About a hundred feet down the logging road he turned uphill on a footpath that they had worn as a shortcut up to the cabin. The path led him through the rocks and the oak trees that were typical of northwestern South Carolina woods along the Appalachian trail and wound its way to the rear of the small dovetail construction log cabin. As Richard turned the corner to the side of the cabin where the driveway ended there sat Helena. In front of her were pieces of four tires that looked like the steel belts had been ripped right out of the rubber — and the wheels were nowhere to be seen — and what appeared to be pieces of automobile carpet and upholstery, pieces of plastic, vinyl and rubber. The mess looked like a monster had eaten their pickup truck and vomited out anything that wasn’t metal. There was nothing left of the Ford F-250. Ford tough was apparently not tough enough to withstand alien robots.
“Are you… harmed?” Richard touched Helena on the shoulder.
“Harmed, uh, nyet. Pissed to hell, da!” She was sitting down on the edge of the driveway fiddling with her jeans. The zipper and snaps had been torn away and the pants were basically ripped open at the crotch.
“Where are they?”
“Gone. Gone as quick as dey came. Goddamn tings took every pot and pan in de goddamn cabin. Even de sonovabitch bedsprings are gone. Look, my best goddamned jeans are ruined. Dey ate de televeesion, de forks and spoons, de couch springs, and even de goddamn truck. Dey ripped it to fuckin’ bits.” Helena sat shaking her head. “Tought you said no goddamn worries for long time?”
“Yeah, I don’t understand that part. It doesn’t make sense to me. What did they look like?” Richard could tell Helena was shaken up. Not from her colorful use of the English language — that was her nature and Richard had long since gotten used to that — but the drained look on her face. She was pale and looked like she had spent every bit of energy in her body the way a marathoner looks at the end of the race. Or the way a soldier looks after a battle — afraid, exhausted, and just glad to still be alive.
Richard sat down beside her looking at the pieces of the truck — so much useless plastic, vinyl, and rubber. Even the rubber insulating coatings of the sparkplug and other wires were left behind, but the metal wires themselves had been pulled right out.
“Dey look like dat goddamned ting dere if you can put it back togedder. I tought you’d vant one so I beats the last one to fucking pieces with a stick of stove wood. Oh, dey took de goddamned stove too.” Helena pointed at what appeared to be a metal boomerang about a meter across. Then she pointed at the hole in the roof and wall where the wood-burning stove had been yanked out. “Dat’s gonna leak like hell.”
“But you’re not hurt? You certain?” Richard put his hand on her shoulder and glanced back and forth between her, the truck remains, the hole in the cabin, and the smashed bot. There was a trickle of blood on her right earlobe where an earring had once been. The lobe wasn’t torn through but the hole had been treated roughly.
“I’m okay.” She rubbed at her ears and looked at the blood on her thumb and forefinger. “Shit. Go look at de damned ting.” Helena pulled her hair back behind her head and tied it into a ponytail. Then she patted the stick of stove wood that she had used as a battle club, “I’m gonna keep you, da.”
Richard had to look at the bot — he had to. It was smashed to hell and gone — Helena had made certain of that. After a bit of inspection, Richard was fairly certain that the alien thing had once been a metal boomerang about a meter or so from tip to tip. It had been about ten to twenty centimeters thick and all of the surfaces were smooth and rounded and seamless. But now it was bent up and dented and had a couple of pieces busted off of it. On its underside was a smaller similar boomerang about a third the size. The smaller boomerang appeared to be molded seamlessly directly to the larger one. There was a large crack through both of them and there were several peripheral pieces scattered about it. Nothing about it, other than the fact that it was an alien Von Neumann probe, seemed to be unearthly — at least not from a quick visual inspection. But Richard had every intent of taking a closer look, a much closer look.
“This looks like common metals.” Richard kicked at it.
“Da. Like a beer can. Oh, dey took dat too. And de refrigerator.” Helena stood wielding her stove wood battle club, and carefully stepped beside Richard and the bot.
“You said they were eating anything metal, right?”
“Da. Dey even pulled de laptop right out of my hands. Not much metal dere?” she asked.
“Oh, plenty. The battery is most likely tasty to them if they eat metal.” Richard kicked a broken piece of the alien probe over closer to the rest of it.
“I see. Den dey takes de faucets and the goddamned television, and de power wires from de walls all gone too.”
“Then why didn’t they eat it too?” Richard pointed at the bashed probe.
“Oh, dey had already gone. Dis one seemed fat or slow or something.”
“Hmm… or pregnant,” he said. Richard knelt down and rolled the probe back over and looked at the twinning pieces. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Well, I don’t know what you would call it, but that performs like the womb, birthing canal, and whatever else these things need to replicate all in one.” Alice pointed out to Roger, Alan, and Tom who had all crowded around her computer in her lab. This lab actually looked like a laboratory fit for a science fiction movie. Major Gries would have been more satisfied with the various computer monitors, instrument panels with flashing multicolored lights, and digital readouts. Of course, there were plenty of wires running around as well. In fact, the same metal octopus convention that had taken place in Roger’s lab must have annexed part of Alice’s laboratory as well.
“Do they actually have sexes?” Alan asked.
“No, no. If we continue to use biological analogies I would say it’s more like cell division than anything. Somehow this thing here…” Alice highlighted a region of the electron microscope image on her computer screen. “Well, this is the region where I think the biological analog of the nucleus is and where it starts to fission.”
“Fission — you mean it’s radioactive?” Alan asked.
“Alan my boy, I think she means biological fission.” Tom grinned at his colleague.
“Right, I would have never figured this out without examining the twinning bot that we have in the holding area downstairs. We were lucky Shane’s group got that one.” Alice continued to flip through images on her computer screen.
“When the bot was first picked apart that small portion near its center was detected but its purpose was unclear to us,” Roger said.
“Yeah, we saw that. It’s just a solid chunk of material as far as we could tell, ” Alan added, waving his arms around.
“Well, it’s a solid chunk of material, but with some apparently random microscopic hollow ‘tubes’ running through it. I think this is the central location for their reproduction system.”
“We had no clue what it was for. You mean you think you know what it is now… that’s a big improvement.” Roger was excited to have made some progress.
“A big improvement indeed!” Tom agreed. “Do you know what the material is?”
“Well, I’m not completely certain, but at the atomic level it’s common Earthly materials. The material was identified by the folks at NC State.” Alice explained. She pointed at a window on the computer screen, a graph from a vaporization mass spectral analysis. “They took a sample I sent them and put it through spectral analysis. It turned out to be common stuff: carbon, iron, aluminum, titanium, nickel, silicon, trace amounts of cesium, strontium, sodium, lead, and uranium, but mostly aluminum. But, from X rays and electron microscopy of the solid piece, it appears to be some very complex heterogonous material with a structure similar to how a crystal grows but much more compacted and complex. And there are regions within the crystalline structure that are filled with pure elements — heavy elements.”