The second robot joined the first in his backward exploration of ground already traversed. They stood with their heads close together, as if trying to decide what should be done next. But that, of course, was absurd and the gaunt woman was completely aware of how preposterous it was. A machine could not think for itself, a machine could not feel.
Her conviction was well-founded and the two metal monsters had put their heads together quite accidentally while avoiding a near collision. The avoidance of the collision had been directed from the flying machine by remote control and there was actually nothing human in the behavior of the robots at all.
The gaunt woman knew all that, but the knowledge could not prevent a knot of cold horror from contracting about her heart. The two metal monsters were at a standstill. Unmistakably they had reached a dead end and could search no further. They no longer knew where to look, or even what they were looking for.
The scanners which projected from their conical heads ceased suddenly to vibrate, and the instant the vibrations stopped the scanner-glass went dark.
A voice spoke out of the blackness. "I regret to report that the ground-warfare machines can no longer function. Their scanning screens have lost track of the two fugitives. The pickup mechanism has gone dead."
For an instant the gaunt woman could not swallow, could not even breathe. Her throat felt parched and constricted and there was a horrible tightness in her chest.
Suddenly all the tightness was gone and a scream, terrible, prolonged, welled up in her throat and issued from her lips. It stopped once abruptly and then went on and on, and only ceased when she seized a metal chair and smashed the scanner-glass to fragments, and collapsed in a heap at it base.
The forest was enveloped in weaving shafts of light. The light stabbed downward, moved between the trees, cascaded across brightly gleaming fungus growths and the boles of century-old trees and logs which forest mold and weevil beetles had turned into vegetable skeletons.
The forest was clamorous with voices. Para-guards moved between the trees, searching with flashlights that sent tunnels of radiance boring into the depths of shadowed crevices and deep caves and even between the tangled roots of titan oaks half-torn from their moorings by freakish bolts of lightning.
A hundred feet from the edge of the forest a guard more venturesome than his fellows descended into the depths of such a tangle, the bole of the oak looming enormous above, and found himself in the strangest of gnomelike dwellings, with winding corridors bathed in a pale blue light and his raised voice echoing from every corridor. It was a house of enchantment, a house underground and easy to people with all manner of elfish creatures.