"They're godly," he whispered. "You seen 'em. They're all shapes and angles, cubes, and small smooth running things. They all shine like metal. And I guess they are metal. Nobody knows what they are. I heard tell when I was a boy that they were just machines. Machines built by humans a long time before. And that somehow or other the hard radiation had put a spark in 'em that made 'em able to think, and move around and organize like humans used to do. But I reckon they're more intelligent than any humans ever were."
Jon backed away. Sweat popped out coldly on his face and chest. "I seen 'em," he choked. "I sneaked on top. I went down to the river. It took me hours to get used to the sun. I waited until the sun started going down, then I sneaked out and looked down the big hill that goes into the valley. I seen two of 'em. They must have been a hundred foot high. They was smooth. They had long snaking arms and single eyes that shot out red beams like fire. They stood on top of the hill against the sun. The sun was red all around 'em. They looked like they were made of metal, all right, Chief. But how can they move by themselves, and—and think, if they're metal?"
The Old Man sighed. "How?" He peered at Jon with tired retreating eyes. "What is thought," he said then. "What was life, ever? Floods of gamma rays bathed them for centuries, and then they were living, and they had thoughts of their own. Humans never got a chance to find out what life was before he took it away from himself. He took it and gave it—to them."
The Old Man dropped his face in his shaking hands. Jon had never heard a man crying before. He backed away slowly, then turned and ran out of the great cavern.
A grey dusky afternoon was dying when Jon crawled out of the small hall between rocks and started writhing down the hill. His eyes stayed open in fearful wonderment until tears rolled down his cheeks. The soft greens and browns of the great forest that thinned up into the hills. There was not the slightest hint that beneath this vast silent beauty, stretched the enormous grotesque underworld of Mammoth Hole.
Nor that in those nameless caverns and corridors along the cold and rushing and naked rivers a few unkempt savages clung to dim memories of centuries-lost power and surface civilization.
Jon stopped. An intangible yet powerful emotion surged in him. "I'm crawlin'," he gritted as he sat up. "I said I was sick a' crawlin.' I ain't a grub. I'm not crawlin' anymore. Not for them damn machines, not for anything. They can't do nothing but kill me, an' what's life down in that hole?"
He stood up. He stood up straight and started walking down the rocky trail, and finally along the smooth greenness beside the river. His strides were long and unhesitating, but inside him was a deep growing horror, as he remembered those shiny silver giants that had stood so silently on the hill against the red sunset. The huge attentive waiting stillness, and the sudden terrible sweep of the red beamed eye and the reaching of the metal arms.
He stopped and looked down at his thin white legs, starved of the sun, knotted and scarred from crawling over the harsh underground paths. He looked at his gnarled pallid fingers quivering in the cold.