The Practice Effect Read Online Free PDF

by his gaiters. The dry grass crunched beneath his feet as he stepped out. Tiny, whining insect sounds filled the air.
    “Pix!” he called, but the little creature had flown from sight.
    Dennis moved cautiously, all senses alert. He guessed the first few moments on an alien world could be the most dangerous of all.
    Trying to watch the sky, the forest, and the nearby insects all at once, he didn’t even notice the squat little robot until he tripped over it and fell sprawling to the ground.
    Dennis instinctively rolled away into a crouch, the needler suddenly in his hand, his pulse pounding in his ears.
    He sighed as he recognized the little Sahara Tech exploration drone.
    The ’bot’s cameras tracked him with a barely discernible whir. Its observing turret slowly turned. Dennis lowered the needier. “Come here,” he commanded.
    The robot seemed to consider the order for a moment. Then it approached on spinning treads to halt a meter away.
    “What have you got there?” Dennis pointed.
    The robot held something in one of its manipulator grips. It was a shiny bit of metal, with a clawed pincer at one end.
    “Isn’t that a piece of another robot?” Dennis asked, hoping he was wrong.
    Compared with some of the sophisticated machines Dennis had worked with, the exploration ’bot wasn’t very bright. But it understood a basic vocabulary. A green light on its turret flashed, indicating assent.
    “Where did you get it?”
    The little machine paused, then swiveled and pointed with one of its other sampling arms.
    Dennis got up and looked, but he saw nothing in that direction. He moved cautiously through the tall grass until, at last, he came to a flat area partly hidden by the weeds. There he stopped and stared.
    The clearing looked like a wilderness parts store … a Grizzly Adams wrecking yard … a rustic electronics swap meet.
    One—no,
two
—S.I.T. robots had been rather tactlessly disassembled; their parts lay in neat rows among the clumps of grass, apparently ordered and sorted by size and shape.
    Dennis knelt and picked up a camera turret. It had been ripped out of its housing, and the pieces had been laid out on the ground, like merchandise for sale.
    The trampled mud was strewn with scattered bits of straw, wire, and glass. Dennis looked closer. Here and there, mixed in among the tread marks and the torn pieces of plastic machinery, were faint but unmistakable footprints.
    Dennis looked down at the neat rows of gears, wheels, panels, and circuit boards—at the faint marks in the clay—and all he could think of was an epitaph he had once read in a New England cemetery.
    I knew this would happen someday
.
    Dennis had always felt he was somehow destined to encounter something really unusual during his life. Well, here it was in front of him—tangible evidence of alien intelligence.
    The comforting Earthlike
Gestalt
finished evaporating around him. He looked at the “grass” and saw it wasn’t like any grass he had ever seen. The line of trees was now a dark, unknown forest filled with malign forces. Dennis felt a crawling sensation on the nape of his neck.
    A clicking sound made him whirl, the needler in his hand. But it was only the surviving robot again, poking through the pieces of its disassembled fellows.
    Dennis picked up an electronics board from the ground. It had been
pried
out of its housing by main force. It could easily have been separated with just a twist, but it had been roughly sheared away, as if the entity doing the dissection had never heard of threaded sleeves or bolts.
    Was this the work of primitives, then? Or someone from a race so advanced that they’d forgotten about such simple things as screws?
    One thing was certain. The being or beings responsible didn’t have a high regard for other people’s property.
    The robots had been made mostly of plastic. He noted that most of the bigger metal pieces seemed to be missing entirely.
    Dennis suddenly had a very unpleasant thought.