Waiting for the Man

"A ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for" ~William Shedd

Louie spent the next few days exploring and settling in.

One of the first things he did was to learn how to use the food machine properly - or at least better than he had been doing. The sponges, for example, were not meant to be put into the cylinders. When he opened the chamber that he'd dumped them in, they were still sitting there. Besides, there was a complex valve at the bottom of the tube, and it was hard to see how it could have anything to do with the odd spongy stuff. He pulled them all out and tried to think what they could be for. He sniffed at them. As far as he could tell, they didn't smell of anything. Tentatively, Louie licked one. It was bland but not unpleasant. He nibbled a corner and chewed the fragment up before swallowing it. It was a little like eating tasteless bread. He inserted the card back into the food machine and pulled it out once a small amount of the sticky soup had covered the bottom. He dipped the sponge into the stuff and took a cautious bite. The sponge reduced the intensity of the taste and gave him something a bit more satisfying to chew on.

He also worked out how to turn the machine on and off using the front panel without having to remove the card all the time. There were more complicated controls and options, but Louie decided to leave well enough alone. He'd broken enough things over the years by messing around too much with workings he didn't really understand.

Eventually, after quite a lot of searching, he found some bowls in a covered recess in the base of the machine. They caught the food as it dripped so that he could now sit outside as he ate, rather than being forced to lean over the device while he scooped up the sticky soup.

Next, he began to explore and familiarise himself with the layout of the complex. As far as he could tell, it was definitely just him and the fuss-bot, whom Louie came across every now and then in his wanderings. The robot would occasionally turn up at Louie's sanctuary and look around for a while before leaving. Louie thought it was making sure he hadn't broken anything.

In general, the base was surprisingly ordinary. If Louie had been taken on a guided tour of it on Earth, he doubted that he'd have seen anything that would have surprised him. Perhaps some of the machines were performing extraordinary tasks but, if so, it wasn't apparent from looking at them. The most futuristic part of the whole place was his sanctuary. Everything else resembled a rather run-down factory.

Louie came across a storeroom in one corner of a large hanger, and in it he found some cable and a sheet of rather oily tarpaulin. He used it to make a hammock back at the sanctuary. He dug a hole out on the plain to use as a toilet. He emptied out one of the boxes and used it to wash his clothes, which he dried on a makeshift clothesline while he washed himself. He sat naked on the ground and watched clouds gathering in the distance to the west. A chilly wind started to rise and Louie shivered and got up to see if his clothes were dry enough to put on yet.

That night, Louie was woken by a thundering roar. He got up and stood in the doorway and watched the rain storm. He didn't dare step outside - it would have been like standing under a waterfall. There was no lightening. He curled up on the floor and watched. At some point he fell asleep and dreamt of the ocean.

In the morning the skies were clear again. He negotiated the mud and puddles that the storm had left behind and made his way to the edge of the cliff. To the north, a gigantic waterfall fell from the top to the ground below. He could hear the roar. The plain spread before him was dotted with rivers, streams, ponds and lakes. The green areas that he'd seen on his journey showed up like splashes of paint. He scouted around the top of the cliff and eventually found a patch of emerald among the ochre. He peered closely and could just make out a mat of pale filaments, like a lime-coloured candy-floss, covering the surface in a thin layer. It seemed odd that this was the only life he'd seen, but Louie supposed there must be a reason. In any event, he would probably have been dead without it - the oxygen must be coming from somewhere. He looked at the tiny threads, nearly invisible, upon which his survival had depended and then wandered back to the edge. The ground was wet, so he sat on the pipe that the fuss-bot had carried him up and stared out over the plain, lost in thought.

Later that day he found a landing site - a wide circle of scorched bare pale stone. To one side was a sheltered bay where a screen displayed a constantly changing series of characters. Louie copied them onto his pad. There were twelve characters in all. He watched the sequence for a while until the pattern made sense. He was pretty sure it was a countdown and that it was a twin of the screen he'd spotted in the sanctuary. The smallest unit lasted just under a second, and the count, if he'd got his sums right, was currently just over two and a half million. He worked out that he had about four weeks until it reached zero. Louie looked up at the sky, trying not to get too excited. He found it almost impossible. It felt like his journey home had already started.

His good mood didn't last. One of the problems of his relative safety was that it gave him time to think and brood. He missed his friends. Most of them had been on the bus and weren't going to be waiting for him when he got back. He found himself reliving the last minutes in the lay-by again and again, and each time he felt powerless and angry, and was left shaking and furious.

Above all else, he missed Ray. He'd been his best friend and Louie felt physical pain at the thought of never seeing him again. Perhaps, if he'd reached out to him on the bus, he could have pulled him here as well. The thought that Ray could have been with him, sharing this strange adventure, made him smile even as he cried.

Over the next few days, Louie acquired the habit of sketching. He'd never been very good at art, and normally found the difference between the drawing he could see in his head and the drawing that ended up on the paper somewhat frustrating. Now, he found the act soothing. It didn't distract him from his thoughts or feelings, which wasn't what he wanted anyway, but it left him contemplative rather than distraught.

Conscious that he didn't have much paper and only the one pen, he drew slowly and carefully, taking time to build up the details. He would find a quiet place to settle down and carefully trace out the view in front of him, or try to sketch some detail of the sanctuary or the base. Views were best - anything else tended to end up lopsided and ill-proportioned. He was even less successful drawing from memory, but nevertheless managed a passable image of the hills and the canyon from his travels.

And so the days passed.

One night, while he was sleeping in his hammock, a loud alarm went off, shocking him awake. He was still trying to rouse himself when the fuss-bot came hurrying in. It silenced the alarm and then began to carefully explore the room. Louie watched it, trying to figure out what it was looking for. Nothing appeared to be on fire and he couldn't smell anything odd, but something was up. Eventually, the robot picked up the stones that Louie had carried across the plain from his arrival site. It examined them for a while and then placed them back before suddenly leaving the room. It returned several minutes later carrying a small sealed box into which it placed the flint-like rock that Louie had used as a trowel. Then it handed Louie a small metal disc and left again, taking the box with it.

Louie had just started to settle down again when it came back. It went over to the odd machine with the flat base and the short pillar and checked something on it. Then it came over to Louie.

"lbh ner pbagnzvangrq jvgu pebavhz," it said.

Louie shrugged. "I don't understand what you want."

The robot responded to this by picking Louie up and carrying him back to the machine. It placed him on the platform and then stood back.

"hfr vg."

Louie looked at the machine. He'd stood on it before, but had been reluctant to do anything else. Now the fuss-bot seemed to be insisting. Louie pointed at the column.

"Do you want me to touch this?"

The robot made no response. Louie moved his hand nearer the column and looked at the robot to see if it reacted, but it remained motionless. Louie sighed and took hold of the column with both hands. He really hoped this wasn't going to hurt.

At first he wasn't sure if anything had happened, but when he tried to lift his hands from the pillar he found he couldn't do it. There was no pain - they were just stuck. Louie looked over at the robot.

"I'm stuck."

The robot gave a little bob, spun round and left. Louie just stood there and wondered what the hell was going on. After a while, he tried to sit down, but found it impossible due to the angle of his hands and wrists. He didn't even dare try and rest his head on the pillar in case that became stuck too. The night wore on. Occasionally, Louie jogged on the spot to try and make his legs ache a little less, as well as to give himself something to do.

"Worst. Night. Ever," he said to the room.

The machine finally switched off a little after dawn. Suddenly released, Louie stumbled backwards and fell against the water machine, bashing his elbow. At a guess, he reckoned that he'd been standing there for about five hours. Exhausted, he dropped into the hammock. One of the ropes came loose from a corner and Louie crashed to the floor. He lay there for a while without moving before rolling himself up in the material. He made a few comments to the room regarding recent events, and then went to sleep.

From then on, the robot would turn up every evening and insist that Louie used the machine. The first time, Louie had resisted, but the thing just kept picking him up and placing him on the platform until he gave in. He was careful to place his hands at an angle that would at least allow him to sit down, but this turned out to be redundant - after only a few minutes activity, the machine released him. Whatever had required it to run for so long the first time he had used it was apparently no longer a problem.

Apart from this daily addition to his routine, the other change was the increasing activity at the base. The dormant machinery began to hum and grind, at first intermittently, but then with increasing urgency and volume. The sanctuary became very noisy and started to vibrate distinctly as the base's commotion was conducted through the ground. After two sleepless nights, Louie dismantled the hammock and carried the canvas sheet out towards the hills to the west until he was far enough away for the sound to be reduced to a distant murmur, and bedded down there. With the canvas for cover, the cold of the night was kept at bay and he slept deeply.

On the second night of camping out on the plain, Louie was suddenly woken by the ground shaking and the low growling rumble of an engine. Startled, he quickly untangled himself from the canvas and stood up. Consequently, he was able to get out of the way and save himself from being run over by the vehicle that rolled out of the dark. It trundled past him on its way to the base, seeming more like a ship in size than anything Louie had ever come across on land - a hundred yards long at least. A huge dust cloud followed in its wake, leaving him coughing and spluttering while it continued its stately journey.

Over the next few days, similar vehicles began to arrive from out of the west and along the crest of the cliff. Whenever he heard them coming, Louie would climb up on to the roof of the sanctuary to watch them rolling across the land. They were impressive - great, tracked, open-topped containers piled high with rock and rubble. They were covered with a series of articulated scoops, cranes and other machinery, but what they didn't seem to have was a driver or even a cabin where one could have sat.

Now that the vehicles were here, they seemed to mostly serve as storage containers. The first one to arrive was still slowly emptying itself, one load at a time, into a large open-topped hopper, and the others waited their turn in a long line. The hopper was big, but was still dwarfed by the vehicles and their cargo, and it looked like being a long process. Louie wondered whether it would be finished by the time the countdown was reached. It didn't seem likely. Five of the machines had arrived so far, and already it looked like it would take a lot longer. If any more arrived, it had to be impossible.

Louie also wondered what it was they wanted from all this rock they were bringing in. He didn't think it was something as simple as gold or diamonds. He wondered if it might be uranium, and tried to trace the progress of the material they were processing in the hope of picking up some clues. The first part was fairly easy. The hopper led into a large sealed box which, judging from the sound it made, was responsible for grinding the raw material down into manageable chunks. After that, he followed its noisy progress as it was fed along a tunnel into a large building. From there, it was hard to know where to go next. The building fed to at least two other locations, and the whole place was full of noise.

One thing he did find out was that the large pipe that dumped rubble on the plain was in action again. He hadn't seen it running since he'd been here, but now it sprang into life every few hours or so.

What he couldn't locate was any sign of what the base was actually producing. He assumed that somewhere there had to be a stockpile, but he just couldn't find it. There were a few storerooms, but none of them contained anything in the kind of quantity that Louie would expect from the size of the place.

Meanwhile, the countdown continued.

As the final few days began, Louie found himself unable to sleep, and often unable to eat as well. He paced continuously - either in his sanctuary or on short, pointless circuits of bits of the base or the edge of the landing site. At night, he would sit in the middle of the circle of stone, looking up - out - waiting to see something approaching. In some ways, it didn't seem an unrealistic expectation. Maybe whatever was coming would appear as a new distant star to begin with, slowly growing brighter as it came closer. On the other hand, Louie knew he wasn't looking up out of logic. In his head, he was already building improbable outcomes - great ships that would whisk him home in days, and would land in a park near his home. He fantasised about a hushed crowd staring in awe as he emerged, his parents rushing forward... By the time his imagination had finished, a genie on a magic carpet would hardly have been much of a leap.

With just over a day to go, Louie was exhausted and his body finally gave in and he collapsed into a short and jittery sleep. When he woke only a few hours later, the sun was just rising and there was still most of a day to go until the countdown reached zero. The landing pad, however, was already occupied. The visitor was early.

Louie had to admit that, in several ways, the ship was something of a disappointment. It was roughly the size and shape of a large four-poster bed. The closer he looked at it, the more Louie's disappointment veered towards gloom. There appeared to be no place for a pilot to sit, let alone a passenger. He began to walk around it to confirm his suspicions.

The legs of the bed appeared to be the engines. Each one was the shape and size of two oil-drums stacked on top of each other, but slightly tapered at the top and bottom. Their surfaces were not smooth, but layered with a series of narrow pipes and flat blades of metal. The rest of the craft seemed to be nothing more than cargo-space - an open-topped container that was currently empty, and without controls or protection of any kind that Louie could identify.

Louie stepped back and turned away. He looked towards the main area of the base, hoping, despite his suspicions, that he might see some occupant. For a moment his heart leapt, but he quickly saw that the approaching figure was only the fuss-bot, carrying a large square box. The robot clambered up the side of the craft, still carrying the container, and placed it carefully on the floor against one side. It then secured it using a series of straps that hung from the walls. Louie was puzzled. Surely that couldn't be all that the place had produced from the mountains of rocks that it had processed?

The robot climbed back out and faced Louie.

"v unir svavfurq ybnqvat, naq gur pnetb-fuvc jvyy abj gnxr bss. lbh zhfg fgnaq onpx."

"Oh definitely," said Louie, with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

"fgnaq onpx abj be v jvyy pneel lbh."

Louie sighed and then gave a sharp cry as the fuss-bot picked him up and carried him away from the ship. Hearing a noise behind him, Louie twisted around and saw that the craft's engines had started and it was beginning to lift from the ground.

"No!" he shouted, and struggled against the grip that held him, beating his fists against the metallic tentacle and any other part of the robot that he could reach. "Let me go - stop it! I need to get on it!"

When they reached the edge of the landing-site, Louie was released. The ship was already thirty or forty feet above him, but he ran back to the centre and jumped, hands stretching upwards, but it was hopeless. A warm wash of air from the engines played across his face and soon even that was gone. The vehicle lifted higher and higher as he looked up at it, and soon dwindled to a point. Louie could only stare up at it and rage. The robot was still watching him from the edge of the pad, and the boy ran over to it, cursing and kicking. The thing just skipped out of his way and burbled something in its incomprehensible language. Louie scooped up a handful of dust and stones and threw it at the fuss-bot, who just stood there impassively as the debris bounced and scattered across its surface.

Louie felt angry tears beginning to gather in his eyes, and even the company of the fuss-bot - especially the company of the fuss-bot - seemed intolerable and he began to walk quickly back towards his sanctuary. When he reached it, he pulled the heavy door shut, something he rarely did, annoyed that it was too unwieldy to slam. It was only then that he realised that a strange voice was speaking to him from inside the room.

The sound was coming from the panel of screens and controls on the far side of the sanctuary. On the whole, he had stayed away from this - Louie was an inveterate fiddler and had broken far more things than he had ever fixed by over-estimating his ability to work stuff out. The temptation to start exploring the console had been almost irresistible, but he had managed it. Now, however, one of the screens had lit up and a rasping voice was shouting out words in the same incomprehensible language as the fuss-bot. It was hard to be sure, but the voice seemed alive - less mechanical than the fuss-bot's unwavering monotone.

Louie moved closer and peered at the lit screen. He wasn't certain, but he was pretty sure he was looking at a face. The main point of confusion was the mouth, which was a hollow concave funnel, moist and pink and ringed by a circle of needle-like teeth. Even ignoring that, the alien was ugly beyond anything Louie had imagined, and he was glad that he only had to look at it on a screen. Apart from the mouth, there were four small dark eyes, like black shining pebbles, widely spaced around the edge of a pale greasy sack of a head. The skin had a doughy appearance, and was studded with thick black hairs. There was no sign of any ears. Below the head, Louie could see little but a thick neck and the barest beginnings of a naked torso.

It looked as though someone had taken an uncooked, slightly hairy currant-bun, stuck a tooth-lined anus in the middle of it, and then smeared it with lard.

"Wow," said Louie in a subdued whisper.

The alien gave another burst of speech and then was silent, staring straight out at him.

"Can you see me?" asked Louie, pointing first at the thing and then at himself. The alien cocked its head on one side and then gave a grunt followed by another short exchange.

Louie shook his head. "I'm sorry - I don't understand." He shrugged and spread his hands, hoping that the gesture was general enough to convey something of his meaning.

The alien said nothing and was still for a moment. Then Louie caught a brief impression of an arm as the creature reached forward for something, and then uttered a few words. Louie started his mime again, but the alien held up a hand in a placatory way. The hand, Louie was pleased to note, was relatively normal looking. True, it only had three fingers, and these were flat, wide paddles, but it was still a relief after the shock of the thing's face.

There were a few minutes of slightly awkward silence. At one point, a small container drifted weightlessly past the alien's head, and it absent-mindedly reached for it and secured it somewhere out of sight. Louie wondered what free-fall on a spaceship would feel like, and whether he was about to find out - the alien was presumably close by.

To pass the time, Louie pointed at himself and said his name. The alien grunted and pointed at himself. "Torf."

Louie wondered if that was his name, his species, or something else entirely.

There was a noise behind him and, somewhat startled, he looked round and was relieved to see that it was only the fuss-bot entering the room. It came over to the monitor and Louie moved aside to make room for it. There then followed a long conversation between the robot and the alien - mainly the alien asking questions and the robot responding. At one moment, Louie was surprised to hear his own voice coming from the robot - it was from when he had copied what the robot had said at the bottom of the cliff just before it had grabbed him.

Louie couldn't be certain, but he thought the alien was becoming increasingly irritated with the fuss-bot - a sensation he understood all too well. The robot didn't care - it just carried burbling on in response to whatever it was asked. At one point the alien was pretty much shouting. Louie had no idea what it was asking or what the robot's answer meant, but in response the alien gave a loud moan and pressed one hand against its face. It looked like the face-palm was a universal expression of incredulous frustration.

After that, the alien seemed to calm down, no longer asking questions, but giving orders. Finally, it dismissed the robot with a wave of one of its hands and looked at Louie. Louie pointed at the alien, and then at the ground. "Are you coming here?"

The alien just carried on looking at him, so he went through the motions again, this time more emphatically. The alien gave a sudden grunt and shook its head and waved its hands in negation. It muttered what sounded like a single word, and then reached forward. The screen snapped off and Louie was alone again with just the fuss-bot. The whole business was incredibly frustrating. Was he going to be rescued or not? Louie sighed and looked at the robot which was still standing close by.

As though taking this as a cue, the robot went over to one of the other consoles and began manipulating some of the controls. Louie wandered over to see what it was doing. Another screen burst into life - one which contained a single image of a black circle on a pale background. A melodious but artificial voice intoned "pvepyr", was silent for a moment, and then repeated the sound.

Louie watched for a while, slightly puzzled by this rather basic display before he realised what was going on. The next time the voice intoned "pvepyr", he repeated the sound. There was a gentle chime, and the picture changed to a square.

"So," thought Louie. "Back to school."

"fdhner," said the voice. Louie copied it, another chime sounded, and the picture changed to a triangle.

The sequence - circle, square, triangle - played for some time, and Louie diligently practiced pronouncing the strange words. Then, the image of the square was shown, but the machine made the sound for "circle", followed by a new one, "ab".

This pattern - a mismatched shape and sound, followed by "ab" - then changed to pairs of correctly matched shapes and sounds. This time, the voice intoned "lrf" after each one.

Then it was Louie's turn. An image was shown and a sound played. If they matched, Louie said "lrf", if they didn't, he said "ab". Each time he made the correct response, the machine would chime. If he got it wrong, the machine made an annoyed buzz and the pattern was repeated.

He wasn't sure whether he had just learnt "yes" and "no" or "right" and "wrong", but he supposed it didn't matter too much at this point. From then on, the machine stopped chiming and buzzing and instead switched to using the two new words to indicate whether Louie had made the correct response or not.

The language course continued through the morning, and by the time Louie felt too exhausted to learn anymore that day, he had been taught thirty or so basic words.

He went outside to stretch his legs and work out some of the kinks in his back that had built up as he had hunched over the screen. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have to make some kind of chair. He wandered over to the landing-pad and made a new discovery. The countdown had been reset. He studied the numbers, fairly confident now that he remembered their values correctly. The display would reach zero again in about six months. Louie groaned.

With little else to do, Louie spent most of his time from then on learning from the machine in his sanctuary. He used one of the boxes as a simple chair and figured out how to use the fairly basic controls to move forwards and back through the lessons. It wasn't a complex language. As far as he could tell, it had hardly any adverbs or adjectives, and, where possible, built more complex words by combining simpler ones. The language, he found out, was called conlang - an abbreviation of "constructed language" - and the sounds it used were fairly straightforward, and he soon began to make solid progress. In addition, there were enough written examples around the base that, as his knowledge of the language increased, he was able to learn the simple phonetic alphabet.

As his confidence increased, he began to have his first stilted conversations with the robot whose real title was "caretaker". It turned out to be a frustratingly literal conversationalist, and never seemed to understand that Louie's mistakes might need correcting rather than taking at face value. At one point it suddenly ran off into the desert after some ill-judged comment about the possibility of rain, and didn't return for several hours.

From then on, Louie tried to stick to simple questions when talking with it, but, even so, felt a growing empathy with the face-palming alien's irritation.

Most importantly, Louie was now able to find out what was likely to happen to him, as well as what this whole place was for. The information came haltingly, and it took several days for a full picture to emerge.

Apparently, rescue was on its way. The caretaker couldn't tell him exactly when it would arrive, since it was unable to send or receive any messages across the vast distances involved. Or rather, it could send a message, but it would take several years to arrive. Communication was limited to the speed of light - a mere 186,000 miles a second, if Louie remembered correctly.

Spaceships were not so constrained. Faster than light travel was possible - something that contradicted everything Louie thought he knew about it. A journey that should have taken years at the very least could be done in a few weeks. By now, the alien he had seen on the monitor would have told the owner of these factories about the unexpected visitor, and rescue shouldn't be far behind. As to why the alien hadn't just landed and rescued him directly, that was where things got rather complicated, and Louie wasn't sure that he'd understood all the details.

As Louie had guessed, the planet was being mined, and this factory - as well as several others scattered across the planet - processed and refined the raw material brought in by the large vehicles. The stuff they were after was called cronium, and it was both rare and valuable - so valuable that even minute quantities were worth collecting. The container that had been loaded onto the small ship by the caretaker had represented several months work.

Beyond that, Louie learnt only two things about cronium - both surprising and one rather alarming.

The first was that interstellar space travel was entirely dependant on it, but, apart from that, the caretaker's knowledge on the subject seemed very limited, leaving Louie to speculate about warp-engines, hyper-drives, black holes and all the other random paraphernalia of books and films.

The second and more alarming bit of information was that cronium was very dangerous. This, as far as Louie could tell, was why the alien hadn't landed. The alien's only job had been to arrive, orbit, send down the small cargo shuttle to retrieve the payloads, and then leave. Even that was considered risky. Not only was a landing not allowed, but the alien's ship hadn't even been capable of it.

As to Louie's safety, the caretaker seemed rather non-committal, not to say indifferent. Cronium was generally stable, but certain circumstances could lead to it becoming highly reactive. Louie had been contaminated with it - badly so - but the odd machine that had frozen him in place all night had removed most of it. The daily sessions should prevent any further build-up within his body, but the stuff was everywhere, and that might not be enough to protect him.

Louie tried to find out what would happen if something did go wrong. The caretaker's initial information seemed rather vague - a cronium accident gave you a bad time was all it seemed able to say on the subject. It was only after Louie's grasp of the new language improved, and after further careful questioning, that he realised that he'd misunderstood. The robot didn't mean a bad time in the general sense - it meant it specifically. Time, literally, went bad.

Somewhat subdued, Louie thought back to the events on the bus. It seemed almost certain that he'd already had a demonstration of what happened in a cronium accident - what happened when time 'went bad'.

And so the days passed. The refinery was silent or active depending on whether any of the loaded vehicles had arrived. Louie found a small outcrop about half a mile away, high enough to make a safe place to camp when the noise at the base made sleep impossible.

The countdown at the landing site referred, he had discovered, to the arrival of the next cargo ship rather than his rescue, which remained unknown. Consequently, he started each day by visiting the pad to check whether anyone had arrived during the night, and each morning he was disappointed.

Until, suddenly, he wasn't.

It had been during one of the noisy periods, and he had strolled in from the plain and rounded a corner that brought him to the open area around the pad. The routine had become so familiar that any sense of expectation or hope had long faded, and it had just become a daily task, like brushing teeth. Consequently, it took him a moment to realise that his wait was over. He stumbled to a stop and stared at the ship sitting in the middle of the landing area.

It was shaped like a tadpole - admittedly one the size of a small house. Once, it must have been bright yellow but was now streaked with dirt and burn marks. The tadpole's tail trailed behind - a thick tube covered in vents and pipes that required its own strut to support it - while the main part rested on four squat legs. The top of the thing bulged upwards like a blister, and was circled by a ring of curved windows that seemed to peer down at him.

A ramp had been lowered from the belly, but there was no sign of movement anywhere.

"Hello?" called Louie, speaking in conlang and cautiously making his way forward.

Silence.

He stepped into the shadows underneath the ship. There was a scorched area between the struts - a wide dimple with a narrow opening in the centre. Louie glanced at it and then peered up the ramp. He could see a dimly lit chamber dusted with a few pinpoints of light. "Hello?" he called again.

"Hello Louie Gage. It's very good to meet you."

The voice came from behind him and Louie jumped in surprise and spun around. Accompanied by the caretaker, and moving towards Louie, was what at first glance looked like a large snake, gliding across the sand on a long body that supported an upright torso.

As he studied its progress more closely, he saw that his initial impression needed some refinement. For a start, unless he was mistaken, it was another robot. Even the thick segmented trunk that it was using to glide serpent-like across the ground was just a scaled-up version of the caretaker's tentacle. At the end of this, its body reared upwards - an angular chunk of plated metal. Near the top, sets of appendages and another tentacle, all very similar to the caretaker's, sprouted from several openings. The head, resting on a short flexible neck, was an armoured wedge pierced by a series of lenses. Splashes of colour over its whole body broke up what would otherwise have been a monotonous dark green.

It was several times more impressive than the caretaker, if rather more alarming - it looked as though someone had crossed a cobra with a praying mantis, and then ordered a customised paint-job.

Louie swallowed and the new arrival came to a halt.

"My name is Cassita-Andrasii," it said. "But please call me Cassita."

It glided closer, its body hissing gently as it undulated across the sand. "I am a registered inorganic intelligence, and I am here to rescue you."

"Oh," said Louie. "Thank you." Not knowing what else to do, and feeling rather light-headed, he held out his hand.

Cassita tilted his head and looked at it. "Do you wish me to copy you?"

"Oh," said Louie. "Um, yes - if that's okay?"

In response, Cassita stretched forward a metallic tentacle and rested it against Louie's palm. Louie, feeling rather stupid, shook it.

"This is common," said Cassita.

"Sorry?" said Louie.

"Touching as part of a formal greeting or exchange is common. Your temperature is fluctuating - are you alright?"

"I think so," said Louie. "Sorry. Yes, I'm fine. It's nice to meet you too." And then he fainted.