ord hung unspoken--a word not to be uttered lightly,
so awful was it in its connotations, freighted with memories of a terror
rooted in the youth of the world.

_Drones._

* * * * *

In the beginning--said the stories--there were the ancients, who were
great and powerful beyond the imagining of the latter-day peoples. But
the ancients were divided among themselves, for some of them were good
and some of them were evil.

So they fought one another, with the terrific weapons of devastation
which they owned. And the good triumphed in the end, as it must--though
at terrible cost, for in those wars the earth was stripped almost
lifeless; searing flame, plague, climatic convulsions wiped out the
varied life which once populated the world, and finally there remained
only the peoples of the machine, all of whom--diverse though their ways
of existence had become, and for all that they lived in ceaseless
conflict with each other--were descended from the victors in that primal
struggle of men like gods.

But the evil old ones, though they were vanquished and their seed
utterly annihilated, had nevertheless found a way to perpetuate their
evil upon the earth. For before the last of them died, as a final act of
vindictive atrocity, they created the drones....

Qanya was shivering uncontrollably. She whispered, "No one remembers
when they last came. Some thought there were none left in the world."

"It's the same among my people," Dworn said hushedly. "There's no record
of the drones' having appeared in the time of anyone now living.... But
here they are."

From out of sight came the rattle and clank and whine of machines at
work. And from farther away, from the direction of the great windowless
buildings, there were hootings and throbbing sounds, and from time to
time a deep rumbling that shook the earth.

Those noises were somehow unspeakably horrible now--now that they knew
there was no one there. No one--nothing but the machines, without
feeling or thought, without life, with only the blind meaningless
activity of unliving mechanism set in motion and made self-subsisting a
thousand or two thousand years ago....

With infinite caution the two humans peeked once again over the summit
of the mound. Out there on the flat, the little wingless drones buzzed
to and fro with their false seeming of animation, finishing their work.

From around the great buildings, whose interior no living eyes h