Special Effects: Survival

winked. Brad took more photographs and put a new cartridge in. He set up a canopy on the side of the Rover, and put some fold up chairs out. Turran sat beside him and drank a can of fizz. Desert flies hovered about him and stuck to his face. This was the worst day of the trip, he thought.

Some time in the afternoon, when neither Brad or Turran was watching, the bowl started to move again. But this time it was falling to pieces. One arm of its cross had already broken off by the time Turran noticed anything and when he did, he called to his father and they ran closer to watch. The membranous wings crackled and crumpled in the sun, folding in on themselves, and the pole sections snapped into segments and dropped to the ground.

The red light, which had up till now winked slowly, began to speed its winking, and the buried parts underneath it began to push it upwards. The sand cracked and fell away as a bulky, pumpkin-shaped mound of metal grew fatter under the light, swelling and expanding outwards symmetrically. When the process stopped, the whole shape was as large as the Rover.

Brad began to back away now, suddenly scared.

"I think I know what this thing is!" he whispered.

Turran backed away with him.

"What is it Dad?"

"I don't believe it!"

'Tell me!"

"Biomechanics! I didn't know they'd developed this far! This is amazing?"

"Bio-what?" said Turran.

"Its a machine that works like an organism!" said Brad.

When they got to the Rover, Brad pulled a notebook out from one of the bags and started to scribble notes. He noted the time and then he went back over the day, jotting down the sequence of events, with the appropriate times beside them.

"This is incredible!" he said as he wrote, "Absolutely incredible!"

"Please explain, Dad!" pleaded Turran.

"OK," said Brad, clipping the pen to the top of his note book, "I'll try to make it as simple as possible.