Strange Highways

last valiant effort to regain its footing, it fell sideways into the snow.
     "Congratulations!" Steffan said.
     The four robots rose from the drift where they'd concealed themselves when the deer had come into sight, and they crossed the small open field to the sleeping buck.
     Curanov bent and felt the creature's sedated heartbeat, watched its grainy black nostrils quiver as it took a shallow breath.
     Tuttle, Steffan, and Leeke crowded in, squatting around the creature, touching it, marveling at the perfect musculature, the powerful shoulders, and the hard-packed thighs. They agreed that bringing down such a brute, when one's senses were drastically damped, was indeed a challenge. Then, one by one, they got up and walked away, leaving Curanov alone to more fully appreciate his triumph and to carefully collect and record his own emotional reactions to the event in the microtapes of his data vault.
     Curanov was nearly finished with his evaluation of the challenge and of the resultant confrontation - and the buck was beginning to regain its senses - when Tuttle cried out as if his systems had been accidentally overloaded.
     "Here! Look here!"
     Tuttle stood two hundred yards away, near the dark trees, waving his arms. Steffan and Leeke were already moving toward him.
     At Curanov's feet, the buck snorted and tried to stand, failed to manage that yet, and blinked its gummed eyelids. With nothing more to record in his data vault, Curanov rose and left the beast, walked toward his three companions.
     "What is it?" he asked when he arrived.
     They stared at him with glowing amber visual receptors that seemed especially bright in the gray light of late afternoon.
     "There," Tuttle said, pointing at the ground before them.
     "Footprints," Curanov said.
     Leeke said, "They don't belong to any of us."
     "So?" Curanov asked.
     "And they're not robot prints," Tuttle said.
     "Of course they are."
     Tuttle said, "Look closer."
     Curanov bent down and realized that his eyes, with half their power gone, had at first deceived him in the weak light. These weren't robot prints in anything but shape. A robot's feet were crosshatched with rubber tread; these prints showed none of that. A robot's feet were bottomed with two holes that acted as vents for the antigrav system when the unit was in flight; these prints showed no holes.
     Curanov said, "I didn't know there were any apes in the north."
     "There aren't," Tuttle said.
     "Then-"
     "These," Tuttle said, "are the prints ... of a man."
     "Preposterous!" Steffan said.
     "How else do you explain them?" Tuttle asked. He didn't sound happy with his explanation, but he was prepared to stick with it until someone offered an acceptable alternative.
     "A hoax," Steffan said.
     "Perpetrated by whom?" Tuttle asked.
     "One of us."
     They looked at one another, as if the guilt would be evident in their identical metal faces.
     Then Leeke said, "That's no good. We've been together. These tracks were made recently, or they'd be covered over with snow. None of us has had a chance, all afternoon, to sneak off and form them."
     "I still say it's a hoax," Steffan insisted. "Perhaps someone was sent out by the Central Agency to leave these for us to find."
     "Why would Central bother?" Tuttle asked.
     "Maybe it's part of our therapy," Steffan said. "Maybe this is to sharpen the challenge for us, add excitement to the hunt." He gestured vaguely at the prints, as if he hoped they'd vanish. "Maybe Central does this for everyone who's troubled by boredom, to restore the sense of wonder that"
     "That's highly unlikely," Tuttle said. "You know that it's the responsibility of each individual to engineer his own adventures and to generate his own storable responses. The Central Agency never interferes. It is merely a judge. After that fact, it evaluates us and gives promotions to those whose data vaults have matured."
     By way of cutting the argument short, Curanov said, "Where do these prints lead?"
     Leeke indicated the marks with a shiny finger. "It looks as if the creature came out of the woods and stood here for a while - perhaps watching us as we stalked the buck. Then he turned and went back the way he came."
     The four