‘There,’ Tuttle said, pointing at the ground before them.
‘Footprints,’ Suranov said.
Leeke said, ‘They don’t belong to any of us.’
‘So?’ Suranov asked.
‘And they’re not robot prints,’ Tuttle said.
‘Of course they are.’
Tuttle said, ‘Look closer.’
Suranov bent down and realized that his eyes, with half their power gone, had at first deceived him in the weak light. These weren’t robot prints in anything but shape. A robot’s feet were cross-hatched with rubber tread; these prints showed none of that. A robot’s feet were bottomed with two holes that acted as vents for the anti-grav system when the unit was in flight; these prints showed no holes.
Suranov said, ‘I didn’t know there were any apes in the north.’
‘There aren’t,’ Tuttle said.
‘Then — ’
‘These,’ Tuttle said, ‘are the prints — of a man.’
‘Preposterous!’ Steffan said.
‘How else do you explain them?’ Tuttle asked. He didn’t sound happy with his explanation, but he was prepared to stick with it until someone offered something more acceptable.
‘A hoax,’ Steffan said.
‘Perpetrated by whom?’ Tuttle asked.
‘One of us.’
They looked at each other, as if the guilt would be evident in their identical, bland metal faces. Then Leeke said, ‘That’s no good. We’ve been together. These tracks were made recently, or they’d be covered over with snow; none of us has had a chance, all afternoon, to sneak off and form them.’
‘I still say it’s a hoax,’ Steffan insisted. ‘Perhaps someone was sent out by the Central Agency to leave these for us to find.’
‘Why would Central bother?’ Tuttle asked.
‘Maybe it’s part of our therapy,’ Steffan said. ‘Maybe this is to sharpen the challenge for us, add excitement to the hunt.’ He gestured vaguely at the prints, as if he hoped they’d vanish. ‘Maybe Central does this for everyone who’s been sated, to restore the sense of wonder that — ’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Tuttle said. ‘You know that it’s the responsibility of each individual to engineer his own adventures and to generate his own storable responses. The Central Agency never interferes; it is merely a judge. It evaluates, after the fact, and gives promotions to those whose data vaults have reached maturity.’
By way of cutting the argument short, Suranov said, ‘Where do these prints lead?’
Leeke indicated the marks with a shiny finger. ‘It looks as if the creature came out of the woods and stood here for a while — perhaps watching us as we stalked the buck. Then he turned and went back the way he came.’
The four of them followed the footprints into the first of the pine trees, but they hesitated to go into the deeper regions of the forest.
‘Darkness is coming,’ Leeke said. ‘The storm’s almost on us, as Janus predicted. With our senses as restricted as they are, we should be getting back to the lodge while we’ve still light enough to see by.’
Suranov wondered if their surprising cowardice were as evident to the others as it was to him. They all professed not to believe in the monsters of myth, and yet they rebelled at the thought of following these footprints. However, Suranov had to admit, when he tried to envision the beast that might have made these tracks — a ‘man’ — he was even more anxious than ever to reach the sanctity of the lodge.
The lodge had only one room, which was really all that they required. Since each of the four was physically identical to the others, no one felt a need for geographical privacy. Each could obtain a more rewarding isolation merely by tuning out all exterior events in one of the lodge’s inactivation nooks, thereby dwelling within his own mind, recycling old data and searching for previously overlooked juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated information. Therefore, no one was discomfited by the single, gray-walled, nearly featureless room where they would spend as much as several weeks together, barring any complications or any lessening of their interest in the challenge of the hunt…
They racked their drug rifles on a metal shelf that ran the length of one wall, and they unbolted their other supplies which, until now, they had carried at various points on their functional body shells.
As they stood at the largest window, watching the snow sheet past them in a blindingly white fury, Tuttle said, ‘If the myths are true, think what would be done to modem philosophy.’
‘What myths?’ Suranov asked.
‘About human beings.’
Steffan, as rigid as ever, was quick to counter the thrust of Tuttle’s undeveloped line of thought. He said, ‘I’ve seen nothing to make me believe in myths.’
Tuttle was wise enough, just then, to avoid an argument about the footprints in the snow. But he was not prepared to drop the conversation altogether. He said ‘We’ve always thought that intelligence was a manifestation, solely, of the mechanized mind. If we should find that a fleshy creature could — ’
‘But none can,’ Steffan interrupted.
Suranov thought that Steffan must be rather young, no more than thirty or forty years out of the factory. Otherwise, he would not be so quick to reject anything that even slightly threatened the status quo that the Central Agency had outlined and established. With the decades, Suranov knew, one learned that what had once been impossible was now considered only commonplace.
‘There are myths about human beings,’ Tuttle said, ‘which say that robots sprang from them.’
‘From flesh?’ Steffan asked, incredulous.
‘I know it sounds odd,’ Tuttle said. ‘But at various times in my life, I have seen the oddest things prove true.’
‘You’ve been all over the earth, in more corners than I have been. In all your travels, you must have seen tens of thousands of fleshy species, animals of all descriptions.’ Steffan paused, for effect, then said, ‘Have you ever encountered a single fleshy creature with even rudimentary intelligence in the manner of the robot?’
‘Never,’ Tuttle admitted.
‘Flesh was not designed for high-level sentience,’ Steffan said.
They were quiet a while, then.
The snow fell, pulling the gray sky closer to the land.
None would admit the private, inner fear he nurtured.
‘Many things fascinate me,’ Tuttle said, surprising Suranov who had thought the other robot was done with his postulating. ‘For one — where did the Central Agency come from? What were its origins?’
Steffan waved a hand disparagingly. ‘There has always been a Central Agency.’
‘But that’s no answer,’ Tuttle said.
‘Why isn’t it?’ Steffan asked. ‘We accept, for answer, that there has always been a universe, stars and planets and everything in between.’
‘Suppose,’ Tuttle said, ‘just for the sake of argument, that there has not always been a Central Agency. The Agency is constantly doing research into its own nature, redesigning itself. Vast stores of data are transferred into increasingly more sophisticated repositories every fifty to a hundred years. Isn’t it possible that, occasionally, the Agency loses bits and pieces, accidentally destroys some of its memory in the move?’
‘Impossible,’ Steffan said. ‘There would be any number of safeguards taken against such an eventuality.’
Suranov, aware of many of the Central Agency’s bungles over the past hundred years, was not so sure. He was intrigued by Tuttle’s theory.
Tuttle said, ‘If the Central Agency somehow lost most of its early stores of data, its knowledge of human beings might have vanished along with countless other bits and pieces.’