In a moment, reluctantly, Steffan followed.
Tuttle came last.
Halfway down toward the valley floor, the tunnel between the trees narrowed drastically. The trees loomed closer, spread their boughs lower. And it was here, in these tight quarters, in the deepest shadows, that they were attacked.
Something howled in triumph, its mad voice echoing above the constant whine of the wind.
Suranov whirled, not certain from which direction the sound had come, lancing the trees with torchlight.
Behind, Tuttle cried out.
Suranov turned, as Steffan did, and both their torches illuminated the struggling robot.
‘It can’t be!’ Steffan said.
Tuttle had fallen back under the relentless attack of a two-legged creature which moved almost exactly as a robot might move, though it was clearly a fleshy creature. It was dressed in furs, its feet booted, and it wielded a metal axe.
It drove the blunted blade at Tuttle’s ring cable.
Tuttle raised an arm, threw back the weapon, saved himself — at the cost of a severely damaged elbow joint.
Suranov started forward to help, but was stopped as a second of the fleshy beasts delivered a blow from behind. The weapon struck the center of Suranov’s back and drove him, totteringly, to his knees.
Suranov fell sideways, rolled, got to his feet in one well-coordinated maneuver, turned quickly to confront his assailant.
A fleshy face stared back at him from a dozen feet away, blowing steam into the cold air. It was framed in a fur-lined hood, a grotesque parody of a robot’s face. Its eyes were too small for visual receptors, and they did not glow. Its face was not perfectly symmetrical as it should have been; instead, it was out of proportion — and it was puffed and mottled from the cold. It did not even shine in the torchlight, and yet… Yet, there was obvious intelligence there — malevolent intelligence, perhaps even maniacal, but intelligence nonetheless.
Surprisingly, the monster spoke to Suranov. Its voice was deep, its language full of rounded, softened syllables, not at all like the clattering language the robots spoke to one another.
Abruptly, the beast leapt forward, crying out, and swung a length of metal pipe at Suranov’s neck.
The robot danced backwards, out of range.
The demon came forward.
Suranov glanced at the others, saw the first demon had Tuttle backed almost into the woods. A third had attacked Steffan, who was barely managing to hold his own.
Screaming, the man before Suranov charged, plowed the end of the pipe into Suranov’s chest.
The robot fell, hard.
The man came in close, raising his bludgeon.
Man thinks, though he’s of flesh… sleeps like an animal, devours other flesh, defecates, rots, dies… he spawns his young in an unmechanical manner, though his young are sentient… he kills… he kills… he overpowers robots, dismantles them, does {what?) with their parts… can be killed, permanently, only with a wooden implement… if killed in any other way, he does not die a true death, but springs up elsewhere in a new body…
As the monster swung his club. Suranov rolled, rose up and struck out with his long-fingered hand.
The man’s face tore, gave blood.
The demon stepped back, bewildered.
Suranov’s terror had metamorphosed into rage, and he made use of that rage as he stepped forward and struck out again. And again. Flailing with all of his reduced strength, he broke the demon’s body, temporarily killed it, leaving the snow spattered with blood.
Turning from his own assailant, he moved in on the beast that was after Steffan and, clubbing from behind, broke its neck with one blow of his steel hand.
By the time he reached Tuttle and had dispatched with the third demon, Tuttle had sustained one totally demolished arm, another smashed hand, and damage to the ring cable which, luckily, had not terminated him. The three of them, with any luck, would survive.
‘I thought it was finished,’ Tuttle said.
Dazed, Steffan said to Suranov, ‘You killed all three of them!’
‘They would have terminated us,’ Suranov said. Inside, where they could not see, he was in a turmoil.
‘But,’ Steffan said, ‘the prime directive from the Central Agency forbids the taking of life — ’
‘Not quite,’ Suranov said. ‘It forbids the taking of life which cannot be restored.’
‘These lives will be restored?’ Steffan asked, looking at the hideous corpses, unable to understand.
‘You’ve seen human beings now,’ Suranov said. ‘Do you believe the myths, or do you still scoff?’
‘How can I scoff?’
‘Then,’ Suranov said, ‘if you believe that such demons exist, you must believe what else is said of them.’ He quoted his own store of data on the subject: ‘If killed in any other way, by any means other than wood, the man will only appear to be dead. In reality, the moment he drops before his assailant, he springs to life elsewhere, unharmed, in a new body.’
Steffan nodded, unwilling to argue the point.
Tuttle said, ‘What now?’
‘We continue back to Walker’s Watch,’ Suranov said.
‘And tell them what we found?’
‘No.’
‘But,’ Tuttle said, ‘we can lead them back here, show them these corpses.’
‘Look around you,’ Suranov said. ‘There are other demons watching from the trees.’
Tuttle looked, saw a dozen white faces on both sides, leering.
Suranov said, ‘I don’t think they’ll attack us again. They’ve seen what we can do, how we have learned that, with them, the prime directive does not apply. But they’re sure to remove and bury the corpses when we’ve gone.’
‘We can take a body along with us,’ Tuttle said.
Suranov said, ‘No. Both of your hands are useless, and Steffan’s right arm is uncontrollable. I couldn’t carry one of those bodies all the way back to Walker’s Watch with my power as reduced as it is.’
‘Then,’ Tuttle said, ‘we still won’t tell anyone about what we’ve seen up here?’
‘We can’t afford to, if we ever want to be promoted,’ Suranov said. ‘Our only hope is to spend a very long time in some inactivation nook, contemplating until we’ve learned to cope with what we’ve witnessed.’
They picked their torches out of the snow and, staying close to one another, started down toward the valley once more.
‘Walk slowly and show no fear,’ Suranov warned.
They walked slowly, but each of them was certain that his fear was painfully evident to the unearthly creatures crouching in the shadows beneath the pine trees.
They walked all that night and most of the following day before they reached the stationhouse at Walker’s Watch. In that time, the storm died down and winked out altogether. The landscape was serene, white, quite peaceful. Looking at it, one felt sure the universe was rational. But Suranov knew, with a terrible, sick premonition, that — if he must believe in specters and other-worldly beings like men — he would never be able to think of the universe in rational terms again.