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push it under the real-time threshold. There's a peduncle effect, of course,
and we can't pinpoint the inventor, but the people in your band are certainly
among the ancestors of his tribe."
Derron was clinging to the sapling as the slave-unit was dragged out over the
edge of the pit. "Thanks for the word, Colonel. How about those grenades I
requested?"
"We're rushing two more slave-units into your sector there, Odegard, but we're
having some technical troubles with them. Three of the enemy have been
destroyed now...
Grenades, you say?" There was a brief pause. "They tell me some grenades are
coming up." The colonel's voice clicked off.
Their rescue job complete, The People had all fallen back a few steps and were
watching the machine carefully. Derron braced himself on one arm and repeated
his peaceful gestures with the other. This seemed to reassure his audience
about the slave, but they promptly found something else to worry about the
setting sun, which they kept glancing at over their shoulders as they talked
to one another. Derron needed no linguist
to know that they were concerned about finding some place of relative safety
in which to spend the night.
In another minute The People had gathered up their few belongings and were on
the march, with the air of folk resuming a practiced activity. The man with
the bow spoke several times to the slave-unit and looked disappointed when his
words were not understood, but he could not dally. Stone-Man was left free to
help himself as best he might.
So Derron trailed along at the end of The People's hiking file. He soon found
that on level ground he could keep the slave-unit moving along pretty well on
its long arms, walking it like a broken-backed ape on the knuckles of its
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hands with its legs dragging.
The People cast frequent backward glances at this pathetic creature, regarding
it with mixed and not altogether favorable emotions. But even more frequently
they looked back farther in the direction they had come from, plainly fearful
that something else could be on their trail.
If The People were not expecting the berserker machine, Derron was. The
slave's leg-
dragging track was certainly plain enough, and the sight of it might cause the
killing machine to approach with some caution, but it would still come on.
Colonel Borss came back to take over the situation. "Odegard, our screens show
the berserker's area of disturbance moving south away from you and then coming
back;
evidently you were right about it being on a false trail of some kind. Your
berserker is the only one we haven't bagged yet, but it seems to be in the
most vital spot. What I think we'll do is this: the two slave-units being sent
to reinforce you are going to catch up with your band, in a few minutes
present-time. We'll have them follow your band's line of march, keeping just
out of sight, one on each flank; don't want to scare your people with a lot of
metal men and have them scatter we've had enough of that problem today.
When your people stop somewhere for the night, you stay with 'em, and we'll
set up the other two units in ambush."
"Understand." Derron kept moving, walking with his arms, the master-unit
rising and falling slightly as the slave jolted over the bumpy terrain. A
certain amount of feedback was necessary to give the operator the feeling of
presence in the past.
The colonel's plan sounded reasonable, as Derron thought it over. And by
Derron's interpretation of the law of averages, something should go right
pretty soon.
Falling dusk washed the wilderness in a kind of dark beauty. The People were
marching with the swampy, half-wooded valley on their right and the low rocky
hills now immediately on their left. The man with the bow, whose name seemed
to be something like Matt, kept anxiously scanning these hills as he walked at
the head of the file.
"What about dropping those grenades to me now? Ho, Operations? Anybody there?"
"We're setting up this ambush now, Odegard. We don't want your people hurling
grenades around at random in the dark."
There was some sense to that, Derron supposed. And his slave could not throw
anything efficiently while it had to walk and balance on its hands.
The leader Matt turned suddenly aside and went trotting up a barren hillside,
the other people following briskly. Scrambling after them as best he could,
Derron saw that they were heading for a narrow cave entrance, set into a steep
low cliff like a door in the wall of a house. Everyone halted a little
distance away from the hole. Before Derron had quite caught up, Matt had
unslung his bow and nocked an arrow. Another man then pitched a sizable rock
into the darkness of the cave, having to stretch around an L-bend at the
entrance to do so. At once there reverberated out of the depths a growl, which
scattered The People like the good survival experts they were.
When the cave bear came to answer the door, it discovered the slave alone, a
crippled foundling on the porch.
The bear's slap of greeting bowled the unbalanceable slave over. From a supine
position Derron slapped back, bending the bear's snout slightly and provoking
a blood-
freezing roar. Made of tougher stuff than poison-diggers, the bear strained
its fangs on the slave-unit's face. Still flat on his back, Derron lifted the
bear with his steel arms and pitched it downhill. Go away!
The first roar had been only a tune-up for the one that followed. Derron
didn't want to break even an animal's lifeline here if he could help it, but
time was passing, and his real enemy would be drawing near. He threw the bear
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a little farther this time. The animal bounced once, landed on its feet and
running, and kept right on going into the swamp.
Howls trailed in the air behind it for half a minute.
The People emerged from behind rocks and inside crevices and gathered slowly
around the slave-unit, for once forgetting to look over their shoulders along
the way they had come. Derron had the feeling that in another moment they were
going to fall down and worship him; before any such display could get started,
he knuckle-walked the slave-unit into the cave and scanned the darkness the
slave's eyes adjusted quickly to see in whatever wavelengths were present to
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