The Water lily Pond

catlike from the depths of their hoods as they studied their captive.The jawas conversed in low guttural croaks and scrambled analogs of human speech.If, as anthropologists hypothesized, they had ever been human, they had long sincedegenerated past anything resembling the human race. Several more jawas appeared. Together, they succeeded in alternately hoistingand dragging the robot back down the arroyo. At the bottom of canyon—like some monstrous prehistoric beast—was asandcrawler as enormous as its owners and operators were tiny. Several dozenmeters high, the vehicle towered above the ground on multiple treads that were tallerthan a tall man. Its metal epidermis was battered and pitted from with-standinguntold sandstorms.