The Practice Effect Part 3

The airlock rested on a gentle slope of dry, yellow gra.s.s. The meadow fell away toward a green-rimmed watercourse a quarter mile away. Beyond the stream, rows of long, narrow hills rose toward whitecapped mountains. Swards of yellow interspersed unevenly with carpets of varitone green.

Trees.

Yes, they looked like real trees, and the sky was blue. White cirrus clouds laced across the almost cyan vault overhead.

For a long moment it was eerily, unnaturally quiet. He realized he had been holding his breath since opening the door. It made him feel lightheaded.

Inhaling, he tasted the crisp, clean air. The breeze brought sounds of brus.h.i.+ng gra.s.s and creaking branches. It also brought odors . . . the unmistakable mustiness of chlorophyll and humus, of dry gra.s.s and what smelled like oak.

Dennis stood in the airlock's combing and looked at the trees. They sure looked like oak. The countryside reminded him of northern California.

Could this place actually be Earth? Dennis wondered. Had the ziev effect played another trick on them all and given them teleportation rather than an interstellar drive?

It would be amusing to hitchhike to a pay phone and call Flaster with the news. Collect, of course.

Dennis felt a sharp stab as tiny claws bit into his shoulder. The pixolet's wing membranes snapped wide with a sound like a shot, and the creature soared off over the meadow, toward the line of trees, "Hey.. . Pix! Where are you ..."

Dennis's voice caught in his throat as he realized this couldn't be Earth. This was where Pix came from.

He began noticing little things-the shape of the leaves of gra.s.s, a huge, fernlike plant by the riverside, a feeling in the air.

Dennis made sure his bolstered sidearm was unenc.u.mbered, and his boot cuffs well covered by his gaiters. The dry gra.s.s crunched beneath his feet as he stepped out. Tiny, whining insect sounds filled the air.

"Pix!" he called, but the little creature had flown from sight.

Dennis moved cautiously, all senses alert. He guessed the first few moments on an alien world could be the most dangerous of all.

Trying to watch the sky, the forest, and the nearby insects all at once, he didn't even notice the squat little robot until he tripped over it and fell sprawling to the ground.

Dennis instinctively rolled away into a crouch, the needler suddenly in his hand, his pulse pounding in his ears.

He sighed as he recognized the little Sahara Tech exploration drone.

The 'bot's cameras tracked him with a barely discernible whir. Its observing turret slowly turned. Dennis lowered the needler. "Come here," he commanded.

The robot seemed to consider the order for a moment. Then it approached on spinning treads to halt a meter away.

"What have you got there?" Dennis pointed.

The robot held something in one of its manipulator grips. It was a s.h.i.+ny bit of metal, with a clawed pincer at one end.

"Isn't that a piece of another robot?" Dennis asked, hoping he was wrong.

Compared with some of the sophisticated machines Dennis had worked with, the exploration 'bot wasn't very bright. But it understood a basic vocabulary. A green light on its turret flashed, indicating a.s.sent.

"Where did you get it?"

The little machine paused, then swiveled and pointed with one of its other sampling arms.

Dennis got up and looked, but he saw nothing in that direction. He moved cautiously through the tall gra.s.s until, at last, he came to a flat area partly hidden by the weeds. There he stopped and stared.

The clearing looked like a wilderness parts store... a Grizzly Adams wrecking yard... a rustic electronics swap meet.

One-no, two-S.I.T. robots had been rather tactlessly disa.s.sembled; their parts lay in neat rows among the clumps of gra.s.s, apparently ordered and sorted by size and shape.

Dennis knelt and picked up a camera turret. It had been ripped out of its housing, and the pieces had been laid out on the ground, like merchandise for sale.

The trampled mud was strewn with scattered bits of straw, wire, and gla.s.s. Dennis looked closer Here and there, mixed in among the tread marks and the torn pieces of plastic machinery, were faint but unmistakable footprints.

Dennis looked down at the neat rows of gears, wheels, panels, and circuit boards-at the faint marks in the clay- and all he could think of was an epitaph he had once read in a New England cemetery.

I knew this would happen someday.

Dennis had always felt he was somehow destined to encounter something really unusual during his life. Well, here it was in front of him-tangible evidence of alien intelligence.

The comforting Earthlike Gestalt finished evaporating around him.

He looked at the "gra.s.s" and saw it wasn't like any gra.s.s he had ever seen. The line of trees was now a dark, unknown forest filled with malign forces. Dennis felt a crawling sensation on the nape of his neck.

A clicking sound made him whirl, the needler in his hand. But it was only the surviving robot again, poking through-the pieces of its disa.s.sembled fellows.

Dennis picked up an electronics board from the ground. It had been pried out of its housing by main force. It could easily have been separated with just a twist, but it had been roughly sheared away, as if the ent.i.ty doing the dissection had never heard of threaded sleeves or bolts.

Was this the work of primitives, then? Or someone from a race so advanced that they'd forgotten about such simple things as screws?

One thing was certain. The being or beings responsible didn't have a high regard for other people's property.

The robots had been made mostly of plastic. He noted that most of the bigger metal pieces seemed to be missing entirely.

Dennis suddenly had a very unpleasant thought. "Oh, no," he murmured. "Please, don't let it be!" He rose with feeling of numb dread in the pit of his stomach.

Dennis walked back to the airlock. He rounded the corner and stopped suddenly, groaning out loud.

The access panel to the zievatron return mechanism lay ajar. The electronics cabinet was empty; its delicate components lay on the ground, like pieces on display on a store shelf. Most were clearly broken beyond repair.

With an eloquence borne of irony, Dennis simply said "Argh!" and sagged back against the wall of the airlock.

Another epigram floated around in the despair that seemed to fill his brain-something a friend had once said to him about the phenomenology of life.

'7 think, therefore I scream."

The robot "peeped" and played the sequence over again. Dennis concentrated on the three-day-old images displayed on the machine's tiny video plate. Something very strange was going on here.

The small screen showed shapes that looked like blurry humanoid figures moving around the zievatron airlock. The beings walked on two legs and appeared to be accompanied by at least two kinds of quadrupeds. Beyond that, Dennis could hardly make out any detail from the noisy enlargement.

The miracle was that he could see anything at all. According to its inertia! recorder, the robot had been on a distant ridge, several kilometers away, when it detected activity back at the airlock and turned to photograph the shapes cl.u.s.tered about the zievatron portal.

At that distance, the robot shouldn't have been able to see anything at all. Dennis suspected something was wrong with the 'bot's internal tracker. It must have been closer than it thought it was at the time.

Unfortunately, this tape was almost his only source of direct information. The records of the other 'bots had been ruined when they were so rudely disa.s.sembled.

He skimmed over the robot's record to a point about three days ago, when it all seemed to have begun.

The first to arrive at the airlock was a small figure in white. It rode up upon the back of something like a very s.h.a.ggy pony-or a very large sheepdog. Dennis couldn't decide which simile was more appropriate. All he could make out about the humanoid was that it was slender and moved gracefully as it inspected the zievatron from all angles, hardly touching it at all.

The figure in white sat before the airlock and Appeared to begin a long period of meditation. Several hours pa.s.sed. Dennis skimmed the record at high speed.

Suddenly, from the forest verge, there erupted a troop of mounted natives charging toward the airlock on s.h.a.ggy beasts. In spite of the blurriness of the image, Dennis could sense the first intruder's panic as it bounded to its feet, then hurriedly mounted and rode off, bare meters ahead of its pursuers.

Dennis saw no more of the figure in white. But as one detachment of the newcomers gave chase, the rest came to a halt by the airlock.

Most of these humanoids seemed to have large, furry heads, distended high above the shoulders. In their midst there dismounted a smaller, more rotund biped in red wrappings, who approached the airlock purposefully.

Try as he might, Dennis couldn't make the images resolve any clearer.

By this time, the robot had apparently decided that all this activity merited closer attention. It began descending the hill to return to base and get a closer look. In moments it had dropped down to the level of the trees, and the action at the zievatron was lost from view.

Unfortunately-or perhaps fortunately-the little 'bot moved slowly over the rugged terrain. By the time it got back, the creatures had already finished their dissection of the Earth machines and departed.

Perhaps they were in a hurry to help pursue the figure in white.

Dennis let the recording play itself out again. He sighed in frustration.

It had been so tempting, on looking at those blurry shapes, to interpret them as humans. Yet he knew he had better not go into things with any preconceived notions. They had to be alien creatures, more closely akin to the pixolet than to himself.

He slipped the record disk out of the robot and replaced it with a blank one.

"You're going to have to be my scout," he ruminated aloud in front of the little drone. "I guess I'll want to send you ahead to find out about the inhabitants of this world for me. Only this time I'll want you to put a high priority on stealth and your own survival. You hear? I don't want you taken apart like your brothers!"

The little green a.s.sent light on the probe's turret lit up. Of course, the 'bot couldn't really have understood all that. Dennis had been mostly talking to himself, to gather his own thoughts. He would pa.r.s.e the instructions in carefully phrased Robot-English later, when he had worked out exactly what he wanted the little machine to do.

He faced a real problem, and he still wasn't quite sure what he could do about it.

Sure, Brady had given him ". .. almost enough gear to build another d.a.m.ned zievatron.. ." But practicality was quite another thing. No one had imagined he would need to bring along spare power cables, for heaven's sake! Both of the big, high-voltage copper busses had been shredded out at the roots, along with most of the detachable metal in the electronics bay.

Even if he did try to build and calibrate another return mechanism, would Flaster keep the zievatron tied up long enough to let him finish? Dennis felt he understood the S.I.T. chief pretty well. The fellow was anxious for a success to further his ambitions. Dennis might even be cast loose so Lab One could be put to work searching for another anomaly world!

And even if he tried to rea.s.semble the device, would he be left alone by the natives long enough to finish?

Dennis picked up the one alien artifact he had found-a sharp, curve-bladed knife that had fallen into the high gra.s.s and apparently been lost by the vandals.

The long, tapered blade had the smooth sharpness of a fine razor, yet it was almost as flexible as hard rubber. The grip was designed for a hand smaller than his, but it was obviously meant to be comfortable and provide a firm grasp.

The b.u.t.t was carved in what appeared to be the shape of a dragon's head. Dennis hoped that wasn't what the natives actually looked like.

He couldn't fathom what the thing was made of. It was certainly doubtful a better knife could be manufactured on Earth. It seemed to belie the idea that the natives were primitives.

Perhaps the vandals were the local equivalent of criminals or careless children. (Could the chase he had observed have been some sort of game, like hide-and-go-seek?) What had happened here might be atypical of their society as a whole. Dennis tried to be optimistic. All he really needed was some metal stock and a couple of days in a good machine shop to fix and calibrate some of the larger ruined parts. The knife seemed to indicate the natives had a high enough technology.

They might even know many things men of Earth did not. He tried to be optimistic, and imagined being the first Earthling to make friendly contact with an advanced extraterrestrial culture.

"I might be able to trade my pocket nailclipper-stop-watch for a genuine gompwriszt or a K'k'kglamtring," he mused. "I could be wealthy in no time!. . . Amba.s.sador Nuel. Entrepreneur Nuel!"

His morale lifted just a little. Who could tell?

The sun was setting in a direction Dennis decided to call west. A tall range of mountains covered that horizon, stretching around to the south and then eastward around this high valley. Sunlight glanced off numerous small glaciers. There were bright highlights from a winding river that weaved through the southeastern mountains.

Dennis watched the reflections from the distant river. The beauty of this alien twilight took some of the sting out of being stranded on a strange world.

Then he frowned.

Something was wrong with the way the river ran through the hills.

It seemed to rise and fall. . . rise and fall. . . .

It's not a river, he realized at last.

It's a road.

3 Nothing could bring home the tangibility of a world better than trying to dig a hole in it. Exertion, the clank of metal against earth, sweat smell and the musty, dry dust of abandoned insect nests all verified the reality of the place like nothing else ever could.

Dennis leaned on his spade and wiped perspiration. Hard work had broken his numb reaction to the shocks of the day before. It was good to be active, doing something about his situation.

He scattered dirt around the flat mound, patting it down, then covered the cairn with a scattering of gra.s.s.

He couldn't take most of his supplies with him on his journey. But locking them in the airlock wouldn't do either. Leaving as much as a gram inside would prevent the people back at Lab One from sending another envoy.

He had used electrical tape to write a message on the side of the lock, telling where his detailed report was buried with the equipment.

Still, if he knew Flaster and Brady, they would dither a long time before deciding on a follow-up mission. Realistically, Dennis knew if anyone was going to fix the return mechanism it would be himself. He couldn't afford anymore slip-ups.

He had already made one big mistake. This morning, when he had opened the airlock and stepped out into the misty dawn, he found that the robot was gone. After an hour of worried searching, he realized that the little drone had departed during the night. He found its tracks leading westward.

It must have set out on the trail of the humanoids-apparently to find out all it could about them, pursuant to his instructions.

Dennis cursed himself for thinking aloud in the robot's presence the day before. But honestly, who would have expected the machine to accept orders in anything but prim Robot-English? It should have rejected the commands as too flexible and unspecific!

He hadn't even given the robot a time limit. It would probably stay out until its tapes were full!

The 'bot must have a wire loose somewhere. Brady wasn't kidding when he said something had gone flaky with the machines they had sent here.

Now Dennis had lost two companions since coming to this world.

He wondered what had become of the pixolet.

Probably it was back in its own element, glad to be away from the crazy aliens who had captured it.