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it was a virtual certainty that in that favored sequence the general public
would know nothing at all about the psi powers.
That settled it. He had to go on. Tentatively for the memory of the hoarse
black bird was still vivid and horrible he looked up.
How do you climb empty air? He was already as high as he could go.
No, not quite. There was still the guard rail.
Oh, oh, the man who looked like Sean said. Something s up. I hope I m
wrong about what it is. Look at them.
A swarm of tiny men had burst out of the barracks. While Danny watched, they
melted into the woods. On the field, more tiny men fled wildly away from the
shining torpedoes. It was as if the entire camp had suddenly been ordered to
stage a demonstration of organized panic like the scattering of movie extras
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before the eruption of a plaster-of-Paris Pompeii. A siren wavered, distantly.
Hell-bomb, the man who looked like Sean said, with complete calm. Don t
know what good it does them to run. The ESP watch hasn t called a dud yet. So
long, Danny.
Frantically, Danny heaved one foot up onto the guard rail.
Hey! the man who looked like Sean shouted. You crazy fool, you ll be dead
anyhow in a
Danny lunged upward and stepped off onto the empty air.
THREE
The soldier s voice snapped out of existence. Danny was enveloped in a
humming dusk. His next step struck a solid surface at once, and after only two
or three steps he had his balance back.
The camp was gone both gone from around Danny, and gone from its own sequence
by now, obliterated along with everything else within a radius of fifty miles.
The fact that it was only partially real did not prevent Danny from feeling a
thoroughly real hatred for the PRS. Those men had been real to themselves, and
no more anxious to die en masse in a hydrogen-bomb blast than any man on the
main line.
Anything the PRS had a hand in meant suffering. It was a fact Danny carried
with him now, and one he meant to have in the forefront of his mind when he
met the PRS again.
He looked around. High over his head, a vaulted ceiling arched its back,
supported by smoothly-curved, graceful buttresses of dark metal. The ceiling
sheltered something immense and dark and throbbing with power, a great
enigmatic mass which rested on the earth some hundreds of feet away from
Danny. The building itself seemed to be as big as a zeppelin hangar, and was
designed rather like one, too; but that black mass was no zeppelin, nor
anything else that Danny recognized.
The curving sides of the hangar were interrupted regularly by tall, narrow
windows. Through them, Danny could see sunlight, and the pointed spires of the
distant city, again familiar but changed; here they had both more grace and
more delicacy. Along the floor, which really did seem to be earth and nothing
more, ran long, intersecting trails like the marks of caterpillar treads.
Which, Danny discovered immediately, was exactly what they were. There were
no men in the hangar. The throbbing black machine was being tended by other
machines, things like half-tracks without cabs, fenders, bumpers or lights,
but equipped with deft and complicated metal arms which were carried, when not
in use, folded mantis-like across what would have been the radiator of a
half-track. They were very quiet, and they moved with purpose and with obvious
intelligence. They were easily the most fascinating mechanisms Danny had ever
seen in his life and they were certainly most unlike Hollywood s versions of
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what a robot would look like.
One of them glided silently out from behind Danny and started to pass him. He
watched it, wondering whether or not he should be afraid.
The machine seemed to be struck by a similar indecision. It paused and sat
there, its front wheels canted toward Danny, but its jointed chassis still
aligned forward, as if unable to decide whether to turn back or to proceed.
Then its treads began to move slowly backwards. The robot backed away in a
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