All these matters it determined to deal with. First it opened the door of its cab. Then it sought out and re-entered the sleeth, hovering half stunned and bewildered over the hilltop, and brought it arrowing swiftly back into the tunnel. The sleeth's great body felt supple and powerful after the clanking paralytic environment of the handling machine; the rogue caused it to soar into the mouth of the tunnel, hurtle down a straightway, round a curve and join the group. It felt joy in the strength of the great muscles, delight in the silent power of its transflection fields, pleasure even in the dreadful radiation that it could evoke from the huge blind eyes. It lifted the girl's sleeping body in the deadly, gentle claws and traced a tightening curve along the tunnel's way, into the mountain and down, until it found a pit that it had not previously observed.
The rogue paused, probing the dark space at the bottom of the pit. It found nothing hostile, nothing of organized organic matter. It was, in fact, a long-forgotten base of the scientific establishment of the Plan of Man; the rogue had no notion what that meant, and still less interest.
Careful with Molly, holding her cuddled against the great sleek belly of the sleeth, it dropped into the dark, drifting slowly downward past the vertical walls, until it dropped out of darkness into a cold, ghostly light. They were in a huge sphere hollowed in the rock at the base of the hill. Once multiplying neutrons had flashed through and saturated a few kilograms of fissionable metal, the nuclear explosion had blossomed and shrugged tens of thousands of tons of rock away, melting the inner shell and holding it suspended, like a balloon, long enough for the dome shape to form. As the pressure leaked away the plastic rock hardened, and what was left was this great ball-shaped cave.
The pale light came from all about it, especially from a pale cold sun of milky mist that hung at the center of the hollow. A spiral staircase, skeletal metal treads and a handrail, wound upward inside a spidery steel tower from the bottom of the globular cavity's floor to a railed platform half inside that high, pale cloud of opal light.
What was the hollow?
What was the light?
The rogue gave those questions no consideration. Tenderly it set Molly Zaldivar down on the bottom of the hollow and allowed her to waken.
To the extent that the nonhuman intelligence of the rogue was capable of satisfaction, it was now pleased with what it had done. It had removed the person of the oddly attractive organized bit of matter called Molly Zaldivar to a place where it would not be harmed by outside activities, and where its own attempts to establish communication could go on without interference. It was a place whose chemistry, pressure and temperature appeared to be compatible with life, as far as the rogue was able to judge.
Of course, the rogue was still comparatively young in time, lacking experience, and even with the absorbed patterns that were all that was left of Cliff Hawk embodied in its own systems, it had no very deep understanding of biological chemistry.
An attractive feature of the cave, for the rogue, was the presence of residual ionizing radiation, coming from the surrounding rock, the very atmosphere inside the bubble, above all from that queerly glowing misty cloud of light. To the rogue this was a welcome source of energy to be tapped at need. It did not know that to Molly Zaldivar it was a death warrant.
When the girl woke up she cried out, peered wildly around the pit, saw the hovering form of the sleeth and tried to leap up and run away. There was nowhere to run. She slipped on the curving stone, black-stained and slick with seeping water, and lay there for a moment, sobbing.
The rogue attempted to form patterns of sound to communicate with her. It was difficult. Even using the transflection fields of the sleeth, modulating them as rapidly and precisely as it could, there was no handy substance for it to vibrate; all it could produce from the shaking of the metallic substance of the nearby tower and steps was a harsh metallic scream, incomprehensible to Molly, and frightening.
The rogue was, for some picoseconds, baffled. Its persona, the sleeth, had no vocal cords, no mechanism at all for making signals in air. But the rogue was more than the sleeth.
It extended a quick plasma finger and probed the tower itself. There, rustless and fresh as the day it was installed, was a bank of instruments; the rogue hunted among them until it found one that possessed a flexible membrane. It spoke through it:
"Molly Zaldivar. You need not be afraid because I love you."
The girl's involuntary scream echoed strangely from the high rounded walls. The rogue floated patiently above her, waiting.
Trembling and unsteady on the slick slope, she climbed to her feet and stared up at it. With a great effort she whispered, "What are you?"
"Cliff Hawk is a part of me. Call me Cliff Hawk."
"I can't! What sort of monster are you?"
"Monster?" The rogue examined the term carefully, without comprehension. It activated the distant tinny speaker to say: "I am your lover, Molly Zaldivar."
The girl's face wrinkled strangely, but Molly had herself under control now. She smiled, a cold, white and terrible smile, ghastly in that shadowless light. "My lover!" she crooned. She paused in thought. "I am lucky," she said bravely. "What girl ever had so mighty a lover?"
The rogue could not recognize near-hysteria. It was puzzlingly aware that the radiance from the organized matter called Molly Zaldivar was not the gentle, warming glow of rose or pearl that it had wanted to evoke; but it knew far too little of human beings to comprehend what Molly was trying to do. In its sleeth body it dropped gently toward her, meeting her as she rose, and allowed her quivering fingers to stroke the fine, dense fur.
"If I love you," she whispered tremulously, "will you help me?"
Powerful floods of energy thundered through the rogue, mighty and irresistible; it was a species of joy, a sort of elation. The rogue allowed its sleeth body to drop to Molly's feet.
"I'll give you everything," it swore through the distant tinny speaker.
The girl was trembling violently, but allowed the vast black talons to draw her quivering body against the fur. The rogue sensed her terror and tried to reassure her. "We are safe here, Molly Zaldivar. No enemy can reach us."
Her fear did not abate. "I fell in the water," she whispered. "I'm damp and cold . . ."
The rogue made the sleeth's fur warm for her; but still she was afraid.
"I'm a human being," she whimpered. "I'll be hungry. Thirsty. I must have food or I'll die!"
From above them the tinny rattle of the overtaxed speaker shouted: "I'll bring food, Molly Zaldivar! I'll bring all things you need. But we must stay here, where we are safe."
The rogue arranged the pit for her comfort, dried the rock with a searing beam from the sleeth's transflection fields, dragged down a cushion from the tower to make her a resting place. It put her shivering body on it, and reached into her mind to erase her haunting terror.
Presently she slept.
The rogue went foraging in the body of the sleeth. It rose to the top of the pit, squeezed its way through the long passages, climbed into the night. It needed only moments to arrow the score of miles to the nearest human dwelling. It dropped out of the dark onto the little house, crushed a four-legged creature that barked and howled at it, ripped through a wall and seized a refrigerated box filled with human food.
The little box in its talons, it dropped again into the side of the mountain, and paused to consider.
Molly Zaldivar had been in an agony of terror; that much it realized. Why? The rogue, which shared with all intellects the homomorphic trait of considering itself the proper matrix on which all other creatures should be modeled, could not believe that it was its own self which frightened her; no doubt it was its proxy, the sleeth. From the dim stirrings of Cliff Hawk's mind it realized that those great blind eyes, those vengeful talons were likely to be frightening to smaller creatures. It determined to leave the sleeth and visit her in another form.