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  They were soon disappointed.

  “Well, that’s it, then. The tracks seem to end right here. Right in front of a blank wall,” Alex groaned. “In through the floor and out through the wall.”

  “Except that this wall isn’t going to let us out,” Dana observed. “Might as well try ‘Open, sesame for all the good it will do us.”

  “I don’t think they all went out that way, though. See back there where the tracks split off? Let’s follow the loner. He may be here yet.”

  “He or it,” Dana replied apprehensively.

  “No, these prints look human enough to me. I’m sure we’re on the track of the missing scientists. And if one of them’s still here, we may be able to find out what happened.”

  The old machinery creaked and rustled in the dark around them. The single set of tracks led on endlessly into the gloom. The footsteps wandered erratically, and Alex thought to himself that whoever had made them had probably been injured or suffered a concussion. He decided against mentioning that speculation to Dana. The thought that their only hope in this place might be disordered mentally, or even dead, would only worry her unnecessarily. Time would tell.

  Suddenly, Dana gasped, “I think I see a light!”

  In the distance, the blackness did seem somewhat paler. Very soon it was discernibly gray. The footsteps lead up to an opening high in the wall—and stopped. Alex began to wonder what lay on the other side of the wall.

  5.

  There seemed to be no end in sight to the beating his body was taking, Alex thought sourly. He lay in another strange room. Dana lay stretched out next to him, her head in his lap, fast asleep.

  His first mistake, he thought, was in trying to get out of the machine shop. It had been a much nicer place than this. His second mistake was in not insisting that they go back in when it turned out that the light outside was provided by two distinctly unfamiliar suns. Then it had been Dana’s turn to make the mistakes.

  No sooner had she seen one of the ridiculous robot things that evidently ruled this planet than she’d walked up to it and said, in effect, “Take me to your leader.” Alex liked the girl, but cops sure have a thing about authority, he reflected.

  The ensuing riot had been complicated by the fact that fists just didn’t seem to make much headway against those metallic monsters. Alex rubbed his knuckles gingerly and thought with wry satisfaction that at least he’d knocked one airborne antigrav robot out of the sky. Where it was now he didn’t know, but the last time he’d seen it, it hadn’t looked as though it would be bobbing around again for quite a while.

  Despite the fight they had put up, Dana and Alex had been overpowered by sheer numbers of whirring, clanking mechanical cowboys. Once subdued, they had been quickly whisked away to their present, evidently jury-rigged cell.

  He hoped his captors knew about such things as bread and water. He wasn’t sure he’d adjust well to a diet of storage cells and machine-grade oil. Just then, a sound at the other side of the locked door drew his attention. In a flash he was on his feet, and Dana’s head slipped painfully to the ground.

  “Ouch!”

  “Dana,” he whispered, “I think we’re about to have visitors.”

  The door swung open abruptly and a pleasant voice said, “That you are, my boy, that you are.” A tall, shambling man in a stained white lab coat and filthy beard advanced into the room. Over his shoulder he barked to a robot waiting outside the door, “Inform Central Comp that I want quarters fixed up for these two, pronto. And a supply of carbon-based protein. Hurry now.”

  Turning back to the astonished Alex and Dana, he grinned. “Hard to find good robots these days, eh what?”

  “Professor Carberry!” Alex exclaimed.

  “Alex, will you introduce me to the young lady?”

  Rather weakly, Alex explained, “This is Dana Drew, Professor. Officer Dana Drew.” Flashing the girl a quick smile, he said, “This is Professor Josiah Carberry, lecturer in psychoceramics, late of Pluto Base.”

  “Right now I suggest we hurry on out of here before these less-than-amiable mechanical marvels change their metal minds. Coming, my dear?” the professor asked Dana.

  “Certainly, Professor.”

  Together the threesome hurried in silence through a procession of corridors, and out the front door of what was certainly the largest building Alex had ever been in. He was bursting with questions, but at every attempt to get some answers, the professor put him off with an absentminded, “Wait until we get there.” Even Alex was stilled, though, when they stepped outside the front portal to the building and encountered a vast metropolis, a city of a size and beauty that seemed nothing short of miraculous.

  White buildings of long and graceful design hugged the ground, set amid verdant swaths of parkland. Tall, fragile-looking towers soared into the slightly green sky. Long, brilliantly tinctured boulevards weaved between park and city, but all the traffic was in the air. Fabulously colored, dipping, diving, and floating robots were everywhere. They looked like so many butterflies intent on their erratic courses.

  Two things struck Alex and Dana almost immediately. Despite the lavish care and attention the whole scene displayed—not a blade of grass unclipped, not a smudge on the highway—it all looked somehow deserted, even with the proliferation of floating mechanoid monsters. Actually, Dana thought to herself, some of them were kind of cute. Indeed, on reflection, that was what most jarred them both. The robot inhabitants of this planet were nothing like the functional mechanos of home. Each seemed to carry about with it an individuality that was unnerving in a plastic and steel creature.

  They seemed almost human.

  In front of the building an air car was waiting. Its robot chauffeur, bobbing around outside in a manner that was strangely like a human chauffeur lounging in the sun, snapped to attention and clawed open the door.

  “Clever creatures,” the professor said. “They learn quickly. When I got here, I gave them the twenty or so most used words in the English language, beginning with: I, is, get, a, was, on, in, you, that, it, have, and so on. They caught on remarkably fast, and evidently deduced the rest of the language from my speech.”

  “But Professor,” Dana asked, “how did you get here?”

  Carberry went on as though he hadn’t heard. “Remarkable evolutionary development, too. The way I understand it, they trace their first ancestors back to a big thunderstorm and a stricken rock rolling down a hill. From there to a tree limb lying across a log: the first tool, you see. And so on, ad infinitum. Grandchildren to the pulley, in all likelihood. Ingenious!”

  Alex whispered to Dana in a worried undertone, “I think he’s had a bad shock, and perhaps a head injury. We’d better humor him.”

  “Well, here we are. Central Comp. We’ll fix up your status here with the machines in charge. Remarkable world, really remarkable.” The professor’s lecture tapered off into a low, constant muttering.

  The three were admitted to a central receiving chamber. Alex and Dana saw robots of all sizes, shapes, and means of locomotion come and go in bewildering array. The professor wasn’t bothered at all by the commotion; in fact, he scarcely seemed to notice it. While the youngsters watched every robot around them suspiciously, the professor treated them all as if they were his servants. And surprisingly, they seemed to respond.

  “That building where you were found,” Carberry said. “That’s their holy of holies. That’s why you were treated so shoddily at first. Same thing happened to me, but we’ve worked all that out now. They seemed to have deified the building. Think of it as their Creator. Consider me a high priest now. We’ll see if we can’t do the same for you.” He began keying what looked like a computer console. “Strange, though, it’s really only an old factory. Been unused in living memory, I’m told—and that’s an awfully long time around here.”

  Alex and Dana’s eyes met in excited mutual understanding. Factory! That was evidently where the robot culture had been made, its early prototypes assembled
—but by whom? And how long had they been gone? The questions hung heavy in the air.

  And the foremost question in both their minds was: How does this tie in with the missing colony of Pluto and the cryptic sentence, “Have gone to Croatan”?

  Their reveries were cut short when suddenly the very air around them began to speak: “This is Central Comp,” it intoned. “State number and activity.”

  The professor began excitedly, “Central Comp, my two assistants have arrived. I want them quartered near me and issued an adequate supply of carbon-based protein.”

  To the professor’s astonishment and indignation, Alex broke in abruptly. “No! That’s not what we want. We are humans! Not priests, not slaves, not robots. Our friends have been abducted, and we want them back. We want information!”

  “What are ‘humans’? What are ‘friends’? Please explain.”

  Alex was blustering too hard to talk straight, and the professor was blowing angrily into his beard, so Dana stepped forward. She took a deep breath and began:

  “Humans are intelligent animals.” A long pause ensued and finally Dana ventured, “You know what animals are, don’t you?” The computer whirred almost inaudibly and signified, “No.” Her face fell abruptly.

  “My dear,” Professor Carberry interrupted mildly, “there are no animals on this planet, only vegetation. A curious evolutionary dead end, indeed.”

  Dana’s forehead puckered in concentration. How was she to explain “human” to a machine that didn’t have an idea what “animal” meant? That is, if machines could be said to have ideas at all. Faced with the Central Computer, she wisely decided to reserve judgment on the matter.

  “Has your kind traveled in space?” she asked hopefully. “Because if it has, you know that every world is different.” Again the computer replied in the negative.

  Alex took another tack. “Where we come from,” he ventured importantly, “computers don’t ask questions, they answer them.”

  Central Comp whirred loudly and encouraged Alex to continue.

  “In fact,” he announced, “computers and robots are built in order to serve humans.” At this bit of braggadocio, Dana winced but the computer purred louder than ever. “Where we come from, computers have to be built!” he announced triumphantly. “Humans created computers.”

  The psychology seemed all wrong to Dana, but Alex seemed to know what he was doing. And clearly he was getting some sort of reaction out of the machine. She only hoped it didn’t take offense easily.

  “Humans create computers?” the machine asked sepulchrally.

  “Correct,” Alex said with something like glee.

  The computer’s workings were positively loud by now, and with a start the little group realized that the robots scurrying to and fro in the chamber were suffering from an odd sort of hyperactivity. Hurry up and stop, hurry up and stop. For the first time since they’d arrived on the planet, the ‘bots seemed like the clumsy machines back home.

  The din was growing considerable, and with some dismay Dana realized that the robots had effectively hemmed the little group in. Even Professor Carberry was looking apprehensive. Alex was seemingly unperturbed.

  “You are creators?” the immense machine demanded.

  It was time, Dana felt, to handle the situation diplomatically. “In a sense we are, I suppose,” she said hesitantly. “We do manufacture computers and robots for tasks too difficult to do ourselves—in mining establishments, for instance, we use many robots. But,” she continued, “none of our machines could truly be said to be sentient. Not like you.”

  The Central Computer seemed to feel that this last was scarcely worth quibbling over, however. It repeated its question as a statement: “You are the creators!” Suddenly a hush fell over the entire assembly. “You will be taken to the First Model,” it intoned into the silence.

  Dana looked at Alex, and then both turned and looked at the professor with a questioning light in their eyes. Just what, both were asking, is going on here?

  Before the professor could hazard a guess, the roomful of robots erupted into frantic, whirring motion. Alex felt suddenly giddy and lightheaded. From their expressions, he could see that Dana and Carberry were suffering similarly.

  In a flash, Dana’s feet slid out from under her. She was poised in midair, suspended inside a ring of bobbing robots. “Tractor beam!” Alex called over his shoulder as his own feet left the floor. In a moment the professor’s underpinnings followed suit, but unlike Dana or Alex, he floated in the air serenely, an airborne monarch of all he surveyed.

  With a sudden swoop and a yelp from Dana, the entourage was off and winging back through the corridors of the building. Checking their motion only slightly at several intersections, the group made their exit of the building in record time. Once outside, the three rings of supporting robots gathered in formation and they were off, gaining altitude now, and sweeping over the city. From this height, Alex could see that the metropolis under him was one of many strung out on the shores of a shining yellow sea. Behind him, Dana gasped with pleasure at the bejeweled sight, and the professor could be heard muttering to himself absorbedly.

  It was hard to measure time during their flight. No untoward events marred their journey, and the countryside below continued to remind Alex of some verdant Grecian idyll. Evidently, with two suns riding the sky, day and night had no real meaning here. All was bright and cheery, and Alex reflected that is was the most relaxing trip he’d ever taken. After what may have been half a day or only an hour later, the small group changed course and began preparations for landing. Alex shouted over to Dana and the professor who were dozing at the time, and announced their imminent arrival—but arrival where?

  The procession descended swiftly into the largest urban center Alex had viewed thus far. Swooping over the outer buildings, he had a vague impression that this was a factory town of some sort. The construction was less graceful and more functional, the parks less frequent and smaller than in the first city they’d visited. Alex saw that they were landing in front of a building very much like the one in which they’d started their robot adventures. Once on the ground, the three were ushered into the dark interior.

  “Looks like another tool shop,” Dana commented. Indeed, the building’s interior was very similar to the other, but everything was on a much larger scale. And if anything, the dust and cobwebs lay in even thicker blankets over the array of machinery.

  “Tool shop, my dear?” the professor interposed. “This is a factory, a building for manufacturing robots.”

  Alex quickly understood the import of the professor’s observation. Whatever race had built this planet, leaving the robot culture behind to run it, must have sealed up the factories when they left. That was why the robot society seemed to have no idea about their beginnings. The planet may have been depopulated millennia before, and the robots had blindly whirred on about their mysterious business, remembering only that the “creators” had worked in this place. He rather hoped they weren’t to be interred here and charged with producing a new generation of mechanical marvels. And what, he wondered, was this “First Model” business?

  The three were ushered along what seemed like miles of dusty corridors. The robot guides shed a sort of pastel luminescence, easing their way. Dana fell in step beside Alex and took his hand. She leaned over close to his ear and whispered, “I’m worried.” Alex pressed her hand tightly and whispered back a few reassuring words. For some reason the dim corridor seemed to subdue the voice as well as the heart. Even Carberry had ceased muttering to himself.

  They were ushered into a vast, inky chamber. The robots left them and a door slid shut behind them. In the nearly palpable darkness, Dana slid nearer to Alex, and the professor struck up a shrill whistling to keep his courage up. As though beckoned by the unmusical notes, a light suddenly pierced the gloom. Searching the air like a spotlight, the beam swept the room and began to advance. Whatever it was attached to was lost in the darkness; in any case, the t
hree were dazzled to the point of blindness by the sudden light.

  “What do you want?” a cranky voice interrupted the professor’s caterwauling. Alex began to reply, but stopped suddenly with a shiver. Although he’d heard plainly and had understood, not a word had been uttered. Whatever confronted them now had at least some degree of telepathic ability. Alex hoped it was very limited.

  “Limited enough,” the voice replied abruptly. “I can receive clearly only from the speech centers of your brain. If you can put it into words, I can hear it, but I wouldn’t dream of probing the rest of the dismal swamp you call a human mind. Yes, Dana, quite right. I am the First Model. And yes, I know what humans are. As the oldest sentient energy form on this planet, I know quite a lot.”

  Out of the gloom, an ancient robot emerged. Roughly the size and shape of a human’s body, shorn of arms and legs, it hung suspended in space. It was stained and marked, casting an indefinable aura of great age.

  It began to speak:

  “Long ago, in a time so ancient that it can be measured only in astronomical terms, I was manufactured by the great race that covered this planet with buildings and monuments. This world was merely an outpost of their galaxy-wide civilization. Never before or since has a species achieved so much—only to lose it all as time and decadence broke their strength. The records of those waning years are largely lost. Even I, spared through eons, retain only a few memories of the momentous disasters that spelled the end. War and dissension destroyed what was left.”

  The robot paused as though silently gauging their reaction. When it began to speak again, it started addressing the questions that were forming in all their minds.

  “I tell you this because I do not know how to help you. Yes, I know the history of your visit. But we did not abduct your friends. Let me explain. Once, this mighty network of planets was linked by a sophisticated system of teleportals. When the secret of that system was lost, a dark age descended over the galaxy. Evidently that system is in use once again, or you would not have found your way here. Who or what is operating it, I cannot say. Where they have taken your friends, I do not know. Why is an even greater mystery.”