Chapter IV

Rested, although no nearer a definite plan for resubjugation of the telepuppet team, Stewart cautiously watched the robots from behind an outcropping. To this concealed vantage point he had led Carol, Director Randall and McAllister while the automatons had been occupied with recharging.

"You're going to try some more voice commands on the OC?" Carol's voice came softly through the earphones as she squirmed to find more comfort within the folds of her oversized sheath.

"We're not doing _anything_," Stewart said firmly, "until that thing is well occupied with transmission."

McAllister's boot came in contact with something hard and he bent down to inspect it. "Say, what's this?"

Randall went over to see. "A burnt-out telepuppet, obviously."

Stewart had a look too. "It's an Algae Detector. But, since there's no water around here, it hasn't had a chance to exercise its function. Electronic atrophy must have set in."

"It's riddled with drill holes," McAllister noted. "Looks like one of those other puppets worked it over."

Stewart examined the thing. The pilot was right.

"At least _one_ of our robots seems to have overcome its inhibition against analyzing pure metal," Randall observed, prodding it.

"Or maybe something else has been around here," McAllister said.

The director looked up sharply.

"Something else? Like what?" Carol laughed at the pilot's unreasonable concern.

McAllister only hunched his bony shoulders.

It was not difficult for Stewart to see that McAllister was afraid. Neither the pilot nor Mortimer was generally known in the Bureau for his courage. That their apprehension had grown to visible proportions out there on this Godforsaken edge of infinity was merely an expected extension of their characters.

Rather, it was Randall's fear--Randall's and his own--that concerned Stewart. Both seemed incommunicable. Stewart's reticence was involuntary, stemming as it did from his inability to find words for his incomprehensible dread. And he wondered whether the director's fear, too, was that inexpressible.

He picked up a clod of soil and crumbled it in his gloved hand, as though symbolizing his anxious desire to come to grips with whatever it was that hid behind a veil in his mind.

Randall lowered himself on his haunches. "Don't we have any _emergency_ means of bringing that machine under control?"

"Oh, there are a couple of tricks. Manhandling it is one."

Carol hugged her knees and laughed skeptically. "_That_ thing?"

"There's a recessed deactivation switch in its lower section. All I have to do is get my hand on it."

"And all _it_ has to do," she retorted dubiously, "is get one of its fifty-pound vises on _you_."

She seized his hand and, through two layers of rubberized material, he sensed the unsteadiness of her grip. "Do be careful, Dave."

He was impressed. It wasn't often she allowed her more serious nature to show through candidly.

She rose suddenly and turned to face a distant mountain range.

Randall tensed. "Yes, Carol--what is it?"

Profuse light from the primary etched lines of concern on her brow. "I'm sensing electronic spill-off from somewhere up in those peaks--perhaps beyond."

Randall's breath rasped in the earphones. But he only said, "Spurious stuff. Reflections caused by a dense magnetic field can throw you off like that, you know."

She nodded--not enthusiastically, however.

Stewart glanced at the director, who looked swiftly away. But their eyes had met for an instant and, in Randall's, Stewart wondered whether he hadn't detected something cunning, elusive. Or was it just the same nameless fear that he, himself, felt.

* * * * *

"There it goes!" McAllister exclaimed. "The OC's getting ready to transmit!"

Elbows splayed along the ridge, Carol watched the huge machine steadying its parabolic discs on a spot close to the horizon.

"See if you can pick up some of the spill-off," Stewart urged.

She waved for silence. "I'm beginning to get it now."

"Can you pinpoint the frequency?"

"Just a notch about one thirty-six point two MCs."

"On the nose, isn't it?" Randall asked.

"Close enough. How _are_ the signals, Carol?"

"They seem shipshape, well modulated, crammed with data. I can even read some bits having to do with oxygen--plenty of it--in that cave over there, I believe." She pointed, then glanced at Stewart. "There's no malfunctioning at all!"

He retrieved his transmitter and switched from MCW to CW. "That simplifies our task. When we re-establish control, all we'll have to do is reorient the OC."

Randall walked several feet away, kicked a stone, glanced up at the sky and returned. "What now?"

Stewart retuned his transmitter. "Penultimate emergency procedure. I'm going to come down with both heels on the frequency at which it received code signals from the relay base."

"But can you give it _coded_ commands?"

"I'm just going to lock the sending key on a steady impulse. It's a 'stop-everything' order." He hit the lever.

Carol winced. "Ouch. I wasn't ready for that."

"What's it doing now?" he demanded.

"Still transmitting. No interruption."

He released the key. "Well that exhausts our bag of tricks. We'll have to do it by hand."

Just then Carol's amused laughter tinkled in the earphones. "Why, that harebrain machine thinks it's God!"

Randall started. "What?"

"I'm having a peek at its PM&R pack spill-off. It's lord and master of the universe! There's only one thing worthy of touching its pedal pad--the puppet barge. That's because the barge, being metal too, is _a totem_!"

The director shook his head and mumbled, "Most unusual." Then, "Carol! Can you see anything at all significant in its memory pack? Any evidence of--"

But in the next instant she screamed and lunged back away from a foot-long metallic crab that had drawn up before her.

"The Flora C&A!" Stewart made a grab for the thing, but it skirted his gloved hand and started forward again.

McAllister backed away until he came up against the outcropping beside the girl. Squirming qualmishly, he kicked out and caught the crab broadside, sending it skittering back.

Then he shouted in pain and gripped his instep with both hands. "My foot! It's broken!"

But, a moment later, Stewart was certain the injury was negligible, judging from the adequate support the foot provided in McAllister's sprint for the Photon.

* * * * *

Bigboss completed his transmission and turned full attention on the eureka signals coming frantically from Grazer.

Interested, he inspected the sequenced data and took note of the modulation peaks that exactly duplicated the C_{5}H_{8} parameter.

Grazer had sensed _hydrocarbon_! More important, one of his spectrometric biodetectors was getting a whiff of DNA molecules!

Even those significant findings, however, accounted for but part of the frenzy with which Grazer was transmitting his impulses. There was much more behind the eurekas than that. But all the lesser worker could convey telemetrically was his general excitement, for there were no parameters dealing with the third element of his discovery.

Perplexed, Bigboss pondered this inadequacy of communication between him and his servitor--until a rationalization circuit came up with the recommendation: Tap in on Grazer's direct video system.

He did.

And Bigboss went momentarily irrational as motor circuits fought one another to express the exultation flooding from his evaluation pack. He leaped three meters high. His upper command section turned up a hundred revolutions per minute in triumphant delirium. He extended and retracted his vises, leveled his blaster and spat out a lance of vicious destruction that slashed a concentric trench in the ground about him.

Then he damped all activity and steadied himself with a sober appreciation of the telemetric signals Grazer had contributed. The servitor was confronting three hated non-Totemic mobiles!

They had emerged from their needle! They had come finally to hurl direct challenge at the Supreme Being!

Circuit currents surging once more toward irrational levels, Bigboss calmed himself with dedication to the vengeful destruction of those insolent creatures.

He transmitted a "stop-what-you're-doing-and-follow-me" order and headed into Grazer's telemetric signals. Every twenty meters or so, a discrimination circuit peaked in its erratic pattern and he hurled out a bolt of raw energy, annihilating a boulder here, leveling a rise there, pulverizing an occasional crag.

In his excitement, however, he had neglected the environs-scanning procedure he had devised to compensate for his damaged video sensor. And he didn't realize that, while he had been stabilized for transmission, Minnie had almost reached him in a stealthy advance. But now he was pulling steadily away from her.

Ignoring their order of social priority, the workers converged on the nearby outcropping. Some bore to the right around the rock formation, while others joined Bigboss in a flanking maneuver to the left. The long-legged Maggie and Peter the Meter evaluated the slanted stone as comprising no barrier and proceeded directly over it.

* * * * *

When he finally swung around and brought the contemptuous mobiles under direct visual observation, Bigboss paused to evaluate the situation. It required no small amount of self-control to restrain his motor circuits. But he _had_ to. For he was determined the arrogant mobiles would not again reach the sanctuary of their Totem.

Grazer stood before the three creatures, his servo units idling as his transmitter continued to send frantic eurekas. And now his excited impulses were joined by those of other servitors who had formed a half circle around the outcropping--Peter the Meter, boasting of excitation of an infrared radiometer; Breather, reporting traces of both oxygen and carbon dioxide in the immediate atmosphere; Minnie, whose high neutron flux instruments were beginning to identify concentrations of calcium, potassium, carbon.

Sequencing and storing the data, Bigboss sent out a curt directive that amounted to: Do not analyze! Just stay out of the way!

The ring of clansmen remained poised. Several times one of the nonmetallic captives attempted to force its way through the workers, but was pulled back by another mobile.

Bigboss brought up his blaster and loosed a vicious, blinding charge that swamped half a dozen unretracted photometers and pulverized the top of the outcropping. He adjusted his aim, compensating for the crouching, huddled position the interlopers had assumed, and fed renewed energy to the blaster's condenser.

By the next sine wave peak, however, he regretted his pre-occupation with the mobiles. For, at that moment, Minnie's drill head, sweeping through one of his fields of vision before he could discharge the blaster, crashed into video pickup lens Three.

He sprang back, rationalization pack coming frantically to grips with this further loss of visual integrity. Through luck rather than intent, he brought one of his still functioning lenses to bear on the advancing Minnie.

She let her entire drill head fly in a bludgeoning blow, but he parried it with his vise while he reasoned out the modified swivel motion now required to provide adequate coverage with only two lenses.

But the attack had touched off a number of other clashes among socially ambitious workers. Seismo turned on Minnie's exposed flank and sent a pedal disc crashing through her after analyzing chamber. Sludge spilled out upon the ground.

Peter the Meter swung his boom-and-ball gamma ray detector against Breather's air pouches while Maggie straddled Sun Watcher and proceeded to stomp on one of his telescopic instruments.

In the midst of all this confusion, Bigboss was only vaguely aware that the three impudent mobiles had slipped out of the ring of servitors and were returning swiftly to their Totem.

Infuriated over the imminent loss of prey, he swiveled around in their direction. Again, however, he neglected his defense.

And before he could trigger a charge at the fleeing things, Minnie's drill head whipped around in a level arc that snapped his blaster off at its socket and sent it hurtling across the plain.

As she drew back for another blow, he lunged over and managed to grip her bit in his vise. With a violent twist, he broke it off at the chuck.

Subdued finally, she withdrew.

* * * * *

"You saw it, didn't you?" Mittich demanded.

Vrausot scratched his jaw with a rigid talon. "Interesting--that trouble between the aliens and their automatons. What interpretation do you put on it?"

Pivoting on his tail, the other spun around from the screen to face the Chancellor. "That they don't even carry side arms. They had no defense whatsoever against their machines. If they were here looking for a fight, wouldn't they be armed at all times?"

Vrausot expressed ridicule by tracing a circle with the tip of his tapering snout. "Mittich, you amuse me. Only one sunset ago you were bending my tail to make me believe they may be cunning; that they might have strung out a seine for us."

"Yes?" the Assemblyman prompted, expecting more.

"Now I simply extend your own logic back to you. They prepared that drama down there for our benefit--just in case we were watching. They _want_ us to believe they are stupid and helpless."

Assemblyman Mittich laced the other with a calculating stare. He was aware of the heavy irony in Vrausot's hisses and clicks and he knew the Chancellor was only deriding him.

"If I had to arrive at an alternate assessment, Assemblyman--" Vrausot paused and Mittich braced himself for more scorn. "It would be that the aliens are stupid, inept, blundering, defenseless. Actually, it would seem that they must have gained interstellar status only through accident."

"Oh, no. We know _that_ isn't true."

Ignoring the interruption, the Chancellor continued. "And they _were_ foolish enough to come here unarmed, apparently."

But Mittich broke in again. "If I had attracted more votes in the Curule Assembly, we would have come unarmed too."

"Ah! But we didn't. And do you know why? Because the Assembly really believes as I do, even though they might not have the courage to vote their convictions. That's why I'm going to exercise my own judgment--because I _know_ their subliminal disposition in this matter."

* * * * *

Mittich unhinged his jaw, conveying dismay. There was no doubt now what the Chancellor's intentions were. Oh, he would probably swim around cautiously for a while. But his final determination was already cloaked with inevitability.

Eventually--how soon?--he would lash out at the aliens with all the ship's invincible firepower. And nothing else could be done to delay that treachery. For Mittich couldn't conceive of another last-_purai_ diversion, such as the suggestion that the aliens may have strung out a seine, to forestall the tragedy Vrausot was determined to perpetrate.

Lumbering over to the ship's control panel, the Chancellor directed his pilot: "Advance five degrees westward along our orbital path then restabilize."

* * * * *

Kavula's hands darted here and there and the vessel resounded with the _thuds_ of great tails thumping down on the deck to maintain equilibrium as new velocity came in surges.

"This will put us below the aliens' horizon," Kavula noted.

"Of course it will," the Chancellor hissed back at the other's impertinence. "And we'll be in such a position that they won't be able to observe our artillery emissions."

He turned to the intercom. "Gun Crew One, prepare for firing."

"Action?" Mittich asked, fearing the worst.

"Of a sort--preparatory." The Chancellor studied the teleview screen and once more directed the gunners:

"I'm designating a target circle on one of those peaks down there. You may fire at will."

He touched a button and a green halo flared on the screen. He adjusted it to encompass the surface prominence he had in mind. The ship shuddered as the gunner punched his firing stud.

Mittich watched the surface erupt in a brilliant display of angry energy--a thousand kilometers off target.

The Chancellor received the fire control officer's apology, together with a request for permission to try again. The latter he denied.

"They evidently need the practice," Kavula advised.

The Chancellor fumed at his pilot's insolence. "They'll do better at close range," he promised. "Meanwhile, I want this ship stripped for action. I've reached my decision. One close pass is all it should take. We strike after sunup."

Desperately, Mittich hurried over and swung his small arms imploringly. "You can't do this thing!"

"Oh, quit being such a floundering minnow! Nothing's going to happen. They're quite defenseless, I'm convinced."

"If that's the case, then you are under injunction of the Curule Assembly to make peaceful contact!"

"Drown peaceful contact!" the Chancellor swore. "I'm supposed to exercise my judgment out here!"

"But--"

"Flotsam! There will be no peace. If that's what the aliens wanted, they wouldn't have come out here in the first place. We are going to blast them. And from here we'll go on!"

"Go on?" Mittich repeated cautiously. "Where?"

Vrausot's eyes glazed over and his disarray of teeth were exposed to the gums as he paced the deck and beat his arms against his side in a fit of frantic expectation.

"We know where their relay base is," he explained. "We'll strike that next! Then, capitalizing on the element of surprise, we'll continue to their World of Origin and destroy it outright. On the way back we'll probably knock out one or two other planets."

He turned on a dumfounded Mittich. "The war--if there is to be one--will be short. We'll have only to return to the Tzarean Shoal and muster a fleet before we wipe out the rest of their civilization. And once again ours will be the glory of conquest--such as we have not experienced in, oh, how many millennia?"