“Enough,” the younger man admitted.

“Well, once we had his angle and speed—and what speed from a standing start!—we knew where he’d have to, come out. Fortunately, tightbeams can outrun any physical object, so we had someone in the area when he emerged a few subjective minutes later. Close enough, anyway, to get his next set of readings. That much, wasn’t difficult. He made seven blind switches, just to try to throw us off the track, but we never lost him. We were able to move in within a few minutes of the point in time at which he began transmitting the data—a safeguard just in case we were as efficient as we actually are. We closed in immediately then, though, and fried him and the ship to atoms. No other way around it. We’d seen firsthand just some of the things that baby could do.”

The younger man shook his head. “Pity, though. It would have been interesting to disassemble the thing. It’s certainly not any design I know of.”

The commander nodded. “Or any of us, either. The fact is, the thing was just about at the limits of our own technology, if not a bit beyond. It fooled x-ray scanners, retinal scanners, body heat and function sensors—you name it. It even fooled the friends of the poor civil servant it was pretending to be, implying memory and possibly personality transfer. At any rate, even though its clever little orbital base blew up after it departed, there was enough left to piece together some of its insides—and I’ll tell you, it’s not ours. Not anything close. Oh, you can deduce some of the functions and the like, but even where the function is obvious, it isn’t done the way we’d do it, nor are the materials similar to ours. We have to face the ugly fact that the robot and its base were built, designed, and directed by an alien power of which we are totally ignorant”