It was hard not to think, now, that it was unwise to have come here so rashly. Rick had the feeling of having plunged too far into enemy territory where his bunch could be ambushed. For those war machines were not all smashed, certainly. Time meant nothing to them here. And the mystery of their function was half known from others like them on other worlds. There was always the chance that some of them would respond to the stimulus of detected movement around them. They were known to have intricate electronic relay systems inside them, almost brains.
"Keep your necks swivelling and your eyes peeled," Schmidt told his watchers on the tractor top, in a brief helmet phone message from inside the cabin.
"Don't worry, we will, Chief!" Lattimer growled back.
Overhead blazed the same constellations of stars known on Earth. Venus was glorious among them. Earth was dimmer—farther off. And it was the brilliance of that space-like star curtain that limned the first ugly moving silhouette. One of the man-like monsters was on the road ahead, its arms raised. Its great jutting thumbs of metal might have been the sort of things that had punctured the helmets of Martell and Jacobs. Perhaps this colossus had awakened on its own, as has been suggested. On the other hand, it might have been commanded by remote control, operating through radio impulses, of which the static-like whispers, barely noticeable in Rick's phones, might be the evidence.
To signal, Rick pounded on the roof of the tractor's cabin. And the men below fired their main blaster at once. The dazing blue flash of neutrons tore the metal giant apart with a spattering of incandescence. But then something fired back. There were two concussions and a blinding glare. Rick felt himself hurtling.
When he scrambled out of a deep snow-like drift, both tractors were blossoming white-hot vapors from their insides. In their cabins, no one could still survive, Schmidt, or any of the others. The lump was hard in Rick's throat, and the blur was thick and angry in his mind. He scrambled along the ditch, keeping down, firing at little shapes that scurried on the road. They were oval, half a foot long, like tortoises, but much faster. He'd seen their like at the Survey Service School brought from Earth's moon. Deadly little robots from X. They scuttled for cover. No use trying to dig them out. They were as elusive as rats. And they could fire atomic pellets.
Two more Earth-made blasters had been in action.
"We're still with you, Rick!" Finden risked saying by phone.
"Yeah, all I got out of it was some bruised ribs," Lattimer who was older, joined in, hiding a wince of pain.