"Must be friendly, then. But I wouldn't want to shake hands with it! The thing does seem to be watching us, doesn't it?"
"I'll fix it!" Ferris suddenly brought his rifle up, took aim at the glowing eyes.
Janus whirled, knocked the rifle aside. "You fool! That's an intelligent entity, I tell you! Want to get us killed?"
As though it had seen and comprehended the action, the robot's eyes blinked once or twice. It was eerie. Then it raised one of its arms and seemed to gesture—not at them, but beyond them. With that, it turned and stalked away, crashing through the forest.
"I get it," Mark said thoughtfully. "It was warning us to stay on our side of the fence!"
"And that's just what we will do. It's the only place where we can stand up, much less move about."
They walked back to the prow of the ship. "Where does this daylight come from?" Brownell was still puzzled. "There's no sun. Seems to me this gravity has something to do with it, too. Say! Do you suppose this light—"
He never finished, for at that moment they heard a shout ahead of them, and saw a group of men approaching. They were tall and straight, clean shaven, and dressed in trousers and tunics of rough texture but undoubtedly of Earth pattern—the pattern which had been popular hundreds of years ago! They carried weapons too, the old-type electric rifles which were so devastating at close range but not very effective at longer distances.
They came warily at first, but smiled when they saw the newcomers were not going to cause trouble.
"Greetings!" their leader said in perfect English. "You're from Earth? We thought we saw your ship crash, and came over to investigate."