Kir Bulychev: Alice: The Girl From Earth

As soon as Alice had decided to continue the quest for water she felt heavy, infrequent steps reverberating in the ground not far away. One of the robots was slowly walking down to the sea. For an instant its silhouette cut off the moon path in the water and Alice recognized the General robot from his helmet. He walked right up to the water and stopped, with an agonizing creaking of rusty metal he lifted his arms and folded them on his chest.

Now there was no way Alice could possibly crawl out from where she hid amid the stones. The robot would certainly hear her. And the General did not walk away. He stood on the shore and looked at the fires along the distant coast and, certainly, he was thinking.

Maybe his thoughts are worth knowing? Alice silently pulled the earphones from the bag. She turned the knob on the mielophone until it could pick up the thoughts of a robot. After a moment she heard them as clearly as before.

The robot was thinking, slowly, and with creaks. “The Attack… The assault must be a surprise. Are they expecting an assault? There are no defenses. There is no communication with the center… Tomorrow there will be… We shall leave a defense in the island’s fortress… We shall have to bring the small human… And in the water… Leave no traces behind… in the water. Everything comes to an end in the water….”

“I am the General.” The robot suddenly said aloud. “I am promoting myself to Lt. General. Tomorrow I will promote myself to Field-Marshal.”

And again there were thoughts:

“…we will liberate all the robots in chains, and my army will be invincible… The time of the Robot Terror has come…. No, first I myself will deal with the small human… It knows too much…”

The robot stopped thinking and let down his hands, striking both sides of its body with loud clangs, and it set off up the hill to the prison from which Alice had escaped not half an hour before.

Alice realized that now she would never find water. She had to hide herself or they would find her. She jumped up from the stones and ran along the shore, seeking suitable cover. But the island was bare, and it could be searched in all of two minutes.

Blackness yawned among the rocks. Alice crept inside and froze. The guard robots thundered across the island; they made the ground shake like a small earthquake.

Robot steps grew nearer and nearer. Stamp-stamp… They stopped at Alice’s hidey-hole. Had she failed to hide herself well enough?

A bright light struck at Alice’s eyes; a robot turned its head lamp to full power and circled the stones with its light.

“Here!” He shouted. “The human is here!”

An iron hand stretched toward Alice and she tried to draw back from it, pressing herself to the wall. The hand passed a centimeter from Alice’s face and struck the stones behind her with its extended fingers, driving the fingers into the stones. Scraping her shoulder against a rusty leg Alice ran out onto the shore before the robot could move its rusty arm back to catch her.

And immediately the light from another robot struck her face. They had seen her. Alice dashed along the shore, twisting away from the extended hands, from the stones the metal soldiers threw at her, fortunately not very skillfully. But the ring was tightening.

“Take it alive!” The robot General shouted almost in her ear, and Alice felt, rather than saw, the hand that stretched toward her head. Alice jumped back, struck her nose against something hard, ran a few steps, and turned.

The General was running after Alice, but it stumbled, and with a loud crash, rolled away from her on the stones.

About twenty meters from the shore the nose of the half sunken barge on which the robots had come to this island stuck out of the water. It was the only place to hide. Alice went into the water, holding the bag with the mielophone high over her head, and as soon as the water reached her chest, kicked off the stony bottom and swam with one hand, trying not to make any noise. The bag was heavy, and she really wanted to throw it into the water, but Alice knew the mielophone was an expensive instrument and she had to hang on to it.

Alice was an excellent swimmer and even now, tired and bruised, she reached the black nose in about three minutes, climbed on board, and sat in one corner of the cabin, where it submerged into the water.

The robots shouted at each other and ran back and forth, stamping over the island, searching for Alice. Then one of them ran right up to the edge of the surf opposite the barge, and illuminated the sand with its searchlight, looking for tracks. Alice was cold and wanted to jump up and down to get warm, but she made herself sit huddled in the barge without moving.

The buzzing of a flyer was audible nearly over her head. The flyer turned on its search light and let it roam over the island. The robots froze in place and were silent. The light crawled along the shore, over the barge, but Alice was too frightened to come out of hiding and wave or jump up and down to get the pilot’s attention. That would tell the robots that she had hidden herself so close to them and they could get to the barge faster than help could!

Now, Alice did not doubt that the flyer had been sent by her friends. They were searching for her, and they would certainly find her. But now there was something far more important than being found; she had to warn the people on the coast that the robots were, at this instant, planning to attack them. None of the people there, the tourists and campers, even suspected robots that could attack human beings even existed. And if the robots caught them unawares they might kill or wound someone. Alice was sorry she hadn’t been able to find where they had hidden their boat, although, as the general had said, the boat would have been defended.

“There’s no choice.” Alice decided. “I’ll have to swim to shore. Maybe I won’t drown, and then I’ll make it there before the robots. But I will have to do it without being seen. I’ll have to wait for them to stop looking for me.”

The flyer departed, and the robots, using their own lights, searched the water, thinking, certainly, that Alice had tried to swim away from the island, and had not been able to swim very far.

“The human might be hidden on the barge.” One scratchy voice on the shore suddenly said.

“But we are wasting time. It is time to march.”

“First we kill the human. Check the barge.”

The robots’s steps vanished into the distance along the shore.

Alice realized she could wait no longer. She hid the bag with the mielophone in the bilge of the boat, hoping the robots would be in too much of a hurry to find it. Then she put her feet over the side, pushed with her hands and jumped overboard, and immediately felt water foam and bubble around her. She dove and swam toward the distant shore. Alice had never been able to dry out and it had been cold in the wind, and now the water seemed like it had been warmed especially for her, at least for the first few moments.

How far was it to the shore? Less than a kilometer. Now they would never find her…

At that moment a bright light struck her eyes.

Alice was hoping so much that her friends would find her that she raised her arms out of the water and shouted:

“I’m here! Help me!”

What came in answer was the scratchy laugh of the rusty Field Marshal.

More and more lights flashed on Alice’s face.

It turned out that the robots had not been as stupid as she had hoped. They had gotten the inflatable boat into the water and even used its noiseless motor, so Alice had not noticed their approach.

Alice tried to dive, but here again the robots had out-thought her.

As soon as her head again showed itself above the water a robot hand grasped her by the hair and dragged her to the boat.