‘This is all, then?’ Leeke asked. He had seen as much danger as Suranov, perhaps even more, but now he sounded frightened.
‘What else would you need?’ Janus asked impatiently.
Leeke said, ‘Well, as you know, certain modifications have been made on us. For one thing, our eyes aren’t what they were, and — ’
‘You’ve a torch for darkness,’ Janus said.
‘And then, our ears Leeke began.
‘Listen cautiously, walk quietly,’ Janus suggested.
‘We’ve had a power reduction to our legs,’ Leeke said. ‘If we should have to run — ’
‘Be stealthy; creep upon your game before they know you’re there, and you’ll not need to chase them.’
‘But,’ Leeke persisted, ‘weakened as we are, if we should have to run from something — ’
‘You’re only after deer and wolves,’ Janus reminded him. ‘The deer will not give chase — and a wolf hasn’t any taste for steel flesh.’
Skowski, who had thus far been exceptionally quiet, not even joining the good natured roasting the others had given Tuttle on the train, now stepped forward. He said, ‘I’ve read that this part of Rogale’s Province has an unusual number of — unexplained reports.’
‘Reports of what?’ Janus asked.
Skowski swept the others with his yellow visual receptors, then looked back at Janus. ‘Well — reports of footprints similar to our own but not those of any robot, and reports of robotlike forms seen in the woods-’
‘Oh,’ Janus said, waving a glittering hand as if to brush away Skowski’s suggestion like a fluff of dust, ‘we get a dozen reports each month about “human beings” sighted in the wilder regions northwest of here.’
‘Where we’re going?’ Suranov asked.
‘Yes,’ Janus said. ‘But I wouldn’t worry. In every case, those who make the reports are robots like yourselves: they’ve had their perceptions decreased in order to make the hunt a greater challenge for them. Undoubtedly, what they’ve seen has a quite normal explanation. If they had seen these things with the full range of their perceptions, they would not have come back with these crazy tales.’
‘Does anyone besides stripped down robots go there?’ Skowski asked.
‘No,’ Janus said.
Skowski shook his head. ‘This isn’t anything at all like I thought it would be. I feel so weak, so…’ He dropped his supplies at his feet. ‘I don’t believe I want to continue with this,’ he said.
The others were surprised.
‘Afraid of goblins?’ Steffan asked. He was the teaser in the group.
‘No,’ Skowski said. ‘But I don’t like being a cripple, no matter how much excitement it adds to the adventure.’
‘Very well,’ Janus said. ‘There will be only four of you, then.’
Leeke said, ‘Don’t we get any weapons besides the drug rifle?’
‘You’ll need nothing else,’ Janus said.
Leeke’s query had been a strange one, Suranov thought. The prime directive in every robot’s personality, when he left the factory, forbade the taking of life which could not be restored. Yet, Suranov had sympathized with Leeke, shared Leeke’s foreboding. He supposed that, with a crippling of their perceptions, there was an inevitable clouding of the thought processes as well, for nothing else explained their intense and irrational fear.
‘Now,’ Janus said, ‘the only thing you’ll need to know is that a natural storm is predicted for the northern Rogale area early tomorrow night. By then you should be to the lodge which will serve as your base of operations, and the snow will pose no trouble. Questions?’
They had none they cared to ask.
‘Good luck to the four of you, then,’ Janus said. ‘And may many weeks pass before you lose interest in the challenge.’ That was a traditional send-off, yet Janus appeared to mean it. He would, Suranov guessed, prefer to be hunting deer and wolves under decreased perceptions rather than to continue clerking at the stationhouse in Walker’s Watch.
They thanked him, consulted their maps, left the station-house and were finally on their way.
Skowski watched them go and, when they looked back at him, waved one shiny arm in a stiff-fingered salute.
They walked all that day, through the evening and on into the long night, not requiring rest. Though the power supply to their legs had been cut back and an effective governor put on their walking speed, they did not grow weary. They could sense their lessened abilities, but they could not grow tired. Even when the drifts were deep enough for them to break out their wire-webbed snowshoes and bolt those in place, they maintained a steady pace.
Passing across broad plains where the snow was swept into eerie peaks and twisting configurations, walking beneath the dense roof of crossed pine boughs in the virgin forests, Suranov felt a twinge of anticipation which had been missing from his exploits for some years now. Because his perceptions were so much less acute than usual, he sensed danger in every shadow, imagined obstacles and complications around every turn. It was positively exhilarating to be here.
Before dawn, a light snow began to fall, clinging to their cold, steel skin. Two hours later, by the day’s first light, they crested a small ridge and looked out across an expanse of pine woods to the lodge where it rested on the other side of a shallow valley. The place was made of a burnished, bluish metal, with oval windows, very straight-walled and functional.
‘We’ll be able to get some hunting in today,’ Steffan said.
‘Let’s go,’ Tuttle said.
Single file, they went down into the valley, crossed it and came out almost at the doorstep of the lodge.
Suranov pulled the trigger.
The magnificent buck, decorated with a twelve-point rack of antlers, reared up onto its hind legs, pawing at the air, breathing steam.
‘A hit!’ Leeke cried.
Suranov fired again.
The buck went down onto all four legs.
The other deer, behind it in the woods, turned and galloped away, back along the well-trampled trail.
The buck shook its huge head, staggered forward as if to follow its companions, stopped abruptly, then settled slowly onto its haunches and, after one last valiant effort to regain its footing, fell sideways into the snow.
‘Congratulations!’ Steffan said.
The four robots rose from the drift where they’d fallen when the deer had come into sight, and they crossed the small, open field to the sleeping buck.
Suranov bent and felt the creature’s sedated heartbeat, watched its grainy, black nostrils quiver as it took a shallow breath.
Tuttle, Steffan, and Leeke crowded in, hunkering about the creature, touching it, marveling at the perfect musculature, the powerful shoulders and the hard-packed thighs. They agreed that bringing down such a brute, when one’s senses were drastically damped, was indeed a challenge. Then, one by one, they got up and walked away, leaving Suranov alone to more fully appreciate his triumph and to carefully collect his own emotional reactions to the event in the micro-tapes of his data vault.
Suranov was nearly finished with his evaluation of the challenge and of the resultant confrontation, and the buck was beginning to regain its senses, when Tuttle cried out as if his systems had been accidentally overloaded.
‘Here! Look here!’
Tuttle stood, Suranov saw, two hundred yards away, near the dark trees, waving his arms. Steffan and Leeke were already moving toward him.
At Suranov’s feet, the buck snorted and tried to stand, failed to manage that yet, blinked its gummed eyelids. With little or nothing more to record in his data vault, Suranov rose and left the beast, walked toward his three companions.
‘What is it?’ he asked when he arrived.
The stared at him with glowing amber visual receptors which seemed especially bright in the gray light of late afternoon.