His camp was uphill from the road a bit. He laid the watch-alarm aside and moved carefully downslope. The night seemed to amplify the snap of every twig as he tried to move silently toward a better vantage point.
After a brief wait, a faint glow appeared to his left. It brightened, then became a painful, piercing white light, spearing through the trees by the road:
Headlights! Dennis blinked. Now, why does that surprise me? Did I think the makers of a road like this one wouldn’t be able to illuminate it?
Hidden by the undergrowth, he squinted against the bright beam. Vague figures marched behind it, bipedal, with swinging arms.
The procession passed below his blind. He heard the low, chuffing snorts of beasts. Shading his eyes, he made out giant quadrupeds pulling hulking vehicles that slid soundlessly along the road. Each conveyance sent a bright beam spearing ahead of it into the gloom.
Behind each came a formation of striding bipeds. Dennis caught glimpses of heavy, coweled clothing and what seemed to be sharp, glinting weapons, held at high port.
But each time his night vision began to return, another giant sled came around the corner to the west, its bright beam dazzling him and sending him flat against the ground again. It was frustrating, but there didn’t seem to be any way to get a better look!
More of the swaggering, coweled figures passed, then more quadrupeds, pulling hulking, eerily silent wagons. Dennis tried to make out how they moved. He neither heard nor saw any turning wheels. Yet hovercraft would give out blasts of compressed air, wouldn’t they?
Antigravity? Nothing else seemed to fit. But if that was so, why were they using animal power?
Could these be descendants of some fallen civilization, patching their commerce together with rude fragments of their forefathers’ science? It seemed to fit what he observed.
The idea of antigravity excited Dennis. Might that be the difference in physical laws Brady had talked about during those last moments on Earth?
A last troop of the hooded “warriors” passed below. These rode rather than walked. Their mounts tossed thickly maned heads and nickered, seeming to him so much like shaggy ponies that Dennis mistrusted his observation. It would be too tempting to interpret what he saw in Terran terms.
He rubbed his eyes and stared. But silhouettes were all he could make out.
One animal among the riders carried a smaller figure, coweled in a cloak of faded white—standing out in the deep gloom outside of the headlights. Something he saw in the smaller entity’s carriage told him that this one was a prisoner. It carried no shiny weapons, and its arms lay motionless on the animal’s neck. The hooded head slumped forward dejectedly.
As the riders passed below, the white-hooded prisoner’s head lifted, then started to turn as if to look up into the undergrowth where he was hiding! Dennis ducked down, feeling his throat suddenly go dry.
One of the dark silhouettes ahead turned around in its saddle and pulled on a tether. The prisoner’s mount stumbled forward, and the party passed below.
Dennis blinked and shook his head to clear it. For a moment, in the glare and confusion, he had experienced a queer illusion. It had seemed to him that the prisoner’s white cloak had opened—for a brief, timeless instant—and the starlight had shown him the sad, forlorn face of a beautiful girl.
7
For a long while the image lingered in his brain—so long, in fact, that Dennis hardly noticed the end of the procession.
He felt a bit lightheaded. Yeah, that must have been it. Too much excitement had gotten him seeing things.
Dennis watched the last glimmer of the caravan pass around the far bend to the east. He still knew next to nothing about the technology and culture of the locals. All he had learned was that the natives shared some of humanity’s less savory habits—such as the way they treated one another.
A moment later a tiny mutter of sound drifted up from the road below.
Dennis suddenly remembered the image on the camp-watch display. There had been one more tiny green dot, following the caravan from behind. In all the excitement he had forgotten about it!
He crept forward to get a better view. There were no more bright, blinding lights. Now he might get a good look!
He slid quietly to within feet of the road itself. At first he saw nothing. Then a tiny noise made him look to the right.
A glint of glass and plastic reflected the faint glow of the departing procession. A tiny articulated arm waved in the dim starlight. On almost silent, spinning treads, the Sahara Tech exploration robot whizzed down the alien highway eastward… following Dennis’s instructions to the letter.
…finding out about the natives.
Dennis barely stifled a shout. Idiot machine! He rushed out onto the highway, tripping over a tree root and rolling most of the way. He made it to his feet in time to see the robot, one of its arms waving as if in farewell, pass around the bend and out of sight.
Dennis cursed softly but soundly. That robot’s tapes doubtless carried all the information he needed. But he couldn’t chase it or call out without bringing himself to the attention of the caravan guards!
He was still muttering softly, standing there in the middle of the dark road, when something alive dropped onto his head from an overhanging branch. Dennis gasped in alarm as the thing wrapped itself tightly over his eyes, sending him stumbling, reeling into the trees.
8
“What was the big idea, scaring me half to death?” Dennis accused hoarsely. “I might have run into something and hurt both of us!”
The object of his ire watched him from a rock a few feet away, green eyes gleaming in the light from the camp stove. The pixolet yawned complacently, apparently of the opinion Dennis was making a big deal out of nothing.
“Damn all machines and natives! Just where have you been the past four days, anyway? Here I rescue you from a fate worse than boredom at the hands of Bernald Brady, and in return all I ask is a friend who knows the neighborhood.
What happens? That ‘friend’ up and leaves me all alone, until isolation eventually gets me so I’m talking to myself… or worse, to a stubby little flying pig who can’t understand a word I’m saying…!”
Dennis found he could hold his hands steady at last. He poured a cup of soup for himself. Blowing on it, he muttered as his temper slowly wound down, “Stupid, practical joking E.T.s… damned fickle aliens…”
He glanced over his cup at the diminutive native animal. Its tongue was hanging out. Its eyes met his.
Dennis let out a sigh of surrender. He poured some soup into the overturned pot cover. The pixolet hopped over and lapped at it daintily, looking up at him from time to time.
When both had finished, Dennis rinsed out the utensils and crawled back into his sleeping bag. He picked up the camp-alarm and worked on its settings. Pix leaped over beside him and watched.
Dennis tried to ignore it but couldn’t maintain his ire for long—not with it looking at him that way, purring, watching with apparent fascination the adjustments he made to the little machine.
Dennis shrugged and picked up the small creature. “What is it about you and machines? You sure can’t use them. See?” He shook its little paws. “No hands!”
With the stove turned off, the forest night settled in around. In a little island in the quiet, Dennis soon found himself telling the pixolet about the constellations and all the other things he had discovered.
And he realized it was good to have company again, even if it was an alien creature who didn’t understand a single word he said.