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 . . .