Robert Sheckley - Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie

“Do they eat people?” Hellman asked.

“Anything at all, that’s what they like.”

“Help me!” Hellman asked.

The robot hesitated. Its photoelectric eyes flashed red and green. Hellman noticed for the first time that the robot had a long articulated tail. It was curling and uncurling now.

“Well,” the robot said, “I don’t have much to do with humans. I’m a carhunter. We stay by ourselves.”

“Please, help! Get me out of here!” Hellman switched on the radio and said to the ship’s computer, “Can you reason with this machine?”

There was a short burst of static. The computer was signaling the carhunter. There was brief electrical activity, then silence, then more static.

“I don’t know,” the carhunter said. “Your keeper says you’re all right...

“My what? Oh, you mean the computer.” Hellman was going to put the robot straight as to who was boss and who was servant between him and the computer, but thought better of it. He needed this machine’s help just now, and if it pleased him to think that Hellman was kept by the computer, that was okay with him, at least until he was in a stronger position.

But why did the computer send you out here?” the robot asked. “He must have known it would be dangerous.”

“Oh, well, it’s an old tradition with us,” Hellman said. “I check out the territory for the computer. I work as one of his extensions, if you know what I mean. “

The robot pondered that for a while. Then he said, “It sounds like a good system.”

The hyenoids were growing bolder. They were circling Hellman and the robot openly now. Their low-slung open-girderwork bodies had been painted in green, gray, and tan stripes, camouflage colors.

There seemed no reason for them to have such large jaws with stainless steel teeth in them. Who would build a robot that fueled itself on the carcasses of animals it killed?

One of them, jaws open and slavering a viscous green liquid, was edging toward Hellman now.

Hellman held the laser pistol in front of him, trying to sight on a vital component. He figured they probably had redundant backup systems, stands to reason if you’re making a carnivorous model. The wear and tear would be tremendous. Not so much as on its victims, but plenty anyhow.

“Better get up on me,” the carhunter said.

Hellman scrambled over to the carhunter and pulled himself up its open-framework sides, straddling its back where it came to a kind of peak.

“Hang on,” the carhunter said, and broke into a loping run, its six legs giving it a curious but not uncomfortable gait. Hellman held on tightly. The speed wasn’t so. great—perhaps fifteen to twenty miles an hour. But to falloff would leave him helpless against the pursuing pack of hyenoids.

The hyenoids followed them through the broken country, and even managed to gain, since tight maneuvering in the little ravines and canyons was easier for the smaller, more agile beasts. One of them got close enough to take a nip at the carhunter. The carhunter extruded a long supple limb and flipped the hyenoid over on its back. The rest of the pack gave them more space after seeing that. The overturned one soon righted itself and came up again in pursuit, staying well out of reach of the carhunter’s limb. It reminded Hellman of pictures he had seen in a museum, of wolves trying to bring down a wounded elk.

Only the carhunter was much more self-assured than any elk. He seemed to have no fear of the hyenoids. After a while they crossed a muddy little river, and then they were on a flat, hard-tamped plain. Here the carhunter could put down his wheels and engage his superior horsepower. Soon he had left the hyenoids far behind, and they turned back. Seeing this, the carhunter shifted to a more economical cruising speed.

“Say when,” he said to Hellman after a while.

“What do you mean, say when?”

“Tell me when you want me to drop you off.”

“Are you crazy?” Hellman asked. “We must be twenty miles from my spaceship. “

“Your spaceship?”

It was too late for Hellman to retrieve the slip. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression back there. Actually the computer works for me.”

The carhunter slowed and came to a stop. There was nothing on all sides of them, and it stretched on forever.

“Well, that’s an interesting twist,” the carhunter said. “Is that how it works where you come from?”

“Well, yeah, pretty much,” Hellman said. “Look, would you do me a great favor and take me back to my spaceship.”

“No. Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m late already for the meeting.”

“A meeting? Is It really so important?”

“It’s a tribal matter. It’s the only really important date in the carhunter year. It takes precedence over any other contingency. Sorry, but I just have time to make it if I proceed immediately.”

“Take me with you.”

To our meeting?”

“I’ll wait outside. I’m not trying to spy on you or anything. I just need to go somewhere until you or somebody can take me back to my ship.”

The carhunter thought about it. “‘Ethics are not my strong point,” he said, “but I suppose that abandoning you to your death out here when I could without too much difficulty do something about it would be pretty unconscionable; is that correct?”

“Perfectly correct.”

“It takes a human being to point out that sort of thing. All I was thinking of was the extra energy I’d have to expend to save your life. I mean, what’s in it for me? That’s the way we start to think when there’s not a human around. “

“I’m glad we can be useful to you,” Hellman said.

“But you’re also extremely difficult to be around. Always tinkering with software. Don’t you think there’s enough uncertainty on the subatomic level without introducing it into our macro dealings?”

“What?” Hellman said.

“Never mind, I’m just raving. When you are a carhunter, you spend a lot of time alone. It’s a nomadic life, you know. Most of us live apart from each other. Hunting cars. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re called carhunters.”

“Oh. What kind of cars do you hunt?”

“All kinds. We’re carnivores, in our limited way. We eat cars. We also eat trucks and half-tracks, but they’ve been getting rare in these parts. People say the half-tracks are about hunted out. Yet my father could tell you about herds of them that stretched from hill to hill as far as the eye could see. “

“Not like that any more, I suppose,” Hellman said, trying to fall in with the carhunter’s mood.

“You got that right. Not that it’s too difficult to stay fed, especially now, in summer. I got me a fat old Studebaker just two days ago. You’ll find a couple of its carburetors and headlights in the bin under you and to your left.”

Hellman could peer down through the metal wickerwork and see, in an open-topped metal box, headlights and carburetors half submerged in crankcase oil.

“Looks pretty good, don’t it? I know you don’t eat metal yourself, but no doubt you can empathize the experience.”

“They look tasty,” Hellman said. “Especially in all that oil.”

“Twice-used crankcase oil. Ain’t nothing like it. I’ve spiced it up a bit with a plant that grows hereabouts. We call it the chili pepper.”

“Yes, we have something like it, too,” Hellman said.

“Damn small galaxy,” the carhunter said. “By the way, I’m Wayne 1332A.”

“Tom Hellman,” Hellman said.

“Pleased to meet you. Settle yourself in and take a good grip. We’re going to the meeting.“

The carhunter broke into a stride, then, lowering wheels, built up speed across the flat face of the desert. But soon he slowed again.