Chapter 3

The pillbox was fairly large. Was that because the natives of this planet had also been large? The bed we used last night certainly supported that assumption. We dropped into the shadow of the pillbox and Anfon put a field dressing on my wound. Thank God, it was not a big deal, except that it was a painful second-degree burn. Either the laser had been low powered or the contact with my skin had been measured in microseconds. I didn't know, I was just glad I still had my arm. The cream Anfon applied stopped most of the pain, so I was back in operation at nearly my original form.

We searched around the pillbox and found what looked like an access hatch. With some diddling around, we finally managed to get the hatch open. We didn't learn much by our initial look inside. The pillbox was filled with all kinds of equipment that my AI was not familiar with. This stuff looked like it was exclusively devoted to the weapon, and nothing was apparent that seemed to be a seat or aiming position for an operator. Therefore, our working assumption was that the weapon was fully automatic, and this one was simply worn out from excessive age. I suppose that the technical people could get something useful from examining the insides of the pillbox, but it sure didn't do much for me.

My main interest was why our X-ray laser did not have any effect, even with a direct hit. The only thing that I could figure was that there was some sort of material built into the construction of the pillbox's armor that absorbed the energy from our guns as fast as we pumped it in. Now that would be a very valuable piece of information. The problem was, there was no way that Anfon and I were going to get it with the equipment we had at hand. We didn't want to tear off a piece of structure to take back with us, even assuming that we could. We would just have to wait on the experts, which probably meant that we, personally, would never hear anything, so our curiosity would be forever unsatisfied. Oh, well, such is the fate of the grunt who does all of the work!

Well, it was time to report in, so Anfon, as leader of the "expedition," prepared to do so. She pulled out her radio and called the orbiting communication satellite that would relay her report back to base. NOTHING! Anfon could not raise a signal from the satellite. Uh-oh, we could be in deep shit! The transporter depended on knowing our position as generated by a radio signal sent through the orbiter. Without that precise positioning, there was no way the transporter could find us to pull us back to base.

Just as Anfon pulled the radio away from her ear, it started to melt! She dropped it in time to keep from being burned, but we had to stomp out the small fire in the dry grass that was started from the melted radio. That made both of us wonder if the satellite still had a functioning radio. Could its radio have been damaged by whatever just killed ours? Well, we certainly had no way of knowing what happened. At first glance, it looked like our only chance of pickup from this planet had just gone up in smoke. I consoled myself with the thought that the people back at base would surely try to pick us up to recover the very expensive AIs, if for no other reason.

Anfon said, "Bill, we could be in trouble. When they don't get the usual report from us, they will know that we have run into a difficulty, but they will have no idea what that difficulty could be. We may be stuck on this gods-forsaken planet for some time while they figure out what to do. Fortunately, we have the replicators, so we will not suffer for a lack of supplies, but we will have to watch out for more of the pillboxes or other weapons that might still be functional."

"Yeah, I agree with you, but we may be in even more trouble than that. I'm not too worried about the pillboxes, but what if there are mobile weapons that start chasing us? Our lasers may not be any more effective against them than they are against the pillboxes. If that is true, what will we do to defend ourselves?"

"Shit, why did you have to bring that up? Here I was, off in a fool's paradise thinking that all we had to do was to stay out of the air, and we would probably be safe. Now you've given me something else to worry about!"

"Wait a minute, I just had a brainstorm. Let me try something." I took out my laser and fired it at a rock a safe distance away and then at the ground close to it. In both cases, there was the expected explosion of disrupted matter and a plume of dust and smoke rising from the site of the explosion.

"There's our defense. We can try causing a plum of dust and smoke in front of the gun attacking us, and that may be enough to confuse the aiming so that we don't get shot. The problem is that it is going to be damned dangerous testing my hypothesis. Would you care to be the first one to give it a try?" Anfon started to cloud with rage until she saw my grin. At that point, she stuck out her tongue at me.

We decided to take a break for lunch and to consider what our next move should be. I noticed that, by the time we had finished eating my hamburger and Anfon's salad, my left arm had stopped hurting. I figured that the cream that Anfon had spread on the wound had finally gotten through to my nerves and had calmed them down. I had also gotten back the range of motion the wound had caused me to lose, so I asked Anfon to take a look at it to see what could be going on.

Anfon peeled off my bandage and gasped in surprise. The wound looked to be completely healed! Could that be a feature of being "functionally immortal?" Would all of my wounds heal that fast? God, I sure hoped so! I hugged and kissed Anfon in celebration, and we danced for a moment, since neither one of us had expected this sort of thing to happen. I wondered why our briefing had not been more explicit in describing this effect. Maybe, they were afraid that we would be foolhardy if we knew about it too soon.

We realized that we had to test my hypothesis about protecting ourselves from attack. Now knowing that we could recover from a wound very quickly, I was not so reluctant to be the test dummy. We returned to the vicinity of the pillbox that had shot at us and tempted it to open fire. It didn't need much encouragement.

I was just able to dodge a shot from the laser as Anfon fired at the ground in front of the pillbox. The cloud of dust that was raised did a lot to absorb the energy from the laser, but we could not tell much about the aiming characteristics. Both of us fired a long series of blasts at the ground in front of the pillbox and raised a cloud that we could not even see through. I then flew close to the pillbox and did not draw a shot. Hooray! It looked like our defense was a success. Now we just needed to find a way to turn off that damned radio killer.

It seemed logical that the device we were interested in must require some sort of directional antenna. It probably was a parabolic dish-type of antenna, so we had our AIs search the data base they had of aerial photos made when the planet was first discovered. The AIs quickly came up with six locations which had shown such an antenna. Two were at the poles, and four were equally spaced around the equator. Shit, this planet was over 11,000 miles in diameter, so we had a lot of ground to cover if we were going to knock out all of the radio stations.

On the other hand, why do they have six stations? It must be because the range of the destroyer beam is less than half way around the planet. If that is true, we can knock out one station and stand there while we are found and "beamed up." At least, that was worth a try.

Now, for the hard part. According to the AIs, the nearest station is about 3,700 miles away to our east. Our maximum speed by flying belt is 110 MPH. That means that, at constant flying at maximum speed, it would take us about 37 hours to get there. That doesn't sound like much, but we would be pounded to a pulp by traveling at maximum speed for that long without more protection than out uniforms and goggles. We figured to take about 80-85 hours plus sleeping and eating time. We guessed our actual traveling time to be on the order of 10 days. Well, we should be able to handle that—after all, we are Galactic Rangers! Did you hear the trumpet fanfare in the background? Shit, we will be physical wrecks by the time we get home. I sure hope they give us some recovery time before sending us on another mission.