have metal exoskeletons underneath that purple enamel, and electronic insides. That’s why they succumbed so easily to my blaster: high heat conductivity, raising the temperature of components designed for Wayland’s natural conditions. But they’re machinery as elaborate as any I’ve ever ruined. As I told you, I hadn’t the time or means to do a proper job of dissection. As near as I could tell, though, they run off accumulators. Their feelers are magnificently precise sensors—magnetic, electric, radionic, thermal, et cetera. They have optical and audio systems as well. In fact, with one exception, they’re such gorgeous engineering that it’s a semantic quibble whether to call them robots or artificial animals.
“Same thing, essentially, for the flyers—which, by the way, I’m tempted to call snapdragonflies. They get their lift from the wings and a VTOL turbojet; they use beak and claws to rip rather than grind metal; but they have sensors and computers akin to the bugs’. And they seem able to act more independently, as you’d expect with a larger ‘brain.’ ”
He put away the last dish, settled back, and longed for a cigarette. “What do you mean by ‘one exception’?” Djana asked.
“I can imagine a robotic ecology, based on self-reproducing solar-cell units that’d perform the equivalent of photosynthesis,” Flandry said. “I seem to recall it was actually experimented with once. But these things we’ve met don’t have anything I can identify as being for nourishment, repair, or reproduction. No doubt they have someplace to go for replacement parts and energy recharges—someplace where new ones are also manufactured—most likely the centrum area. But what about the wrecked ones? There doesn’t seem to be any interest in reclaiming those marvelous parts, or even the metal. It’s not an ecology, then; it’s open-ended. Those machines have no purpose except destruction.”