severely dented,was already being dragged away, wheels still helplessly in the air, by atowing-machine. The other had been smashed beyond repair. Around itseveral of the new arrivals were busy, callously and efficientlybeginning to take it apart.
Dworn watched them at it, and the dreadful suspicion that had budded inhis mind ripened into a monstrous certainty.
Aluminum skin was swiftly stripped away; frame members of the same metalwere clipped neatly asunder by a machine armed with great shearing jaws.The engine came loose and was hoisted aloft carried dangling away byanother specialized machine. In an incredibly short time, little but abare chassis remained, and that too was being attacked by the salvagers.
And Dworn knew at last beyond all doubt, what manner of things thesewere.
Beside him he heard a sharp gasp, and turned to put a warning finger onQanya's lips. He drew her gently back with him, out of view of theactivities on the farther side of the mound.
"You understand what _that_ means?"
The girl nodded soberly. "We have the tradition. I think that must beone tradition that all the peoples have in common."
"Then you know what we have to do."
She nodded again.
Between them the word hung unspoken--a word not to be uttered lightly,so awful was it in its connotations, freighted with memories of a terrorrooted in the youth of the world.
_Drones._
* * * * *
In the beginning--said the stories--there were the ancients, who weregreat and powerful beyond the imagining of the latter-day peoples. Butthe ancients were divided among themselves, for some of them were goodand some of them were evil.
So they fought one another, with the terrific weapons of devastationwhich they owned. And the good triumphed in the end, as it must--thoughat terrible cost, for in those wars the earth was stripped almostlifeless; searing flame, plague, climatic convulsions wiped out thevaried life which once populated the world, and finally there remainedonly the peoples of the machine, all of whom--diverse though their waysof existence had become, and for all that they lived in ceaselessconflict with each other--were descended from the victors in that primalstruggle of men like gods.
But the evil old ones, though they were vanquished and their seedutterly annihilated, had nevertheless found a way to perpetuate theirevil upon the earth. For before the last of them died, as a final act ofvindictive atrocity, they created the drones....
Qanya was shivering uncontrollably. She whispered, "No one rememberswhen they last came. Some thought there were none left in the world."
"It's the same among my people," Dworn said hushedly. "There's no recordof the drones' having appeared in the time of anyone now living.... Buthere they are."
From out of sight came the rattle and clank and whine of machines atwork. And from farther away, from the direction of the great windowlessbuildings, there were hootings and throbbing sounds, and from time totime a deep rumbling that shook the earth.
Those noises were somehow unspeakably horrible now--now that they knewthere was no one there. No one--nothing but the machines, withoutfeeling or thought, without life, with only the blind meaninglessactivity of unliving mechanism set in motion and made self-subsisting athousand or two thousand years ago....
With infinite caution the two humans peeked once again over the summitof the mound. Out there on the flat, the little wingless drones buzzedto and fro with their false seeming of animation, finishing their work.
From around the great buildings, whose interior no living eyes had everlooked upon, lights winked oddly blue through the thickening dusk. Theycaught glimpses of immense moving machinery, and heard mysterioussounds. Once and again, it seemed that in the open space before thestructures a great door opened in the earth, and against a blue lightthat streamed upward they saw a vast winged shape rise majestically fromunderground and roll slowly forward into the shadows to join othersalready ranked there.
"What are they doing?"
"I don't know...." Dworn reflected, grasping at memories of thelegends, the traditions he had heard. What he recalled was ominous. "Ithink I can guess, though. I think they're getting ready to swarm."
Her stifled exclamation was sign enough that she understood.
If the guess was right, the danger was on the verge of being multipliedmany times over. Soon now, a swarm of queen ships would take to the airand fly in all directions, sowing the seed of the robot plague broadcastfar and wide; one such colonizing vessel, no doubt, had founded thisgreat hive only a few months ago. The things worked fast....
And Dworn's duty, and Qanya's, became all the more clear and urgent.Duty to spread the warning, at whatever risk to themselves. In the faceof that, Dworn's mission of personal blood vengeance becameunimportant--even if it had been possible to take such vengeance upon afoe with no life to forfeit.
He whispered to Qanya, "The ground machines are about to leave. Whenthey're gone, we'll have to make a break for it." For some reason, as hepondered the distance they must cross to reach the Barrier cliffs, herecalled the strange revolving thing atop the central tower off yonder,turning constantly with its air of restless searching.... He swallowedpainfully, repeated, "_Have_ to."
The girl nodded silently. Impulsively Dworn put his arm around her; shepressed close against him. They huddled together like that, finding inone another's living warmth some measure of encouragement against theterror of the falling night in which nothing moved but the lifelessmachines.
* * * * *
They watched while the lights glimmered far off across the flats; whilea flight of fighter drones took off from there and howled away into thedark on some roving patrol; while, at last, the salvaging machinesfinished their work and rolled loot-laden away one by one.
More than once while they waited, other columns of the wingless dronesentered or emerged from the tunnel mouth at the base of the mound. Thetempo of activity in the hive was, if anything, increased as night cameon. In the deepening darkness a faint blue glow streamed from the tunnelmouth.
As the whirring of the last salvager receded, Dworn got cautiously tohis feet. He said between his teeth, "We'd better move fast, now--"
"Wait," said Qanya tensely. "They'll sight us in the open, and then whatchance will we have?"
Dworn tried to make out her expression, but in the darkness her face wasonly a white blur. "We've got to try. There's no other way."
"Perhaps there is. What about the tunnel?"
Dworn was brought up short; that idea hadn't occurred to him at all. Hesaid slowly, "I see what you mean, It's only big enough for one-waytraffic--and the drones evidently have some system of remote control, sothat outbound expeditions aren't using it at the same time as returningones...."
"So, if we wait till some of the wingless ones enter from this end, andhurry through the tunnel close behind them--" Qanya left the sentenceuncompleted. Dworn knew she could imagine as well as he what wouldhappen if they failed to time it right, and met a drone column comingfrom the opposite direction. Still, the sound sense of the girl's ideaswas obvious.
"All right," he said. "We'll try it that way."
It was another nerve-fraying wait until a file of ground machines camewinding near and vanished one after another into the tunnel.
The two watchers gave them a little time--not too much--to get clear ofthe entrance. Then Dworn clasped Qanya's hand tightly in his own, andtogether they plunged down the sliding slope of the sandhill. The tunnelmouth yawned in its side, the bore on which it opened slanting steeplydown into the earth, inwardly lit with eery blue light.
Hearts pounding, they raced into the tunnel.
It was an unreal, nightmare flight. The blue shaft curved and descendedendlessly. Endlessly ahead of them echoed the snarling of drone engines.
They ran with lungs near to bursting, through air heavy and foul withexhaust gases--trying frantically to keep close behind that enginenoise, while it receded inexorably before them. And once
and again, amidthe tricky tunnel echoes, Dworn was almost sure that other drones hadentered and were descending the narrow way behind them, and before hiseyes flashed hideous visions of the two of them overtaken and run down,here where there was scarcely room to turn, let alone fight or hide.
The featureless walls were pressing inward to crush them, swimmingbefore eyes filmed with exhaustion, in the blue shimmer which no doubtsufficed for the perceptions of the drones but which hardly servedhuman vision....
The tunnel was in fact perhaps a thousand yards long.
But it seemed as if they had been staggering for a lifetime through thenightmare, through the blue glow, and it scarcely seemed real when apatch of night sky showed through the exit before them, and when theystumbled panting out into the clean cold air of the mountainside, andsaw the white radiance of moonrise over the Barrier cliffs
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