“You’ve had no luck, Anderson?”
“Not a scrap. Not a potsherd.”
“How about you, Marshall?”
“Check. Scattered signs of a city, but nothing of archaeological value, sir.”
I heard Leopold chuckle before he said, “Well, I’ve found something. It’s a little too heavy for me to manage by myself. I want both outfits to come out here and take a look at it.”
“What is it, sir?” Marshall and I asked simultaneously, in just about the same words.
But Leopold was fond of playing the Man of Mystery. He said, “You’ll see when you get here. Take down my coordinates and get a move on. I want to be back at the base by nightfall.”
Shrugging, we changed course to head for Leopold’s location. He was about seventeen miles southwest of us, it seemed. Marshall and Webster had an equally long trip to make; they were sharply southeast of Leopold’s position.
The sky was fairly dark when we arrived at what Leopold had computed as his coordinates. The headlamps of the halftrack lit up the desert for nearly a mile, and at first there was no sign of anyone or anything. Then I spotted Leopold’s halftrack parked off to the east, and from the south Gerhardt saw the lights of the third truck rolling towards us.
We reached Leopold at about the same time. He was not alone. There was an—object—with him.
“Greetings, gentlemen.” He had a smug grin on his whiskery face. “I seem to have made a find.”
He stepped back and, as if drawing an imaginary curtain, let us take a peek at his find. I frowned in surprise and puzzlement. Standing in the sand behind Leopold’s halftrack was something that looked very much like a robot.
It was tall, seven feet or more, and vaguely humanoid; that is, it had arms extending from its shoulders, a head on those shoulders, and legs. The head was furnished with receptor plates where eyes, ears, and mouth would be on humans. There were no other openings. The robot’s body was massive and squarish, with sloping shoulders, and its dark metal skin was pitted and corroded as by the workings of the elements over uncountable centuries.
It was buried up to its knees in sand. Leopold, still grinning smugly (and understandably proud of his find) said, “Say something to us, robot.”
From the mouth-receptors came a clanking sound, the gnashing of—what? Gears?—and a voice came forth, oddly high-pitched but audible. The words were alien and were spoken in a slippery singsong kind of inflection. I felt a chill go quivering down my back.
“It understands what you say?” Gerhardt questioned.
“I don’t think so,” Leopold said. “Not yet, anyway. But when I address it directly, it starts spouting. I think it’s a kind of—well, guide to the ruins, so to speak. Built by the ancients to provide information to passersby; only it seems to have survived the ancients and their monuments as well.”
I studied the thing. It did look incredibly old—and sturdy; it was so massively solid that it might indeed have outlasted every other vestige of civilization on this planet. It had stopped talking, now, and was simply staring ahead. Suddenly it wheeled ponderously on its base, swung an arm up to take in the landscape nearby, and started speaking again.
I could almost put the words in its mouth: “—and over here we have the ruins of the Parthenon, chief temple of Athena on the Acropolis. Completed in the year 438 B.C., it was partially destroyed by an explosion in 1687 while in use as a powder magazine by the Turks—”
“It does seem to be a sort of a guide,” Webster remarked. “I get the definite feeling that we’re being given an historical narration now, all about the wondrous monuments that must have been on this site once.”
“If only we could understand what it’s saying!” Marshall exclaimed.
“We can try to decipher the language somehow,” Leopold said. “Anyway, it’s a magnificent find, isn’t it? And—”
I began to laugh suddenly. Leopold, offended, glared at me and said, “May I ask what’s so funny, Dr. Anderson?”
“Ozymandias!” I said, when I had subsided a bit. “It’s a natural! Ozymandias!”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“Listen to him,” I said. “It’s as if he was built and put here for those who follow after, to explain to us the glories of the race that built the cities. Only the cities are gone, and the robot is still here! Doesn’t he seem to be saying, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’?”
“‘Nothing beside remains,’” Webster quoted. “It’s apt. Builders and cities all gone, but the poor robot doesn’t know it, and delivers his spiel nonetheless. Yes. We ought to call him Ozymandias!”
Gerhardt said, “What shall we do with it?”
“You say you couldn’t budge it?” Webster asked Leopold.
“It weighs five or six hundred pounds. It can move of its own volition, but I couldn’t move it myself.”
“Maybe the five of us—” Webster suggested.
“No,” Leopold said. An odd smile crossed his face. “We will leave it here.”
“What?”
“Only temporarily,” he added. “We’ll save it—as a sort, of surprise for Mattern. We’ll spring it on him the final day, letting him think all along that this planet was worthless. He can rib us all he wants—but when it’s time to go, we’ll produce our prize!”
“You think it’s safe to leave it out here?” Gerhardt asked.
“Nobody’s going to steal it,” Marshall said.
“And it won’t melt in the rain,” Webster added.
“But—suppose it walks away?” Gerhardt demanded. “It can do that, can’t it?”
Leopold said, “Of course. But where would it go? It will remain where it is, I think. If it moves, we can always trace it with the radar. Back to the base, now; it grows late.”
We climbed back into our halftracks. The robot, silent once again, planted knee-deep in the sand, outlined against the darkening sky, swivelled to face us and lifted one thick arm in a kind of salute.
“Remember,” Leopold warned us as we left. “Not one word about this to Mattern!”
At the base that night, Colonel Mattern and his seven aides were remarkably curious about our day’s activities. They tried to make it seem as if they were taking a sincere interest in our work, but it was perfectly obvious to us that they were simply goading us into telling them what they had anticipated—that we had found absolutely nothing. This was the response they got, since Leopold forbade mentioning Ozymandias. Aside from the robot, the truth was that we had found nothing, and when they learned of this they smiled knowingly, as if saying that had we listened to them in the first place we would all be back on Earth seven days earlier, with no loss.
The following morning after breakfast Mattern announced that he was sending out a squad to look for fissionable materials, unless we objected.
“We’ll only need one of the halftracks,” he said. “That leaves two for you. You don’t mind, do you?”
“We can get along with two,” Leopold replied a little sourly. “Just so you keep out of our territory.”
“Which is?”
Instead of telling him, Leopold merely said, “We’ve adequately examined the area to the southeast of here, and found nothing of note. It won’t matter to us if your geological equipment chews the place up.”
Mattern nodded, eyeing Leopold curiously as if the obvious concealment of our place of operations had aroused suspicions. I wondered whether it was wise to conceal information from Mattern. Well, Leopold wanted to play his little game, I thought; and one way to keep Mattern from seeing Ozymandias was not to tell him where we would be working.
“I thought you said this planet was useless from your viewpoint, Colonel,” I remarked.