The colonel’s flat-fingered right hand sprang to the bill of his peaked cap, his urge to salute having proved irrepressible.
He instantly turned away and barked orders at the waiting soldiers.
The machine to be tested, one chosen at random by Sylvester from among the six on the factory floor, had been airlifted to the proving ground yesterday; it was now crouched at the edge of the raw earth landing pad. Six jointed legs held its belly only inches from the ground, but it was a fat beast, its back as high as a man’s head. Two soldiers in white suits with hoods and faceplates stood at ease beside the machine; their overalls bore bright yellow radiation warning signs. Silhouetted against a sky of scudding black clouds, the robot’s diamond-studded eye ports and spiny electromagnetic sensors gave it the visage of a samurai crab or beetle. No wonder the very sight of it had fired the military imagination.
“Captain Reed, when you’re ready.” The whitesuited team double-timed to a truck plastered with yellow radiation warnings and opened its rear doors. They removed a three-foot metal cylinder, which they carried slowly and carefully to the robot, then proceeded to load it into the metal insect’s abdomen.
Meanwhile Colonel Witherspoon led Sylvester and Gordon to a bank of seats erected on the lip of the landing pad, shielded from the blustery wind by plastic windscreens.
The little observation post looked northward from a low ridge into a wide, shallow valley. The ridge crests on both sides were pocked with pillboxes, and the ground around had been torn up by generations of horses’ hooves, gun-carriage wheels, cleated tires, tank treads, and countless booted feet.
While they waited Sylvester once more declined Gordon’s urgings to sip from his flask.
Within a few seconds the robot was fueled and critical.
The soldiers stood well back. Witherspoon gave the signal and Captain Reed manipulated the sticks and knobs on the tiny control unit he held in his left hand.
On the control unit’s screen Reed could see what the robot saw, a view of the world that encompassed almost two hundred radial degrees but was oddly distorted, like an anamorphic lens—a distortion programmed to compensate for the glassy atmosphere of Venus.
Within moments, the carbon-carbon cooling fins on the back of the robot began to glow—first dull orange, soon a bright cherry, finally a pearly white. The robot was powered by a high-temperature nuclear reactor cooled by liquid lithium. The extreme temperature of the cooling fins was excessive on Earth, but essential to create a sufficient gradient for radiative cooling in the eight-hundred degree surface temperatures on Venus.
The smell of hot metal reached them across the flat, windy ground. Witherspoon turned to his guests. “The robot is now fully powered, Mrs. Sylvester.”
She cocked her head. “Possibly you have a demonstration of your own in mind, Colonel?”
He nodded. “With your permission, ma’am—first, unguided terrain navigation according to stored satellite maps. Objective, the crest of that far ridge.”
“Carry on,” Sylvester said, her lips curving in an anticipatory smile.
Witherspoon signaled his adjutant. With a chorus of whining motors the robot came to life. It raised its radiator-crested, antennaed head. Its chassis was of heatresistant molybdenum steel and titanium-alloy, mounted on six titanium-alloy legs for traversing terrain more wildly irregular than any that could be found in England or anywhere else on Earth. It moved its legs with intricate and startling rapidity, and as it scuttled forward, turned, then plunged down the hillside, a novel set of tracks was left in the earth of Salisbury Plain.
The gigantic metal beast scurried along, raising a plume of dust behind it that blew strongly to the east, like a dust devil racing across the desert.
For some forgotten exercise in siegecraft, moats had been dug across the breadth of the valley and berms piled behind them; the robot scurried into trenches and over the rises without pause, thundering straight up the valley like the entire Light Brigade at Balaklava. Now outcroppings of gray rock blocked it from its goal at valley’s end. The robot ran around the sheerer cliffs, but where the slope was not too steep, it simply scrambled over them, scrabbling for purchase among cracks and ledges of stone.
Within a few moments it had reached its objective, a row of concrete pillboxes on the scudding heights. There it stopped.
“Those emplacements were constructed in the 19th century, Mrs. Sylvester,” Witherspoon informed her. “Four feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The army have declared them surplus.”
“I would be delighted for you to proceed with the sec- ond part of your demonstration,” Sylvester said. “I only wish I had a better view.”
“Captain Reed? Over here, if you will,” Witherspoon called sharply. Reed brought his control unit close enough for Sylvester and the others to see the robot’s-eye view on its videoplate. “And please take these, ma’am.” Witherspoon handed her a pair of heavy binoculars, sheathed in sticky black plastic.
The binoculars were electromagnetically stabilized oillens viewers with selective radiation filtration and image enhancement. When she held them to her eyes she saw the robot so close and sharp she could have been standing ten feet away, although the perspective was markedly flat and graphic. There it crouched, a firebug, implacable, facing the squat bunker.
The robot needed to do more than move about on the surface of Venus. It was a prospector and a miner; it was equipped to seek out and analyze mineral samples and, when it came upon ore of commercial value, to dig out and partially process the ore, preparing it for further processing by other machines and eventual transportation offplanet.
“Go ahead, Colonel,” Sylvester said.
Witherspoon gave the signal; Reed manipulated the controls. The robot’s diamond-edge proboscis and claws slashed into the old bunker. Rust and gray dust flew up in a cloud. The robot ate into the bunker, ate around the walls, and when the roof collapsed on top of it, ate through that. It ate into the floor; slab-iron gun mounts and railings went into its maw, and rubber and steel and copper cables, and even the contents of the drains, choked with ancient grease. Soon there was nothing left of the bunker except a cavity in the hillside. The robot ceased working. Behind itself it had deposited neat molten piles— gleaming iron, ruddy copper, baked calcium.
“Excellent,” said Sylvester, handing the binoculars to Witherspoon. “What’s next?”
“We thought possibly, remote control navigation?” the officer suggested.
“Fine. Any problem if I do the controlling?” she asked.
“Our pleasure.” Witherspoon waved Reed over; he handed her the control unit. She studied it a moment, and Gordon leaned his head to hers and judiciously murmured something about forward and back, but by the time he’d finished her fingers were already conjuring with the controls.
The robot, a glowing dot in the naked-eye distance, scuttled backward, away from the ex-bunker. It turned and headed downslope, toward them.
She deliberately tried to run it over one of the steep outcrops. At the very edge of the cliff, it refused to go.
She would not countermand her order, so the robot took rudimentary thought and found a solution: it began to eat the outcrop away from under itself. Sylvester laughed to see it chew its own switchbacks to the bottom of the cliff.
She ran it at full speed toward their position. It scrambled over the red ground, growing impressively larger as it came, leaving dust and wavering plumes of heat in its wake.
She turned to Witherspoon, her eyes gleaming. “Heat!”
He blinked at her fervor. “Why, yes . . . we had thought—”
He pointed to a long open bunker lying to the north, halfway up the ridge. “Phosphorus,” Witherspoon said. “Close as we could come on short notice. If you’ll just steer the machine in there.”
She bent to the controls again. The robot swerved toward the open bunker. As it rushed close, the bunker sud- denly erupted with a glaring white light. Coruscating fountains of whistling, hissing flame leaped high into the air. Without pausing, the robot charged into the midst of the inferno. There it stopped.
It rested there, its own radiators gleaming through the fire. After several long seconds the pyre subsided. At Sylvester’s gentle urging on the controls, the robot turned, quite unperturbed, and climbed straight up to the crest of the ridge. The soldiers stolidly kept their positions as the metal juggernaut rose above the ridge and bore down upon them. When the fiery beetle was a few yards away Sylvester lifted her hands from the control unit. The robot halted, radiant.
“Well done, Colonel,” said Sylvester, handing the controls to Witherspoon. Again she hooked her long hair out of her eyes. “Mr. Gordon, my congratulations to Rolls- Royce.”
When Sylvester reached her hotel that evening the desk clerk informed her that a Mr. Nikos Pavlakis was waiting for her in the lounge. She marched straight in and surprised him hunched over the bar, his big shoulders straining the tight jacket of his suit, a tumbler of water and a shot glass of cloudy ouzo in front of him, deep into what looked like his second bowl of peanuts. She smiled when he mumbled something she took to be an invitation to have a drink.