The Practice Effect (5 page)

Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—the little ’bot moved slowly over the rugged terrain. By the time it got back, the creatures had already finished their dissection of the Earth machines and departed.

Perhaps they were in a hurry to help pursue the figure in white.

Dennis let the recording play itself out again. He sighed in frustration.

It had been so tempting, on looking at those blurry shapes, to interpret them as humans. Yet he knew he had better not go into things with any preconceived notions. They had to be alien creatures, more closely akin to the pixolet than to himself.

He slipped the record disk out of the robot and replaced it with a blank one.

“You’re going to have to be my scout,” he ruminated aloud in front of the little drone. “I guess I’ll want to send you ahead to find out about the inhabitants of this world for me. Only this time I’ll want you to put a high priority on stealth and your own survival. You hear? I don’t want you taken apart like your brothers!”

The little green assent light on the probe’s turret lit up. Of course, the ’bot couldn’t really have understood all that. Dennis had been mostly talking to himself, to gather his own thoughts. He would parse the instructions in carefully phrased Robot-English later, when he had worked out exactly what he wanted the little machine to do.

He faced a real problem, and he still wasn’t quite sure what he could do about it.

Sure, Brady had given him “… almost enough gear to build another damned zievatron …” But practicality was quite another thing. No one had imagined he would need to bring along spare
power cables
, for heaven’s sake! Both of the big, high-voltage copper busses had been shredded out at the roots, along with most of the detachable metal in the electronics bay.

Even if he did try to build and calibrate another return mechanism, would Flaster keep the zievatron tied up long enough to let him finish? Dennis felt he understood the S.I.T. chief pretty well. The fellow was anxious for a success to further his ambitions. Dennis might even be cast loose so Lab One could be put to work searching for another anomaly world!

And even if he tried to reassemble the device, would he be left alone by the natives long enough to finish?

Dennis picked up the one alien artifact he had found—a
sharp, curve-bladed knife that had fallen into the high grass and apparently been lost by the vandals.

The long, tapered blade had the smooth sharpness of a fine razor, yet it was almost as flexible as hard rubber. The grip was designed for a hand smaller than his, but it was obviously meant to be comfortable and provide a firm grasp.

The butt was carved in what appeared to be the shape of a dragon’s head. Dennis hoped that wasn’t what the natives actually looked like.

He couldn’t fathom what the thing was made of. It was certainly doubtful a better knife could be manufactured on Earth. It seemed to belie the idea that the natives were primitives.

Perhaps the vandals were the local equivalent of criminals or careless children. (Could the chase he had observed have been some sort of
game
, like hide-and-go-seek?)

What had happened here might be atypical of their society as a whole. Dennis tried to be optimistic. All he really needed was some metal stock and a couple of days in a good machine shop to fix and calibrate some of the larger ruined parts. The knife seemed to indicate the natives had a high enough technology.

They might even know many things men of Earth did not. He tried to be optimistic, and imagined being the first Earthling to make friendly contact with an advanced extraterrestrial culture.

“I might be able to trade my pocket nailclipper-stop-watch for a genuine
gompwriszt
or a
K’k’kglamtring
,” he mused. “I could be wealthy in no time!… Ambassador Nuel. Entrepreneur Nuel!”

His morale lifted just a little. Who could tell?

The sun was setting in a direction Dennis decided to call west. A tall range of mountains covered that horizon, stretching around to the south and then eastward around this high valley. Sunlight glanced off numerous small glaciers. There were bright highlights from a winding river that weaved through the southeastern mountains.

Dennis watched the reflections from the distant river. The beauty of this alien twilight took some of the sting out of being stranded on a strange world.

Then he frowned.

Something was wrong with the way the river ran through the hills. It seemed to rise and fall … rise and fall.…

It’s not a river
, he realized at last.

It’s a road
.

Nothing could bring home the tangibility of a world better than trying to dig a hole in it. Exertion, the clank of metal against earth, sweat smell and the musty, dry dust of abandoned insect nests all verified the reality of the place like nothing else ever could.

Dennis leaned on his spade and wiped perspiration. Hard work had broken his numb reaction to the shocks of the day before. It was good to be active, doing something about his situation.

He scattered dirt around the flat mound, patting it down, then covered the cairn with a scattering of grass.

He couldn’t take most of his supplies with him on his journey. But locking them in the airlock wouldn’t do either. Leaving as much as a gram inside would prevent the people back at Lab One from sending another envoy.

He had used electrical tape to write a message on the side of the lock, telling where his detailed report was buried with the equipment.

Still, if he knew Flaster and Brady, they would dither a long time before deciding on a follow-up mission. Realistically, Dennis knew if anyone was going to fix the return mechanism it would be himself. He couldn’t afford anymore slip-ups.

He had already made one big mistake. This morning, when he had opened the airlock and stepped out into the misty dawn, he found that the robot was gone. After an hour of worried searching, he realized that the little drone had departed during the night. He found its tracks leading westward.

It must have set out on the trail of the humanoids—
apparently to find out all it could about them, pursuant to his instructions.

Dennis cursed himself for thinking aloud in the robot’s presence the day before. But honestly, who would have expected the machine to accept orders in anything but prim Robot-English? It should have rejected the commands as too flexible and inspecific!

He hadn’t even given the robot a time limit. It would probably stay out until its tapes were full!

The ’bot must have a wire loose somewhere. Brady wasn’t kidding when he said something had gone flaky with the machines they had sent here.

Now Dennis had lost two companions since coming to this world. He wondered what had become of the pixolet.

Probably it was back in its own element, glad to be away from the crazy aliens who had captured it.

As the golden-white sun rose above the eastern treeline, Dennis made ready to go. He would make do alone.

He had to tie knots in the straps of his backpack to keep them from slipping. Apparently Brady had bought the cheapest equipment possible. Dennis muttered comments on his rival’s probable parentage as he hoisted the pack and set off southeastward toward the road he had seen the day before.

Dennis hiked along narrow game paths, always watching out for possible dangers. But the forest was peaceful. In spite of the squeaky noises from his awkward pack, he found himself enjoying the sunshine and the fresh air.

He took bearings as well as he could with the cheap compass Brady had provided. When he took breaks by the banks of small streams he kept up a notebook on the ways this world differed from home. So far the list was brief.

The vegetation
was
very Earthlike. The predominant trees in this area looked a lot like beech, for instance.

It could be a sign of parallel evolution. Or the zievatron might open onto alternate versions of Earth itself. Dennis
knew as much about the ziev effect as anybody back home did. But he admitted that that wasn’t all that much. It was a very new field.

He kept reminding himself to move with caution. Still, as the forest became more familiar, he found himself passing the time playing with the anomaly equations in his head, trying to find some explanation.

The animals of the forest watched suspiciously from cover as a preoccupied Earthman hiked their narrow paths in the direction of morning.

When evening finally came, Dennis camped under the trees by a brook. Not wanting to risk a fire, he tinkered with the rickety little gas stove Brady had provided. A weak flame finally sputtered to life and he was able to stir up a lukewarm batch of freeze-dried stew.

I’ll have to start hunting soon, he realized. The favorable biochemistry report notwithstanding, Dennis was still uncomfortable with the idea of shooting any local creatures. What if the “rabbits” here were philosophers? Could he be so sure
anything
he aimed at wasn’t intelligent?

When the tepid meal was done, Dennis activated his camp-watch alarm. It was no bigger than a deck of cards, with a small display screen and a tiny rotating antenna. He had to tap it several times to get it started.

Apparently Brady had been saving Sahara Tech money again. “It may give me two seconds’ warning if something the size of an elephant comes rooting through my pack,” Dennis sighed.

With the needler by his side, he laid back in his sleeping bag and watched through the gaps in the branches overhead as the constellations came out. The configurations were utterly alien.

That finished off the parallel Earth theory once and for all. Dennis scratched three lines of equations from his mental chalkboard.

While waiting for sleep to come, he watched the sky and named the constellations.

Toward the southern mountains, Alfresco the Mighty wrestled with the great snake, Stethoscope. The hero’s piercing eyes shone unevenly, one red and twinkling, the other bright green and steady. The green eye might be a planet, Dennis
decided. If it moved over the next few nights, he would give it a name of its own.

Above Alfresco and Stethoscope, the Chorus of Twelve Virgins sang backup to Cosell the Loquacious as he chanted a monotonous description of Alfresco’s mighty struggle. It didn’t matter that the combatants hadn’t budged in millennia. The announcer found color to fill out the time.

Overhead, the Robot rolled, squat and imperturbable upon a highway made up of a billion tiny numbers, pursuing the Man of Grass … the Alien.

Dennis stirred. He wanted to look at the destination the Man of Grass so doggedly sought. He wanted to turn his head. But he finally realized, with the complacency that comes in dreams, that he had been asleep for some time.

He came to the road late on the afternoon of his fourth day.

His journal bulged with notes on everything from trees to insects, from rock formations to the local varieties of birds and snakes. He had even tried to drop rocks from a cliff, to time their fall and measure the local force of gravity. Everything seemed to support the idea that this place was not Earth but was an awful lot like it.

About half of the animals seemed to have close cousins back home. The other half were unlike anything he had ever seen.

Already Dennis felt he was becoming a seasoned explorer—like Darwin or Wallace or Goodall. And best of all, his boots were beginning to wear in.

He had hated them at first. But after the initial painful blisters, they seemed to become more comfortable day by day. The rest of his equipment still caused him aggravation, but he seemed to be getting used to the stuff, gradually.

The camp-watch still awakened him several times every night, but he apparently was getting the hang of its tiny controls. It no longer went off every time a leaf blew through his camp.

Last night, though, he had started awake to see a troop of hairy-hoofed quadrupeds skirting the edge of his camp. They stared into the beam of his flashlight while his heart pounded. Then they scampered off.

On reflection they had seemed harmless enough, but why hadn’t the alarm warned him?

Dennis’s equipment worries dropped from his mind as he eagerly skidded down the last gravelly slope to the highway. He dropped his pack and approached to kneel by the shallow curb.

It was an odd road, barely wide enough for a small Earth landcar to pass. Uneven and twisty, it followed the contours of the land instead of cutting straight through, as a highway on Earth would have done. And its edges were ragged, as if no one had bothered to trim them when the bed was laid.

The shiny pavement felt smooth and yet tough. Dennis scuffed it and walked a few paces. He tried to scratch it with a metal buckle and dribbled water from his canteen. It seemed skidproof and weatherproof, and offered resilient traction.

Two narrow grooves—exactly one point four two meters apart—ran down its center, following every twist and turn. Dennis knelt to peer into one of the thin channels, its cross section a near-perfect semicircle. The inside surface was almost slippery smooth to the touch.

Dennis sat down on a nearby stump, whistling softly to himself.

This road was a very advanced artifact. He doubted a surface like it could be made on Earth.

But why the ragged edges? Why the grooves, or the twisty, inefficient path?

It was perplexing, like the illogical way in which the return mechanism and the robots had been taken apart. The locals seemed to think differently than men.

Back at the airlock, Dennis had found most of the metal parts taken away from the zievatron. He thought this might mean he had arrived on a metal-poor world. But in the past few days he had seen at least three areas where iron and copper ores lay open and available.

It was a mystery. And there was only one way to find out more.

To the west, the road climbed higher into the mountains. Eastward, it seemed to descend into a broad watershed. Dennis picked up his pack and started off along the road, away from the afternoon sun—toward what he hoped would be civilization.