World of the Drone Read online

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  Transcriber's note:

  This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and FantasyJanuary 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that theU.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  Dworn knew that if his machine failed him in battle he would die. For men fought each other viciously, with no bond of brotherhood, in this--

  World Of The Drone

  _by_

  _Robert Abernathy_

  The beetle woke from a dreamless sleep, yawned, stretched cramped limbsand smiled to himself. In the west the sunset's last glow faded. Starssprang out in the clear desert sky, dimmed only by the white moon thatrose full and brilliant above the eastern horizon.

  Methodically, suppressing impatience, he went through every evening'sritual of waking. He checked his instruments, scanned the mirrors whichgave him a broad view of moonlit desert to his left. To the right hecould see nothing, for his little armored machine lay half-buried,burrowed deep into the sheltering flank of a great dune; all day long ithad escaped the notice of prowling diurnal machines of prey. Helistened, too, for any sound of danger which his amplifiers might pickup from near or far.

  The motor, idling as it had all day while its master slept, responded totesting with a smooth, almost noiseless surge of power. The instrumentswere in order; there was plenty of water in the condenser, and thoughhis food supply was low that shouldn't matter--before tonight was donehe would be once more among his people.

  Only the fuel gauge brought an impatient frown to his face. It wasmenacingly near the empty mark--which meant he would have to spend timeforaging before he could continue his journey. Well ... no help for it.He opened the throttle.

  The beetle's name was Dworn, and he was twenty-one years old. The fleshand blood of him, that is. The rest, the steel-armored shell, the wheelsand engine and hydraulic power-system, the electric sensoryequipment--all of which was to his mind as much part of his identity ashis own skin, muscles, eyes and ears--was only five years old.

  Dworn's face, under his sleep-tousled thatch of blond hair, was boyish.But there were hard lines of decision there, which the last months hadleft.... Tonight by the reckoning of his people, he was still a youth;but when tomorrow dawned, the testing of his wanderyear would be behindhim, and he would be adult, a warrior of the beetle horde.

  Sand spilled from the beetle's dull-black carapace as it surged from itshiding-place. It drifted, its motor only a murmur, along the shoulder ofthe dune. Dworn eyed his offending fuel gauge darkly; he would very muchhave liked to be on his way at top speed, toward the year's-endrendezvous of the horde under the shadow of the Barrier.

  He began cruising slowly, at random, across the rolling moonlit waste ofwind-built dunes, watching for spoor.

  He spied, and swerved automatically to avoid, the cunningly concealedpit of a sand devil, strategically placed in a hollow of the ground.Cautiously Dworn circled back for a second look. The conical pit waspartly fallen in, unrepaired; the devil was obviously gone.

  The burrowing machine would, Dworn knew, have had fuel and othersupplies somewhere in its deep lair, buried beneath the drifted sandwhere it spent its life breathing through a tube to the surface andwaiting for unwary passers-by to skid into its trap. But Dwornregretfully concluded that it would not be worth while digging on thechance that whatever had done away with the devil had not rifled itsstores.... He swung the beetle's nose about and accelerated again.

  On the next rise, he paused to inspect the track of a pill-bug; but tohis practiced eye it was quickly evident that the trail was too old,blowing sand had already blurred the mark of heels, and the bug probablywas many miles away by now.

  A mile farther on, luck smiled on him at last. He crossed the fresh andwell-marked trail of a caterpillar--deeply indented tread-marks,meandering across the dunes.

  * * * * *

  He began following the spoor, still slowly, so as not to lose it or torun upon its maker unawares. A caterpillar was a lumbering monster ofwhich he had no fear, but it was much bigger than a beetle, and could bedangerous when cornered. Dworn had no wish to corner it; the caterpillaritself was not the object of his stalking, but one of its supply cacheswhich according to caterpillar custom it would have hidden at variousplaces within its range.

  The trail led him uphill, into a region cut by washes--dry now, sincethe rainy season was past--and by ridges that rose like naked vertebraefrom the sea of sand that engulfed the valley floor.

  Several times Dworn saw places where the caterpillar had halted, backedand filled, shoved piles of earth and rocks together or scraped patchesof ground clear with its great shovel. But the beetle knew his prey'shabits of old, and he passed by these spots without a second glance,aware that this conspicuous activity was no more than a ruse to deceivepredators like himself. If Dworn hadn't known that trick, and manyothers used by the various non-predatory machine species whichmanufactured food and fuel by photosynthesis, he would have been unfitto be a beetle--and he would never have lived through the wanderyearwhich weeded out the unfit according to the beetle people's sternimmemorial custom.

  At last he came to a stop on a rocky hillside, where the tracks werefaint and indistinct. Carefully scanning the ground downslope, he sawthat his instinct had not misled him--the caterpillar had turned asideat this place and had afterward returned to its original trail, backingand dragging its digging-blade to obliterate the traces of its sideexcursion.

  Dworn grinned, feeling the stirring of the hunter's excitement thatnever failed to move him, even on such a prosaic foraging expedition asthis. He sent the beetle bumping down the slope.

  The blurred trail led into the sandy bed of a wash at the foot of thehill, and along that easily-traveled way for a quarter mile. Then thestream made a sharp bend, undercutting a promontory on the left andcreating a high bank of earth and soft white rock. Dworn saw that asection of the bank had collapsed and slid into the gully. That was noaccident; the mark where a great blade had sheared into the overhang wasplain to read, even if it had not been for the scuffed over vestiges ofcaterpillar tracks round about.

  Dworn halted and listened intently, his amplifier turned all the way up.No sound broke the stillness, and the black moon-shadows within range ofhis vision did not stir.

  He nosed the beetle carefully up to the heap. He had no equipment formoving those tons of soil and rock, but that was no matter. He twisted aknob on the control panel, a shutter in the beetle's forward cowlingsnapped open and a telescoping drill thrust from its housing, chatteredbriefly and took hold, while the engine's pulse strengthened to take upthe load.

  Twice Dworn abandoned fruitless borings and tried a different spot. Onthe third try, at almost full extension the drill-point screechedsuddenly on metal and then as suddenly met no more resistance. Dwornswitched on the pump, and quickly turned it off again; he swung theoverhead hatch open, and--pausing to listen warily once more--clamberedout onto the cowling, in the cold night air, to open the sample tap atthe base of the drill and sniff the colorless fluid that trickled fromit.

  It gave off the potent odor of good fuel, and Dworn nodded to himself,not regretting his caution though in this case it had not been needed.But--clever caterpillars had been known to bury canisters of water intheir caches, poison for the unsuspecting.

  * * * * *

  The pump throbbed again; there was the satisfying gurgle of fuel flowinginto almost-empty tanks. Dworn leaned back, seizing the opportunity torelax for a moment in preparation for the strenuous journey stillbefore him.

  But he didn't fail to snap alert when just as th
e gauge trembled nearthe full mark, he heard pebbles rattling on the hillside above.Immediately thereupon he became aware of the grind of steel on stone andthe rumbling of an imperfectly muffled engine.

  In one smooth rapid motion Dworn switched off the pump, and spun thedrill control. As the mechanism telescoped back into place, he gunnedhis engine, and the beetle shot backward and spun round to face theoncoming noise.

  A squarish black silhouette loomed high on the slope above theoverhanging bank, which rose so steeply that a stone loosened by turningtreads bounded with a clang off the beetle's armor in the wash below.The caterpillar halted momentarily, engine grumbling to take in thescene.

  Dworn didn't linger to learn its reaction at spying a looter. A snapshot from his turret gun exploded directly in front of the othermachine, throwing up a cloud of dust and--he hoped--confusing its crew.And the beetle was fleeing around the bend in the stream bed, keepingclose to the high bank.

  A score of yards past the turning, intuition of danger made