A guard droned knife missile saw the figure skylining about five kilometres away, on a low ridge. The little missile sized the object up carefully, not moving from its crevice in the rocks. It triangulated from the eyes on its outboard monofilament warps, then rose slowly from its hiding place until it was in line of sight with a scout missile lodged on a cliff ten kilometres behind it. It flashed a brief signal, and received a relayed reply from its distant drone.
The drone was there in a few minutes, taking a wide curve round the suspicious figure. It shook other missiles free as it went, deploying them in a ring around the potential target.
What to do? The drone had to make up its own mind. The base wasn’t transmitting while whatever had hit the last incoming module was still hanging around. It had been a long wait, but they’d survived so far, and the big guns should be arriving soon.
The drone watched the figure as it skidded and slid down the scree beneath the ridge, leaving a hazy trail of dust behind it. It got to the bottom, then started walking across the wide gravel basin, seemingly oblivious to all the attention it was attracting.
The drone sent a knife missile closer to the object. The missile floated up from behind, monitoring weak electromagnetic emissions, tried to communicate but received no reply, then darted round in front of the figure, and lasered its drone the view it had of the scarred suit front.
The figure stopped, stood still. It raised one hand, as though waving at the small missile hovering a few metres in front of it. The drone came closer, high above, scanning. Finally, satisfied, it swooped from the sky and stopped a metre in front of the figure, which pointed at the black mess of the communication unit on its chest. Then it gestured to the side of its helmet and tapped at the visor. The drone dipped once in a nod, then floated forward and pressed gently up against the visor of the helmet, vibrating the speech through
'We know who you are. What happened?'
'He was alive when we got down, but I had no medics left. Ablation caused a slow oxygen leak and eventually the recycler packed up. There was nothing I could do.'
'You walked all this way?'
'From near the equator.'
'When did he die?'
'Thirty-four days ago.'
'Why didn’t you ditch the body? You’d have been quicker.'
The suit made a shrugging movement. 'Call it sentiment.'
'Climb aboard. I’ll take you to an entrance.'
'Thank you.'
The drone lowered to waist height. The suit pulled itself up onto the top of the drone and sat there.
The body, bouncing slackly inside the suit, was still quite well preserved, though dehydration had stretched the skin and made it darker. The teeth were displayed grinning knowingly at the barren world, and the skull was arched back on the locked upper vertebrae, upright and triumphant.
'You all right up there?' The drone shouted through the fabric of the suit. The suit nodded stiffly to the eye of an accompanying knife missile.
'Yes. Everything’s a little difficult though.' It pointed at the scarred, burned surface of its body. 'I hurt.'
Cleaning Up
The first Gift fell onto a pig farm in New England. It popped into existence five metres above a ramshackle outhouse, dropped through the roof, bounced off a cistern and demolished a wheel-less tractor driving a band saw.
Bruce Losey came running out of the house clutching his sporting carbine and ready to blast any interloper to Kingdom Come. All he found was what looked like a gigantic bundle of Peacock feathers on top of his tractor, which was lying on its side leaking fuel and looking like it would never work again. Bruce looked up through the hole in the roof and spat into a pile of cut logs, 'Goddamned S.S.T.s.'
He tried to shift the object that had bust up his tractor, smashed his roof and dented his cistern, but leapt away when it burned his hands. He went back to the house watching the sky warily, and called the police.
Cesare Borges, head of the mighty Industrial Military Combines Corporation, sat in his office reading a fascinating article called
'What?'
'Professor Feldman to see you, sir.'
'Who?'
'A Professor Feldman, sir.'
'Oh yeah?'
'Yes, sir. He says he has the results of the preliminary development work on… ', there was some talking Cesare didn’t catch, '… on the Alternative Resources Project.'
'The what?'
'The Alternative Resources Project, sir. It was set up last year, it seems. The professor has been waiting for some time, sir.'
'I’ll see him later,' Cesare said, clicking the intercom off and going back to the
'Hell,
'I think it fell off an S.S.T.'
The patrolman rubbed his chin. The other cop was poking a stick at the bundle lying across the old tractor. The thing was about three metres long and one in diameter, and whatever it was its colours kept shifting and changing, and whenever anything touched it, it got hot. The tip of the stick smoked.
'Who should we tell about this anyway?' said the cop with the stick. He wanted to have this cleared up as quickly as possible and get away from the smell of pigs coming from the barn across the yard.
'I guess… the F.A.A.,' said the other, 'or maybe the Air Force. I dunno.' He took off his cap and fiddled with the badge, breathing on it and polishing it on his sleeve.
'Well I’m claiming compensation, whoever it belongs to,' Bruce said as they went back to the house. 'That’s a lot of damage that thing’s done. That’ll cost a few bucks to set right. That tractor was nearly new, you know. I’m telling you; nowhere’s safe now with those S.S.T.s.'
'Hmm.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Hey,' Bruce said, stopping and looking at the two cops with a worried expression on his face, 'do you know if Liberia registers S.S.T.s?'
Professor Feldman sat in the outer-outer office in Cesare’s suite at the top of the I.M.C.C. building in Manhattan and looked through the abstract of his report for about the eightieth time.
The secretary, a clean-cut young man with an IBM 9000 desk terminal and a M.23 submachine gun, had shrugged his shoulders sympathetically after he had at last been persuaded to call through to Cesare’s office. The professor said he would just have to wait, and went back to his seat. There were seven other people waiting to see Cesare apart from himself. Two of them were Air Force generals and one was the foreign minister of an important developing country. They all looked nervous without their aides, who were kept in the outer-outer-outer office to avoid crowding. According to the others, they had been waiting there, seven or eight hours each day, five days a week, for at least the last three weeks.
This was the professor’s first day.
The factory ship moved through space in one of the dust-rich arms of the main galaxy, its net-fields like great, invisible limbs stretched before it, gathering its harvest like a trawl and funnelling the ensnared material into
