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astonishing discovery—they were afraid of me.
    Men afraid of a machine.
    It was incomprehensible. Why should they be afraid? Surely man and machine are natural complements: they assist one another. For a moment I thought I must have misread their minds—it was possible that thoughts registered differently on this planet, but it was a possibility I soon dismissed.
    There were only two reasons for this apprehension. The one, that they had never seen a machine or, the other, that third planet machines had pursued a line of development inimical to them.
    I turned to show Banuff lying inert on my forerods. Then, slowly, so as not to alarm them, I approached. I laid him down softly on the ground near by and retired a short distance.
    Experience has taught me that men like their own broken forms to be dealt with by their own kind. Some stepped forward to examine him, the rest held their ground, their eyes fixed upon me.
    Banuff's dark colouring appeared to excite them not a little.
    Their own skins were pallid from lack of ultraviolet rays in their dense atmosphere.
    "Dead?" asked one.
    "Quite dead," another one nodded. "Curiouslooking fellow," he continued. "Can't place him ethnologically at all. Just look at the frontal formation of the skull—very odd. And the size of his ears, too, huge: the whole head is abnormally large."
    "Never mind him now," one of the group broke in, "he'll keep. That's the thing that puzzles me," he went on, looking in my direction. "What the devil do you suppose it is?"
    They all turned wondering faces towards me. I stood motionless and waited while they summed me up.
    "About six feet long," ran the thoughts of one of them. "Two feet broad and two deep. White metal, might be—(his thought conveyed nothing to me). Four legs to a side, fixed about halfway up—jointed rather like a crab's, so are the armlike things in front: but all metal. Wonder what the array of instruments and lenses on this end are? Anyhow, whatever kind of power it uses, it seems to have run down now..."
    Hesitatingly he began to advance.
    I tried a word of encouragement.
    The whole group froze rigid.
    "Did you hear that?" somebody whispered. "It—it spoke."
    "Loudspeaker," replied the one who had been making an inventory of me. Suddenly his expression brightened.
    "I've got it," he cried. "Remote control—a telephony and television machine worked by remote control."
    So these people did know something of machinery, after all.
    He was far wrong in his guess, but in my relief I took a step forward.
    An explosion roared: something thudded on my body case and whirred away. I saw that one of the men was pointing a hollow rod at me and I knew that he was about to make another explosion.
    The first had done no injury but another might crack one of my lenses.
    I turned and made top speed for the high, green vegetation.
    Two or three more bursts roared behind, but nothing touched me.
    The weapon was very primitive and grossly inaccurate.
DISAPPOINTMENT
    For a day and a night I continued on among the hard stemmed growths.
    For the first time since my making, I was completely out of touch with human control, and my existence seemed meaningless. The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us.
    This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it. Something of the kind, selfpreservation which is allied to it—must have made me leave the man with the explosive tube and taken me into the strange country. But it was not enough to give me an objective. I seemed to go on because — well, because my machinery was constructed to go on.
    On the way I made some odd discoveries.
    Every now and then my path would be crossed by a band of hard matter, serving no useful purpose which I could then understand. Once, too, I found two unending rods of iron fixed horizontally to the ground and stretching away into the distance on either side. At first I thought they