There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully…or even walked around. Like 61 Cygni, for example.
It took judgment…and some tolerance…and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could scarcely die.
But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital.
They had died of violence, of that there was no question.
Adams' eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne's latest report:
Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their-work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation.
Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won't let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was cool.
But there wasn't much to find…not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question marks.
Five men had died and when that was said, that was the end of fact. For they were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.
A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies the machine had smashed into a tree, had wrapped itself around and half sheared the trunk in two. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.