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interplanetary liners, which now stood humbly along the edges of the field,
towed hastily out of the way.
"Well, sir!" the awed driver whispered. "Ain't she big!"
She was. The thick concrete aprons had shattered and buckled under the weight
of that black hull, which towered so high that a white tuft of cumulus had
formed about its peak. Peering upward until his neck ached, Forester watched
gigantic valves lifting open, and long gangways sliding down, and the hordes
of humanoids start marching out to establish their service to mankind.
Tiny against the scale of their colossal craft, the new mechanicals were all
identical, nude and neuter, quicker and sleeker than men, graceful and perfect
and tireless. The sun shimmered blue on their dark hastening limbs, and
glittered on their yellow brands. They spread out across the broken concrete
by the busy thousands, innumerable.
The first scouts of that dark army came to the high wire fence around the
spaceport, near where Forester had stopped. They began cutting it down, deftly
slicing through the heavy mesh with small tools, and neatly piling the
sections. Swarming about the task in ever greater numbers, they began to
remind him of some social insects. They worked silently, never calling to one
another - for they all were parts of the same ultimate machine, and each unit
knew all that any of them did. Watching, he began to feel a vague impact of
terror.
For they were too many. Glinting with bronze and frosty blue, their hard black
bodies were too beautiful. They were too sure, too strong, too swift. Unlike
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any actual insects that he had ever watched, they wasted no time and no
effort. They worked as one, and they made no blunders. Mark White's
apprehension of them seemed better founded now, and he was suddenly grateful
for the president's decision to save Project Thunderbolt.
"Let's go!" He tugged at the staring driver's sleeve, and his voice was a
husky whisper, as if he were already afraid for the humanoids to hear. "Drive
on - fast!"
"Right, sir." With a last astonished look at the vastness of that ship and the
silent machines still swarming from it, the driver pulled back on the road.
"The world sure changes," he commented sagely. "What won't they think of
next!"
Back at Starmont, Forester hurried down to the project without even taking
time to call Ruth, and worked that night and all the next day without sleep,
modifying three missiles. Light would take two long centuries to reach Wing
IV, but these tapered shapes of death had their own dreadful geometry. The
time quantity, in the equations of rhodomagnetic propulsion, varied with the
fourth root of distance. Wing IV, consequently, was only a few seconds farther
than the nearest planet.
When the third missile was ready at last, with drive and relays rebuilt,
Forester went to sleep in his coveralls on a cot beside the launching station.
The teleprinter bell awoke him instantly - and he saw that the time was
somehow nine, next morning. The brief message from the defense minister was
classified top secret. It warned him to be ready for a humanoid inspector,
arriving within an hour.
Quickly checking the three modified missiles again, he left them racked and
ready. Back at the surface, he locked the elevator, pushed the mirror down to
hide the controls, kicked a rug over the escape door in the floor, hung his
coveralls on a hook, and walked out of an innocent cloakroom into his office,
to wait for the inspection.
The mechanical came on a military aircraft, escorted by the commanding general
of the satellite space stations and his retinue. A staff car brought them from
the landing strip below the mountain, and Forester waited to meet them at the
inner gate. The machine stepped out ahead of the men, droning its greeting:
"Service, Dr. Clay Forester."
In the midst of the stiff military uniforms, the slender silicone nakedness of
the humanoid had a curious incongruity, but that oddness was not amusing. Its
air of kindly blind alertness was somehow disturbing, and Forester couldn't
help an uncomfortable start when it spoke his name.
"We have come to examine your Project Lookout." Its voice was a mellow golden
horn. "Under the provisional agreement, we are to patrol all military
installations, to prevent any aggressions before the ratification election.
Then we shall remove all weapons."
"But this project isn't a weapon," Forester protested. "Like the satellite
stations, it's only part of the warning network."
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