Neither Tuttle nor Suranov answered him.
Leeke’s head hung limply on his neck, because several of the links in his ring cable had been bent out of alignment. His visual perceptors had been smashed, and the mechanism behind them ripped out through the shattered sockets. When Suranov bent closer, he saw that someone had poked a sharp object into Leeke’s data vaults, through his eye tubes, and had scrambled his tapes into a useless mess; he hoped Leeke had been dead by then.
‘Horrible,’ Steffan said. He turned away from the scene and began to walk back toward the lodge, stopped abruptly as he realized that he should not be out of the other robots’ company. He shuddered, mentally.
‘What should we do with him?’ Tuttle asked.
‘Leave him,’ Suranov said.
‘Here to rust?’
‘He’ll sense nothing more.’
‘Still-’
‘We should be getting back,’ Suranov said, shining his light around the snowy scene. ‘We shouldn’t expose ourselves.’
Keeping close to one another, they returned to the lodge.
9. He dismantles robots, though none but other men know what he does with their parts…
‘As I see it,’ Suranov told them, when they were once again inside the lodge, ‘Leeke did not take the rifles. Someone — or something — entered the lodge to steal them. Leeke must have come out of his inactivation nook just as the culprits were leaving. Without pausing to wake us, he gave chase.’
‘Or was forced to go with them,’ Tuttle said.
‘I doubt that he was taken out by force,’ Suranov said. ‘In the lodge, with enough light to see by and enough space to maneuver in, even with lessened perceptions, Leeke could have kept himself from being hurt or forced to leave. However, once he was outside, in the storm, he was at their mercy.’
The wind screamed across the peaked roof of the lodge, rattled the windows in their metal frames.
They stood still, listening until the gust died away, as if the noise were not made by the wind but by some enormous beast that had reared up over the building and was intent on tearing it to pieces.
Suranov went on: ‘When I examined Leeke, I found that he was felled by a sharp blow to the ring cable, just under the head — the kind of blow that would have had to come suddenly, from behind, without warning. In a room as well lighted as this, nothing could have gotten behind Leeke without his knowing it was there.’
Steffan turned away from the window and said, ‘Do you think that Leeke was already terminated when…’ His voice trailed away, but in a moment he had found the discipline to go on: ‘Was he terminated when they dismantled his legs?’
‘We can only hope that he was,’ Suranov said.
Steffan said, ‘Who could have done such a thing?’
‘A man,’ Tuttle said.
‘Or men,’ Suranov amended.
‘No,’ Steffan said. But his denial was not so adamant as it had been before. He said, ‘What would they have done with his legs?’
‘No one knows what they do with what they take,’ Suranov said.
Steffan said, ‘You’re beginning to sound as if Tuttle’s convinced you, as if you believe in these creatures.’
‘Until I have a better answer to the question of who terminated Leeke, I think it’s safest to believe in human beings,’ Suranov explained.
For a time, they were silent.
Then, Suranov said, ‘I think we should start back to Walker’s Watch in the morning, first thing.’
‘They’ll think we’re immature,’ Steffan said, ‘if we come back with wild tales about men prowling about the lodge in the darkness. You saw how disdainful Janus was of others who’d made similar reports.’
‘We’ve poor, dead Leeke as proof,’ Tuttle said.
‘Or,’ Suranov said, ‘we can say Leeke was terminated in an accident and that we’re returning because we’re bored with the challenge.’
‘You mean, we wouldn’t even have to mention — human beings?’ Steffan wanted to know.
‘Possibly,’ Suranov said.
‘That would be the best way to handle it, by far,’ Steffan said. ‘Then, no second-hand reports of our temporary irrationality would get back to the Central Agency. We could spend much time in the inactivation nooks, until we finally saw the real explanation of Leeke’s termination, which somehow now eludes us; if we meditate long enough, a proper solution is bound to arise. Then, by the time of our next data vault audits by the Agency, we’d have covered over all traces of this illogical reaction we now suffer from.’
‘However,’ Tuttle said, ‘we might already know the real explanation of Leeke’s death. After all, we’ve seen the footprints in the snow, and we’ve seen the dismantled body… Might it be that men — human beings — really are behind it?’
‘No,’ Steffan said. ‘That’s superstitious. That’s irrational.’
‘At dawn,’ Suranov said, ‘we’ll set out for Walker’s Watch, no matter how bad the storm is by then.’
As he finished speaking, the distant hum of the lodge’s generator — which was a comforting background noise that never abated — now cut out, and they were plunged into darkness.
With snow crusted on their chilled metal skins, they focused three electric torches on the generator in its niche behind the lodge. The top of the machine’s casing had been removed, exposing the complex inner works to the elements; in, the center of all that tangled wiring lay an obvious hole where some part or other should have been.
‘Someone’s removed the power core,’ Suranov said.
‘But who?’ Steffan asked.
Suranov directed the beam of his torch to the ground.
The others did likewise.
Mingled with their own footprints were other prints similar but not made by any robot: those same, strange tracks that they had seen by the trees in the late afternoon, and which had profusely marked the snow all around Leeke’s body.
‘No,’ Steffan said. ‘No, no, no.’
‘I think it’s best that we set out for Walker’s Watch tonight.’ Suranov said. ‘I don’t think it would be wise, any longer, to wait until morning.’ He looked at Tuttle who was mottled by the snow which clung to him in icy lumps. ‘What do you think?’
‘Agreed,’ Tuttle said. ‘But I suspect it’s not going to be an easy journey. I wish I had all my senses to full power.’
‘We can still move fast,’ Suranov said. ‘And we don’t need to rest, as fleshy creatures must. If we’re pursued, we have the advantage.’
‘In theory,’ Tuttle said.
‘We’ll have to be satisfied with that.’
7. He kills.
8. He can overpower a robot.
In the lodge, by the eerie light of their hand torches, they bolted on their snowshoes, attached their emergency repair kits, and picked up their maps. The beams of their lamps preceding them, they went outside again, staying quite close together.
The wind beat upon their broad backs, while the snow worked hard to coat them in hard-packed, icy suits.
They crossed the clearing, half by dead reckoning and half by the few landmarks the torches revealed, each wishing to himself that he had his full powers of sight, and his radar, in operation again. Soon, they came to the opening in the trees which lead down the side of the valley and back toward Walker’s Watch. They stopped there, staring into the dark tunnel which the sheltering pines formed, and they seemed reluctant to go any farther.
‘There are so many shadows — ’ Tuttle said.
‘Shadows can’t hurt us,’ Suranov said. Throughout their association, from the moment they had met one another on the train coming north, Suranov had known that he was the leader among them. He had exercised his leadership sparingly, but now he must take full command. He started forward, into the trees, between the shadows, moving down the snowy slope.