The machine gazed thoughtfully for many minutes. Probably its distant operators were hoping that life frightened into hiding by its fall might reappear; but if this were the case they were disappointed for the moment. After a time it crawled back to the remains of its parachute harness and played a set of lights carefully over the collection of metal girders, cables, and ribbons, examining them all in great detail. Then it moved away again, this time with a purposeful air.

For the next ten hours it quartered meticulously the general area of the landing, sometimes stopping to play its light on some object like a plant, sometimes looking around for minutes on end without obvious purpose, sometimes emitting sounds of varying pitch and loudness. This last always happened when it was in a valley, or at least not on the very top of a hill; it seemed to be studying echoes for some reason.

Periodically it went back to the abandoned harness and repeated the careful examination, as though it were expecting something to happen. Naturally, in an environment having a three hundred-seventy-degree temperature, about eight hundred atmospheres pressure, and a climate consisting of water heavily laced with oxygen and oxides of sulphur, things started to happen soon enough; and great interest was shown in the progress of the corrosion as it steadily devoured the metal. Some parts lasted longer than others; no doubt the designers had included different alloys, perhaps to check this very point. The robot remained in the general area until the last of the metal had vanished in slime.

At irregular intervals during this time, the surface of the ground shook violently. Sometimes the shaking was accompanied by the crashes which had first greeted the robot’s “ears”; at other times it was relatively silent. The operators must have been bothered by this at first; then it became evident that all the hills in the neighborhood were well rounded with no steep cliffs, and that the ground itself was free of both cracks and loose stones, so there was little reason to worry about the effect of quakes on the fabulously expensive mechanism.