Chapter V

Siria rested while Tinker made a scouting trip to the electronic-brain shed. From inside its complex array of circuit boards he could see Drake’s ship, now hovering motionless a few yards over the top of a building a hundred yards away. Tinker watched for a long minute, but nothing happened.

He had a worried expression on his face when he rejoined the girl and, though his countenance was invisible to her, she could hear the strain in the voice. “How bad is it?” she asked.

Tinker said, “Bad enough. He’s in a pretty favorable spot. So long as he stays in the ship, we can’t touch him. I’m afraid time’s working for him. The longer we stay here, the better off he will be. If we stay here more than twenty-four hours, we’ll die. The radiation _could_ kill us in fifteen hours.”

She was silent for a moment. “I see,” was all she said.

“On the other hand,” resumed Tinker, more confidently, “there must be _something_ we can do. Maybe we don’t know what it is, but there never was a tactical position so strong it couldn’t be attacked. At least we’ve got that factor working for us.”

She hesitated. “Tinker,” she said uncertainly, “did I understand what you just said? There’s a weakness in his position, and we don’t know what it is. We don’t know, but--it helps us?”

“Certainly,” said Tinker, his voice reassuring. “Consider all the things we might try. First, we could make a jump for the radio on Asteroid B. That won’t work, because he’d promptly run us down in the ship. Second, we could attack the ship with our bare hands. That’s out too, because we couldn’t do it any damage. Third, we could just wait here until he goes away. That won’t work, because we’d die of radiation poisoning. Fourth, we could--”

“Tinker!” cried the girl. “You’re cracking!”

He smiled. “Not exactly, dear,” he said. “There _must_ be some weakness in Drake’s strategic position.”

“But we don’t know what it is. You said so yourself!”

“That’s true,” he conceded. “But you see, Drake doesn’t suspect that we don’t know. You’ll find that situation described in Clausewitz’s _Tactics_,” he added encouragingly. “Unless I made it up myself.”

Siria might have had her doubts about Tinker’s sanity, but she grimly followed orders. Most of her engineering knowledge was from textbooks and the drawing board, but she put her mind to practical mechanics and quickly erected the mechanism Tinker had specified out of spare parts in the storage buildings.

The machine glittered and sparkled. It towered higher than her head. It was rude and clumsy in construction, but it had a long, deadly-looking barrel that came out of its vitals and poked threateningly into space. And it did absolutely nothing.

She was staring at it dourly when Tinker scrambled out of the tunnel hatch behind her. He turned his radio volume down as far as possible and, his helmet almost touching hers, asked: “Everything all right?”

“I suppose so,” she whispered, “but--”

“Never mind. Any trouble with the robots?”

She shook her head. “They look the same as ever. But I’ve been staying out of sight, just as you advised, even if they are perfectly harmless.”

“They aren’t,” he said, surprisingly. “But don’t worry about it right now.”

He stood up cautiously and peered around. Drake’s ship was methodically cruising up and down the lanes of buildings, not particularly close. There were individual robots and groups wandering up and down, their “heads” under their arms in their accustomed fashion.

But they were slightly different in some respects now, since Tinker had made certain changes in the master pattern-sets in the electronic brain.

“Drake’s looking for us,” he reported to the girl, sinking down again. “That’s good. It shows he’s getting edgy. I don’t blame him. He thinks that once he takes care of us, he’ll be free. But the longer he waits the greater the chance of some wandering patrol vessel or freighter blundering in, for some message coming through from the Company that starts them wondering. So he’s irritable--jumpy. He’s desperately anxious to get away.”

“So am I,” the girl said.

“All right.” Tinker stood up again, took a last look. The ship was close at hand, but none of the robots were. Conditions would never be any better. “This is it, Siria,” he said, bending close. “In case anything goes wrong, I love you.”

A second later, trundling the imitation machine out into the open, he wondered just how much he had been deceiving himself. Not very much, he decided, almost incredulously. But then he didn’t have time to think for quite a while.

The main problem was to move the machine a substantial distance away from any building. He hadn’t moved it quite as far as he might have wished when he saw the nose of the ship come suddenly about and head toward him. Drake had sighted him.

Tinker gave a splendid five-second performance of the Courageous Ack-Ack Gunner, sticking to his weapon to the last. He tugged and strained and twisted dials, and sighted through tubes. It was almost too realistic to be safe, because he just barely managed to dive aside in time to dodge Drake’s ship.

It was hare-and-hound for several frantic seconds after that, but Tinker had picked his spot and he made it to one of the buildings and into the tunnels. Drake had learned his lesson about the futility of knocking down buildings. He hung irresolute for a moment, then drifted back toward the “weapon.”

Tinker stood watching half inside the tunnel for a long moment, with his heart in his mouth. Then, slowly, the hatch began to open.

Drake had taken the bait.