“Surely, friend.”
The two men started out towards the long, dully gleaming hull of the thing like a mounted torpedo. Sparks came doubtfully, at a diagonal, to join them. The blood was drying on his chin.
“Trying for a truce?”
“Trying for something,” said George. “Just be ready to duck if anything starts up.”
Nothing did. They came alongside the wheeled monster. There was no sign of hatches or portholes, and when they’d walked clear around it they’d established that the hull was a completely unbroken surface save for a couple of short, flexible rods, near the nose, back-flung like antennae. George reached up, on his toes. He grabbed one of the rods and pulled at it. It waggled loosely, then sprang back when he released it. The monster didn’t seem offended or in the least perturbed. It ignored him. He picked up a rock and banged it several times against the hull. Circumspectly, the mate and Sparks stood a little way back lest the wheels started turning. But they did not.
“There’s no one at home,” said George, tossing the rock away. “Or else they’re playing possum—maybe watching us through that hull—some kind of one-way vision.”
Just in case that were so, he made what he considered to be friendly signs at the ship. It remained totally unresponsive. He threw up his hands.
“Well, maybe the tank drivers will have something to say. Let’s go see.”
They plodded over the cracked earth to the nearest tank, half expecting it to swivel and cover them with its gun. (The long guns protruded from the tanks’
bodies, not their turrets, which were too small to carry them.) But all the tanks remained static in their arc.
Still, they had slightly more promise than the seamless torpedo craft. Each turret had a lid with a handle to it. George screwed up his courage, clambered onto the first tank, and tried to open it up. It proved easy enough. The lid lifted after a single twist of the handle.
George looked straight down on the breech of the gun. Plainly, it was self-loading, with an automatic ammunition feed. There was radar apparatus, with a tiny screen. And there was a man-sized driving seat, with an elaborate instrument panel, including an inset TV screen, facing it. Everything was there—except the driver.
Meanwhile, Sparks and the mate were similarly investigating other nearby tanks. They came back with the same answer. All the tanks were obviously driverless.
“So what happened to the drivers?” asked Sparks. “They couldn’t have got out: we’d have seen them go.”
“They can be folded up small and slipped into a dashboard pocket,” said the mate, attempting humor after this anti-climax.
“Although these tanks have provision for manual control, they must have been operated by remote control,” said George. “Question is, where are the controllers? Lying low in that cigar on wheels? Or maybe in some General Headquarters way over the horizon?”
“I’ll take a bet they’re in the cigar,” said the mate. “And they’re stuck in there because the power’s failed. Look, that hot-dog on wheels came charging at us bent on murder. Then it changed its mind and turned to go back. Found its batteries were running out or something. And all the tanks had to turn around, too, because they’re powered from that thing. Then they were stuck because it had run out of gas. Could be it’s re-charging its batteries right now. We’ll know about it soon if it is—they’ll all turn on us.”
“That’s a nice theory,” said George, scratching his head. “Got any theories about that mark?”
He pointed to a white O painted on the side of the nearest tank.
“Sort of regimental sign,” said the mate. “All the tanks have got that same letter O.”
“Or zero,” said Sparks. “More probably, it’s just a circle: you can’t expect Venusians to share our alphabet or figuring system.”
But the mate wasn’t listening to him, but to something else. There was a distant heavy droning.
“Its coming from the sky,” George decided. “Airplanes —of a kind.”
The mate said: “We’d better get back to the craters.”
They started back. The droning swelled behind them, ballooning up over their heads menacingly. They looked back and up over their shoulders and saw only the grey blank mask of the sky.
