The baying of the dogs had changed to excited yapping.
“Treed,” said Elmer. “Whatever they were running has taken to a tree.”
I reached out to the little pile of wood Elmer had brought in, laid new sticks on the fire, used another to push the spreading coals together. Little tongues of blue-tipped flame ran up from the coals to lick against the new wood. Dry bark ignited and threw out sparks. The fresh fuel caught and the fire leaped into new life.
“A fire is a pleasant thing,” said Cynthia.
“Could it be,” asked Elmer, “that even such as I should be warmed by such a feeble flame? I swear that I feel warmer sitting here beside it.”
“Could be,” I said. “You’ve had a lot of time to grow-into a man.”
“I am a man,” said Elmer. “Legally, that is. And if legally, why not otherwise?”
“How is Bronco getting on?” I asked. “He should be here with us.”
“He is sitting out there soaking it all up,” said Elmer. “He is weaving a woodland fantasy out of the dark shapes of the trees, the sound of nighttime wind in leaves, the chuckle of the water, the glitter of the stars, and three black shapes huddled at a campfire. A campfire canvas, a nocturne, a poem, perhaps a delicate piece of sculpture-he’s putting it all together.”
“He works all the time, poor thing,” said Cynthia. “It is not work for him,” said Elmer. “It is his very life. Bronco is an artist.”
Somewhere off in the dark something made a flat cracking sound, and an instant later it was followed by another. The dogs, which had fallen silent, resumed excited barking. “The hunter shot whatever it was that the dogs had treed,” said Elmer.
After he had spoken, no one said a word. We sat there imagining-or at least I was imagining-that scene off there in the darkened woods, with the dogs jumping about the tree, excited, the leveled gun and the burst of muzzle flame, the dark shape falling from the tree to be worried by the dogs.
And as I sat there listening and imagining, there was another sound, faint, far off-a rustling and a crackling. A breath of breeze came down the hollow and swept the sound away, but when the breeze died down, the sound was there again, louder now and more insistent.
Elmer had leaped to his feet. The flicker of the fire sent ghostly metallic highlights chasing up and down his body.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked and Elmer did not answer. The sound was closer now. Whatever it might be, it was heading toward us and was coming fast.
“Bronco!” Elmer called. “Over here, quick. By the fire with us.”
Bronco came spidering rapidly.
“Miss Cynthia,” Elmer said, “get up.”
“Get up?”
“Get up on Bronco and hang on tight. If he has to run, stay low so a tree branch won’t knock you off.”
“What is going on?” asked Bronco. “What is all the racket?”
“I don’t know,” said Elmer.
“The hell you don’t,” I said, but he didn’t hear me; if he did, he didn’t answer.
The noise was much closer now. It was no kind of noise I had ever heard before. It sounded as if something was tearing the very woods apart. There were popping sounds and the shriek of tortured wood. The ground seemed to be vibrating as if something very heavy was striking it repeated hammer blows.
I looked around. Cynthia was up on Bronco and Bronco was dancing away from the fire out into the dark, not running yet, but staying limber and ready to run at a second’s notice.
The noise was almost upon us, shrieking and deafening and the very ground was howling. I leaped to one side and crouched to run and would have run, I suppose, except I did not know where to run, and in that instant I saw the great bulk of whatever it was up on the ridge above us, a huge dark mass that blotted out the stars. The trees were shaking wildly and crashing down to earth, overridden and smashed by the black mass that charged along the ridgetop, almost brushing the camp, and then going away, missing us, with the noise rapidly receding down the hollow. On the ridge above, the smashed-down trees still were groaning softly as they settled into rest.
I stood and listened as the noise moved away from us and in a little time it was entirely gone, but I still stood where I was, half-hypnotized by what had happened, not knowing what had happened, wondering what had happened. Elmer, I saw, was standing, as hypnotized as I.
I sat down limply by the fire, and Elmer turned around and walked back to the fire. Cynthia slid off Bronco.
“Elmer,” I said.
He shook his massive head. “It can’t be,” he mumbled, talking to himself rather than to me. “It would not still be there. It could not have lasted . . .”
“A war machine?” I asked.
He lifted his head and stared across the fire at me. “It’s crazy, Fletch,” he said.
I picked up wood and fed the fire. I put on a lot of wood. I felt an urgent need of fire. The flames crawled up the wood, catching fast.
Cynthia came over to the fire and sat down beside me. “The war machines,” said Elmer, still speaking to himself, “were built to fight. Against men, against cities, against enemy war machines. They’d fight to the very death, until the last effective ounce of energy was gone. They were not meant to last. They were not fashioned to survive. They knew that and we who built them knew it. Their only mission was destruction. We fashioned them for death, we sent them out to death . . .”
A voice speaking from the past of ten thousand years before, speaking of the old ethics and ambitions, of ancient blood striving, of primordial hate.
“The ones who were in them had no wish to live. They were already dead. They had a right to die and they postponed their dying . . .”
“Elmer, please,” said Cynthia. “The ones who were in them? Who was in them? I had never heard that anyone went in them. They had no crews. They were . . .”
“Miss,” said Elmer, “they were not all machine. Or at least ours were not all machine. There was a robot brain, but human brains as well. More than one human brain in the one I worked on. I never knew how many. Nor who they were, although we knew they were the still competent brains of competent men, perhaps the most competent of military men who were willing to continue living for a little longer to strike one final blow. Robot brain and human brain forming an alliance . . .” “Unholy alliance,” Cynthia said.
Elmer shot a quick glance at her, then looked back at the fire. “I suppose you could say so, miss. You do not understand what happens in a war-a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred -that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness …”
“Let us quit all this,” I said. “It may have been no war machine. It may have been something else entirely.”
“What something else?” asked Cynthia.
“It’s been ten thousand years,” I said.
“I suppose so,” Cynthia said. “There could be a lot of other things.”
Elmer said nothing. He sat quietly. Someone shouted on the ridge above us and we all came to our feet. A light was bobbing up there somewhere and we heard the sound of bodies forcing their way through the swath of fallen trees.
Someone shouted again. “Ho, the fire!” he said. “Ho, yourself,” said Elmer. The light kept on bobbing.
“It’s a lantern,” Elmer said. “More than likely the men who were out hunting with the dogs.”
We continued to watch the lantern. There was no more shouting at us. Finally the lantern ceased its bobbing and moved down the hill toward us.
There were three of them, tall scarecrow men, grinning, their teeth shining in the flicker of our fire, guns across their shoulders, one carrying something on his back. Dogs frisked about them.
They stopped at the edge of the campfire circle, stood in silence for a moment, looking us over, taking us in. “Who be you?”-one of them finally asked. “Visitors,” said Elmer. “Travelers, strangers.” “What be you? You are not human.” He made it sound* like “hooman.”
“I am a robot,” Elmer said. “I am a native of this place. I was forged on Earth.”
“Big doings,” said another one of them. “Night of big doings.”
“You know what it was?” asked Elmer.
“The Ravener,” said the first who had spoken. “Old stories told of it. Great-grandpappy, his father told him of it.”
“If it pass you by,” said the third one, “no need of fearing it. No man sees it twice in one lifetime. It comes again only after many years.”