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Part 2

11.

SLOWLY, THE SMOKE CLEARED.

 Well, it didn't exactly clear; in fact, what happened to it was more in the nature of a series of local solidifications.  Banzai's little grenades were turning out to have a great many unusual properties, the latest being that the passageway became cluttered with comparitively small globs of smoke, which remained more or less still, drifting now and then as the air circulation devices in the Station moved them, but not dissipating them at all.  Many of them were strangely, even beautifully colored:  green, pink, a dashing blue-and-yellow speckled gob, a very sober one in a kind of midnight brown....

Many of them--almost all, in fact---had at least one kind of local aura.  Some of them shimmered and shone, developing haloes that looked, on puffs of smoke, practically blasphemous.  Others emitted simple, practical noxious fumes, enough to drive even the noseless away from their vicinity; a purple-and-white one (stripes) was dubbed by Arkady, as it drifted up to him, as Superskunk.  One or two of them semed to have developed an unpleasant nagging whine, at nearly the bottom level of audibility, but Arkady wasn't sure about that, and thought he might be imagining it.

In fact, he rather thought he was imagining the entire situation, and that at any minute he was going to wake up either in a hospital in Brasilia or in some sort of reasonable afterlife.  Unless, of course, this was hell....

But, then, it looked too inexplicable for any self-respecting Eternal Roast.  It was either a hospital nightmare, or exactly what it seemed to be.

And what it seemed to be...

Well:  the sudden announcement that Earth was being invaded by aliens (which was ridiculous in itself) had stopped the war between the personnel of Stations 1 and 2.  The robots, however, having been firmly directed by the U.N.'s witch doctor (try that over your abacus, Arkady told himself bleakly), were going righ ton with the Satellite War.  And they were rather difficult to stop.

Robots, when fighting other robots, seemed to get original and rather difficult ideas.  These particular specimens were tearing off bulkheads wherever they could, swinging with everything at their command, using welding torches where torches happened to be part of their equipment.....

Arkady's idea---and that of everybody else, apparently---was to get to the communications area and find out what in the name of all the gods of Banazi was happening on Earth.  But getting there required passing through the field of battle.  It took Arkady, the rest of the inspection team, and all the Africans and Haitians of Station 2 something like half an hour to get past the robots and around a corner of the passage.  Even then, one small white robot followed them, twitching pitifully.  Dav kept looking back until it was at last outdistanced, and out of sight.

"They'll stop," one of the Station 2 personnel said---Mufasa, Arkady thought, but it was hard to tell.  "They'll reach a level of functioning too low to allow their baltte to continue; it won't take long."

"You're quite correct," Banzai said. "By the time we have some idea what this news from Earth is all about....

Very shortly, they began to get the news.  Communications was sketchy, but ther was a hook-in remaining with the U.N.'s sky-eye satellites, and that, along with a little message here and there, started to provide a picture.  It was, Arkady thought, a picture which made all his previous troubles look like Life at ClubMed.

First of all, the statement that there were one thousand alien ships now looked like the wildest and most hopeful kind of understatement Arkady was sure he had (by the time they were temporarily finished with the sky-eyes) personally counted more than that.  Second, attack wasn't really the right word for what they were doing.