"Hey, what's with you, Lew? You look like you seen a ghost," Gonzalez said.
"It moved." Verbanic stared at the pile of garbage. His face was drained of color and glowed a pearly green in the moonlight.
"The dump? You kidding, man?"
"It's moving now."
Gonzalez turned toward the dump slowly, his head tucked between two hunched shoulder blades. "I don't see nothing," he said with relief.
"It stopped."
Gonzalez patted Verbanic on the back. "Well, okay. That's good, pal. Look, man, it's late. We're both tired, and like maybe you're seeing things—"
"It's moving again."
Gonzalez whirled around. The dump was as still as a grave. "I tell you, there ain't nothing moving in there!" he shouted. "See? Not a cockroach. Nothing."
10
A tin can tumbled down the side of the mound. Gonzalez jumped straight into the air. Then the entire hillside of debris began to shiver and rumble, sending an assortment of objects clattering to the earth.
Deep below, in the decomposing rubble of the mound, a bolt maneuvers through the silt and ¦funk, drawn by magnetic impulses toward a metal cube.
"Let's get out of here, man," Gonzalez whispered.
"What if somebody's alive in there?"
"In that? Hah . . ." Gonzalez tried to laugh, but the sound caught and died in this throat.
Another bolt, a microfilm type cylinder, an unbroken anode...
"It's an earthquake, that's what it is," Gonzalez said.
"Then how come the ground isn't shaking?"
With a crack, the casing of the LC 111 flies apart and tears through the dirt, down, down through two years of waste. ... A click, the squeal of rust being stripped from metal threading ...
"We got to go, Lew," Gonzalez said somberly.
Verbanic didn't move.
"I'm serious. We're leaving."
"Why?"
" 'Cause I just peed my pants."
"Whoever it is, we've got to help get them out," Verbanic said.
The form growing larger, more complete, adding to itself as it shudders, buried, waiting to be bom anew...
11
"Help them out? You got to be kidding."
The mound shifted again, widening as a hole formed in the top, with dust spouting upward like a restless volcano. "Huh-uh," Gonzalez said, "No way. Count me out."
"All right," Verbanic said. He walked purposefully toward the dump.
A spinal column, limbs, optical receivers. Speech tapes, transistorized memory banks, sensory data, logic.
"You nuts?" Gonzalez yelled. "Come back!" His face was contorted in fear, his buttocks cramping in trembling spasms. "We don't know what's in there. It could be anything. Werewolves, anything."
Verbanic was digging with his hands, shoveling away armfuls of festering decay.
And the new microfilm tapes, coded in binomial sequences. New, strange information once stored in the LC 111, now a part of the creature that created itself from a single directive programmed into its manmade intelligence. A single voice, a command overriding all others: SURVIVE.
It creaked in its deep grave, shifting its weight onto its lower limbs. High above, Lew Verbanic dug frantically, moving aside earth with a discarded box as sweat poured down his face and darkened the back of his uniform. SURVIVE. "I see something!" Verbanic shouted.
"W-what?" Gonzalez inched toward his partner. Spinning effortlessly through the debris, whole now, rising toward the light by its own momentum. SURVIVE.
12
"It's . . ." Verbanic's eyes opened wide as he saw the spinning metal thing nearing the surface.
"What is it, Lew? Lew?"
"My God," Verbanic whispered.
"My God." The words entered the thing's aural transceivers. They were fuzzy and faraway-sounding, but they triggered a series of circuits that flashed to life:
NEED . . . INCOMPLETE . . . LIFE FORM PRESENT . . . IMMEDIATE . . . NEED . . . SURVIVE . .. SURVIVE . . .
One by one the hundreds of thousands of minuscule tapes began to wind and thread. The orbital receivers rolled upward, registering a life form the memory banks identified as Human, Adult Male.
UTILI7.ATION OF LIFE FORM NECESSARY . . . PROTECTIVE OUTER COVERING MANDATORY FOR ASSIMILATION . . . SURVIVE . . . SURVIVE ...
"Get out, Marco," Verbanic said evenly, backing slowly away from the smoking crater at the center of the rubbish mound.
Gonzalez was crying. "Lew . . . Lew . . ."
"Get out. Now!" he commanded.
They were the last words Lew Verbanic spoke. In a fraction of a second, a metallic hand shot out of the hole and clutched Verbanic's ankle as he tried to run. He screamed as the bone in his leg pulverized to dust inside the flesh. Still screaming, he was spun in the air like a limp rag while the metallic creature rose from the crater in the mountain of trash.
13