        A robot.  Why hadn’t that occurred to him before?  He thought of the astronomy book that rested in his bag, with all its pictures of planets and moons taken by robots.  What safer way to explore a foreign land?  The group before might have been repairing the robot, and now that it was back in service, they were going to use it.  Its odd coloring might really stand out to them; it could be their equivalent of blaze orange.  If it was a robot, it acted very smoothly, much more naturally than human androids.