sections bigger than a man and gleaming a polished silver-blue, their eyes, four of them evenly spaced around the cylinder a foot or so below the antenna, white and bulging, with neither pupil nor lid, their limbs many-jointed and metallic, various tool-ends fastened securely instead of hands. The legs were attached to the small body, but one fifth the size of the head; the arms came from the head itself, just below the unblinking eyes.

"They must be twelve feet tall," Johnny whispered.

"Shh! Softly. We're close to our encampment and I don't want them to find us. They average twelve feet, Johnny."

Johnny would never forget the sight. Many times he had watched the robots parading in thin-lined silence down the long, silent roads which men no longer used, but now he could have almost reached out and touched them. The absolute quiet was unnerving. The Robots must have weighed close to a ton each but walked with the stillness of stalking jungle cats.

"Where are they going, Diane?"

"I don't know. Who understands the ways of Robots? Who can say...." Abruptly, Diane was still. Her eyes went big and wide but she wasn't watching the Robots.

Directly in front of her face and staring at her from unblinking eyes, its body half-coiled and dappled with the sunlight which filtered down through the foliage, was a copperhead. The tongue darted out in a quick, blurring red streak, the head cleared the loose coils and swayed slightly from side to side.

"Don't move," Johnny barely formed the words with his lips and hoped Diane would retain her presence of mind and obey him. A sudden motion would set the snake to striking.

The file of robots paraded by just in front of them, an occasional joint creaking, metal skins polished to keen reflection. The copperhead was fully coiled now, head cocked flat and ugly and perfectly still. Johnny placed his hand on Diane's thigh and let it crawl upwards, as if of its own volition, with an agonizing lack of speed. Now his fingers had reached the edge of the buckskin shorts and now they climbed on the smooth pelt. He could feel Diane trembling faintly, the motion unseen but felt. And now his fingers climbed to the girdling belt, grasped the haft of the hunting knife, slowly withdrew it, tiny fraction of an inch at a time.

At last he had drawn the knife clear, easing it slowly toward his own body. He balanced it on his palm, trying to judge the weight. He 

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