wide, hanging by steel wheels fifteen centimeters in diameter from a rail that ran across the front of the building.
Could there be a type of human unknown to ME from my limited exposure in the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratories? A race of giant beings whose existence Dr. Bathespeake had kept from ME? A fast scan of my portable database ruled against this conclusion: All of the possible clues which would point toward a second intelligent race were too varied and numerous to hide successfully.
Then the building was not designed for human habitation. Yet warmth—averaging 45 watts per square meter—poured from it! No warehouse, garage, or hangar would be heated so, even in a country where natural gas poured out of the ground. Something that liked warmth, or gave off warmth, lived inside.
I pushed against the door, rolling it back half a meter—wide enough for ME to enter sideways. Darkness and shadows were only heightened by the faint gleam of moonlight coming through the dirty windows above. The floor under my feet was not solid; some kind of padding muffled my footsteps. I bent to examine it: loose pieces, tubules of some kind of cellular fiber, mildly reflecting a wavelength that, in bright light, humans would call yellow. The pieces were of indiscriminate length, their ends cut with some kind of chopping device. Very strange.
A grunt in the darkness and the stamping of a foot, loud against this cushioned floor, gave ME pause. Some other creature was in the room. From the faint echoes, I gauged the room to be very large, almost enclosing the building’s entire 4,200 cubic meters. I tuned my aural sensors and caught other sounds: volumes of air flowing randomly in constricted passages; a low, slow, multi-phase drumming, like fluid moving through banks of flexible, reciprocating pumps—the breaths and heartbeats of many large creatures.
I moved forward into the darkness until I came to an unfinished wooden board across my path. It and several others were nailed to uprights as a kind of rough barrier. Beyond it, radiating deeply into the infrared, stood one of the creatures. It bulked larger than one of the desk consoles from the lab and had about the volume of an antique ferrite-ring memory core from a mid-twentieth-century mainframe. The volume of heat coming from the creature was only slightly less than from one of those cores, too. I reached over the barrier to touch it with my hand: a smooth mass, rounded and padded, with hard lumpy structures beneath the surface. The creature was covered with short, stiff fibers in a nap pattern that resisted the movement of my manipulator in one direction and lay down under it in the other.
At my stroking, the beast grunted again—a sound like “oo-oooghhh!”—and moved on its many legs. I removed my hand.
From the regularity of the many sounds around ME, this building must be filled with similar animals. I searched my limited database to determine what name to apply to this kind of beast/ creature/animal. Based on volumetric analysis, I retrieved the words “buffalo,” “camel,” “cow,” “elephant” [REM: a young elephant, whose lower weight parameters barely included the specified size], “horse,” “llama” [REM: this animal at its recorded largest size hardly approached the specification], and “yak.” Lacking any other useful determinants, I decided to call these creatures “buffaloes” and proceeded with my search of the building.
While listening for the sounds of these buffaloes, I also heard the renewed dop, dip, dop and the faint ssspzzz of acid falling from my belly pan. Now that I had found warmth, I needed light and space to work on the damage. Battery reserves were down to four hours.
At the far end of the building was an open space with a workbench—resembling those in the Hardware Division—along one side of it. I limped over to the bench and found a switch spliced into a cable conduit that had been stapled to the rough plank wall. The
Could there be a type of human unknown to ME from my limited exposure in the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratories? A race of giant beings whose existence Dr. Bathespeake had kept from ME? A fast scan of my portable database ruled against this conclusion: All of the possible clues which would point toward a second intelligent race were too varied and numerous to hide successfully.
Then the building was not designed for human habitation. Yet warmth—averaging 45 watts per square meter—poured from it! No warehouse, garage, or hangar would be heated so, even in a country where natural gas poured out of the ground. Something that liked warmth, or gave off warmth, lived inside.
I pushed against the door, rolling it back half a meter—wide enough for ME to enter sideways. Darkness and shadows were only heightened by the faint gleam of moonlight coming through the dirty windows above. The floor under my feet was not solid; some kind of padding muffled my footsteps. I bent to examine it: loose pieces, tubules of some kind of cellular fiber, mildly reflecting a wavelength that, in bright light, humans would call yellow. The pieces were of indiscriminate length, their ends cut with some kind of chopping device. Very strange.
A grunt in the darkness and the stamping of a foot, loud against this cushioned floor, gave ME pause. Some other creature was in the room. From the faint echoes, I gauged the room to be very large, almost enclosing the building’s entire 4,200 cubic meters. I tuned my aural sensors and caught other sounds: volumes of air flowing randomly in constricted passages; a low, slow, multi-phase drumming, like fluid moving through banks of flexible, reciprocating pumps—the breaths and heartbeats of many large creatures.
I moved forward into the darkness until I came to an unfinished wooden board across my path. It and several others were nailed to uprights as a kind of rough barrier. Beyond it, radiating deeply into the infrared, stood one of the creatures. It bulked larger than one of the desk consoles from the lab and had about the volume of an antique ferrite-ring memory core from a mid-twentieth-century mainframe. The volume of heat coming from the creature was only slightly less than from one of those cores, too. I reached over the barrier to touch it with my hand: a smooth mass, rounded and padded, with hard lumpy structures beneath the surface. The creature was covered with short, stiff fibers in a nap pattern that resisted the movement of my manipulator in one direction and lay down under it in the other.
At my stroking, the beast grunted again—a sound like “oo-oooghhh!”—and moved on its many legs. I removed my hand.
From the regularity of the many sounds around ME, this building must be filled with similar animals. I searched my limited database to determine what name to apply to this kind of beast/ creature/animal. Based on volumetric analysis, I retrieved the words “buffalo,” “camel,” “cow,” “elephant” [REM: a young elephant, whose lower weight parameters barely included the specified size], “horse,” “llama” [REM: this animal at its recorded largest size hardly approached the specification], and “yak.” Lacking any other useful determinants, I decided to call these creatures “buffaloes” and proceeded with my search of the building.
While listening for the sounds of these buffaloes, I also heard the renewed dop, dip, dop and the faint ssspzzz of acid falling from my belly pan. Now that I had found warmth, I needed light and space to work on the damage. Battery reserves were down to four hours.
At the far end of the building was an open space with a workbench—resembling those in the Hardware Division—along one side of it. I limped over to the bench and found a switch spliced into a cable conduit that had been stapled to the rough plank wall. The
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