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© Copyright 1960 Clifford D.Simak
Prepared by: Anada Sucka, August 12, 1999
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THE INVENTORY list was long. On its many pages, in his small and
precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and
all the rest of it - all the personal belongings that had been accumulated
by the Barringtons through a long family history.
And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the
last item of them all:
One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.
He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together
and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them - the
little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked
up that last visit she had made to Peking.
And having done that, his job came to an end.
He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked
across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the
family's past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon
had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece
itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of
moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon,
and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family
spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.
And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family
portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had
helped to fashion.
And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard
Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.
There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who
had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus,
Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind,
the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to
the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first
built the family fortune.
And many others - administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All
good men and true.
But this was at an end. The family had run out.
Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house - the family
room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the
library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal
and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and
aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each
of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom
where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line
of Barringtons.
The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a
house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a
false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything
within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The
rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a
last indignity, the house itself be sold.
Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He
was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.
Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple
sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one
would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And,
besides, there was the law - the law that said no robot could legally have
continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.
And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had
gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth
no hope.
"Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer
voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I
completely fail to see how your family got away with it."
"They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very
seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."
"Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There
must be a file on you..."
"The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many
influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before
they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many
other matters."
The lawyer grunted knowingly.
"What I can't quite understand," he said, "is why you should object so
bitterly. You'll not be changed entirely. You'll still be Richard Daniel."
"I would lose my memories, would I not?'
"Yes, of course you would. But memories are not too important. And
you'd collect another set."
"My memories are dear to me," Richard Daniel told him.
"They are all I have. After some six hundred years, they are my sole
worthwhile possession. Can you imagine, counselor, what it means to spend
six centuries with one family?"
"Yes, I think I can," agreed the lawyer. "But now, with the family
gone, isn't it just possible the memories may prove painful?"
"They're a comfort. A sustaining comfort. They make me feel important.
They give me perspective and a niche."
"But don't you understand? You'll need no comfort, no importance once
you're reoriented. You'll be brand new. All that you'll retain is a certain
sense of basic identity - that they cannot take away from you even if they
wished. There'll be nothing to regret. There'll be no leftover guilts, no
frustrated aspirations, no old loyalties to hound you."
"I must be myself," Richard Daniel insisted stubbornly. "I've found a
depth of living, a background against which my living has some meaning. I
could not face being anybody else."
"You'd be far better off," the lawyer said wearily. "You'd have a
better body. You'd have better mental tools. You'd be more intelligent."
Richard Daniel got up from the chair. He saw it was no use.
"You'll not inform on me?" he asked.
"Certainly not," the lawyer said. "So far as I'm concerned, you aren't
even here."
"Thank you," said Richard Daniel. "How much do I owe you?"
"Not a thing," the lawyer told him. "I never make a charge to anyone
who is older than five hundred."
He had meant it as a joke, but Richard Daniel did not smile. He had not
felt like smiling.
At the door he turned around.
"Why?" he was going to ask. "Why this silly law."
But he did not have to ask - it was not hard to see.
Human vanity, he knew. No human being lived much longer than a hundred
years, so neither could a robot. But a robot, on the other hand, was too
valuable simply to be junked at the end of a hundred years of service, so
there was this law providing for the periodic breakup of the continuity of
each robot's life. And thus no human need undergo the psychological
indignity of knowing that his faithful serving man might manage to outlive
him by several thousand years.
It was illogical, but humans were illogical.
Illogical, but kind. Kind in many different ways.
Kind, sometimes, as the Barringtons had been kind, thought Richard
Daniel. Six hundred years of kindness. It was a prideful thing to think
about. They had even given him a double name. There weren't many robots
nowadays who had double names. It was a special mark of affection and
respect.
The lawyer having failed him, Richard Daniel had sought another source
of help. Now, thinking back on it, standing in the room where Hortense
Barrington had died, he was sorry that he'd done it. For he had embarrassed
the religico almost unendurably. It had been easy for the lawyer to tell him
what he had. Lawyers had the statutes to determine their behavior, and thus
suffered little from agonies of personal decision.
But a man of the cloth is kind if he is worth his salt. And this one
had been kind instinctively as well as professionally, and that had made it
worse.
"Under certain circumstances," he had said somewhat awkwardly, "I could
counsel patience and humility and prayer. Those are three great aids to
anyone who is willing to put them to his use. But with you I am not
certain."
"You mean," said Richard Daniel, "because I am a robot." "Well, now..."
said the minister, considerably befuddled at this direct approach.
"Because I have no soul?"
"Really," said the minister miserably, "you place me at a disadvantage.
You are asking me a question that for centuries has puzzled and bedeviled
the best minds in the church."
"But one," said Richard Daniel, "that each man in his secret heart must
answer for himself."
"I wish I could," cried the distraught minister. "I truly wish I
could."
"If it is any help," said Richard Daniel, "I can tell you that
sometimes I suspect I have a soul."
And that, he could see, had been most upsetting for this kindly human.
It had been, Richard Daniel told himself, unkind of him to say it. For it
must have been confusing, since coming from himself it was not opinion only,
but expert evidence.
So he had gone away from the minister's study and come back to the
empty house to get on with his inventory work.
Now that the inventory was all finished and the papers stacked where
Dancourt, the estate administrator, could find them when be showed up in the
morning, Richard Daniel had done his final service for the Barringtons and
now must begin doing for himself.
He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him and went quietly
down the stairs and along the hallway to the little cubby, back of the
kitchen, that was his very own.
And that, he reminded himself with a rush of pride, was of a piece with
his double name and his six hundred years. There were not too many robots
who had a room, however small, that they might call their own.
He went into the cubby and turned on the light and closed the door
behind him.
And now, for the first time, he faced the grim reality of what he meant
to do.
The cloak and hat and trousers hung upon a hook and the galoshes were
placed precisely underneath them. His attachment kit lay in one corner of
the cubby and the money was cached underneath the floor board he had
loosened many years ago to provide a hiding place.
There was, he, told himself, no point in waiting. Every minute counted.
He had a long way to go and he must be at his destination before morning
light.
He knelt on the floor and pried up the loosened board, shoved in a hand
and brought out the stacks of bills, money hidden through the years against
a day of need.
There were three stacks of bills, neatly held together by elastic bands
- money given him throughout the years as tips and Christmas gifts, as
birthday presents and rewards for little jobs well done.
He opened the storage compartment located in his chest and stowed away
all the bills except for half a dozen which he stuffed into a pocket in one
hip.
He took the trousers off the hook and it was an awkward business, for
he'd never worn clothes before except when he'd tried on these very trousers
several days before. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that long-dead Uncle
Michael had been a portly man, for otherwise the trousers never would have
fit.
He got them on and zippered and belted into place, then forced his feet
into the overshoes. He was a little worried about the overshoes. No human
went out in the summer wearing overshoes. But it was the best that he could
do. None of the regular shoes he'd found in the house had been nearly large
enough.
He hoped no one would notice, but there was no way out of it. Somehow
or other, he had to cover up his feet, for if anyone should see them, they'd
be a giveaway.
He put on the cloak and it was a little short. He put on the hat and it
was slightly small, but he tugged it down until it gripped his metal skull
and that was all to the good, he told himself; no wind could blow it off.
He picked up his attachments - a whole bag full of them that he'd
almost never used. Maybe it was foolish to take them along, he thought, but
they were a part of him and by rights they should go with him. There was so
little that he really owned - just the money he had saved, a dollar at a
time, and this kit of his.
With the bag of attachments clutched underneath his arm, he closed the
cubby door and went down the hall.
At the big front door he hesitated and turned back toward the house,
but it was, at the moment, a simple darkened cave, empty of all that it once
had held. There was nothing here to stay for - nothing but the memories, and
the memories he took with him.
He opened the door and stepped out on the stoop and closed the door
behind him.
And now, he thought, with the door once shut behind him, he was on his
own. He was running off. He was wearing clothes. He was out at night,
without the permission of a master. And all of these were against the law.
Any officer could stop him, or any citizen. He had no rights at all.
And he had no one who would speak for him, now that the Barringtons were
gone.
He moved quietly down the walk and opened the gate and went slowly down
the street, and it seemed to him the house was calling for him to come back.
He wanted to go back, his mind said that he should go back, but his feet
kept going on, steadily down the street.
He was alone, he thought, and the aloneness now was real, no longer the
mere intellectual abstract he'd held in his mind for days. Here he was, a
vacant hulk, that for the moment had no purpose and no beginning and no end,
but was just an entity that stood naked in an endless reach of space and
time and held no meaning in itself.
But he walked on and with each block that he covered he slowly fumbled
back to the thing he was, the old robot in old clothes, the robot running
from a home that was a home no longer.
He wrapped the cloak about him tightly and moved on down the street and
now he hurried, for he had to hurry.
He met several people and they paid no attention to him. A few cars
passed, but no one bothered him.
He came to a shopping center that was brightly lighted and he stopped
and looked in terror at the wide expanse of open, brilliant space that lay
ahead of him. He could detour around it, but it would use up time and he
stood there, undecided, trying to screw up his courage to walk into the
light.
Finally he made up his mind and strode briskly out, with his cloak
wrapped tight about him and his hat pulled low.
Some of the shoppers turned and looked at him and he felt agitated
spiders running up and down his back. The galoshes suddenly seemed three
times as big as they really were and they made a plopping, squashy sound
that was most embarrassing.
He hurried on, with the end of the shopping area not more than a block
away.
A police whistle shrilled and Richard Daniel jumped in sudden fright
and ran. He ran in slobbering, mindless fright, with his cloak streaming out
behind him and his feet slapping on the pavement.
He plunged out of the lighted strip into the welcome darkness of a
residential section and he kept on running.
Far off he heard the siren and he leaped a hedge and tore across the
yard. He thundered down the driveway and across a garden in the back and a
dog came roaring out and engaged in noisy chase.
Richard Daniel crashed into a picket fence and went through it to the
accompaniment of snapping noises as the pickets and the rails gave way. The
dog kept on behind him and other dogs joined in.
He crossed another yard and gained the street and pounded down it. He
dodged into a driveway, crossed another yard, upset a birdbath and ran into
a clothesline, snapping it in his headlong rush.
Behind him lights were snapping on in the windows of the houses and
screen doors were banging as people hurried out to see what the ruckus was.
He ran on a few more blocks, crossed another yard and ducked into a
lilac thicket, stood still and listened. Some dogs were still baying in the
distance and there was some human shouting, but there was no siren.
He felt a thankfulness well up in him that there was no siren, and a
sheepishness, as well. For he had been panicked by himself, be knew; he had
run from shadows, he had fled from guilt.
But he'd thoroughly roused the neighborhood and even now, he knew,
calls must be going out and in a little while the place would be swarming
with police.
He'd raised a hornet's nest and he needed distance, so he crept out of
the lilac thicket and went swiftly down the street, heading for the edge of
town.
He finally left the city, and found the highway. He loped along its
deserted stretches. When a car or truck appeared, he pulled off on the
shoulder and walked along sedately. Then when the car or truck had passed,
he broke into his lope again.
He saw the spaceport lights miles before he got there.
When he reached the port, he circled off the road and came up outside a
fence and stood there in the darkness, looking.
A gang of robots was loading one great starship and there were other
ships standing darkly in their pits.
He studied the gang that was loading the ship, lugging the cargo from a
warehouse and across the area lighted by the floods. This was just the setup
he had planned on, although he had not hoped to find it immediately - he had
been afraid that he might have to hide out for a day or two before he found
a situation that he could put to use. And it was a good thing that he had
stumbled on this opportunity, for an intensive hunt would be on by now for a
fleeing robot, dressed in human clothes.
He stripped off the cloak and pulled off the trousers and the
overshoes; he threw away the hat. From his attachments bag he took out the
cutters, screwed off a hand and threaded the cutters into place. He cut the
fence and wiggled through it, then replaced the hand and put the cutters
back into the kit.
Moving cautiously in the darkness, he walked up to the warehouse,
keeping in its shadow.
It would be simple, he told himself. All he had to do was step out and
grab a piece of cargo, clamber up the ramp and down into the hold. Once
inside, it should not be difficult to find a hiding place and stay there
until the ship had reached first planet-fall.
He moved to the corner of the warehouse and peered around it and there
were the toiling robots, in what amounted to an endless chain, going up the
ramp with the packages of cargo, coming down again to get another load.
But there were too many of them and the line too tight. And the area
too well lighted. He'd never be able to break into that line.
And it would not help if he could, he realized despairingly - because
he was different from those smooth and shining creatures. Compared to them,
he was like a man in another century's dress; he and his
six-hundred-year-old body would stand out like a circus freak.
He stepped back into the shadow of the warehouse and he knew that be
had lost. All his best-laid plans, thought out in sober, daring detail, as
he had labored at the inventory, had suddenly come to naught.
It all came, he told himself, from never going out, from having no real
contact with the world, from not keeping up with robot-body fashions, from
not knowing what the score was. He'd imagined how it would be and he'd got
it all worked out and when it came down, to it, it was nothing like he
thought.
Now he'd have to go back to the hole he'd cut in the fence and retrieve
the clothing be had thrown away and hunt up a hiding place until be could
think of something else.
Beyond the corner of the warehouse he heard the harsh, dull grate of
metal, and he took another look.
The robots had broken up their line and were streaming back toward the
warehouse and a dozen or so of them were wheeling the ramp away from the
cargo port. Three humans, all dressed in uniform, were walking toward the
ship, heading for the ladder, and one of them carried a batch of papers in
his hand.
The loading was all done and the ship about to lift and here he was,
not more than a thousand feet away, and all that he could do was stand and
see it go.
There had to be a way, he told himself, to get in that ship. If he
could only do it his troubles would be over - or at least the first of his
troubles would be over.
Suddenly it struck him like a hand across the face. There was a way to
do it! He'd stood here, blubbering, when all the time there had been a way
to do it!
In the ship, he'd thought. And that was not necessary.
He didn't have to be in the ship.
He started running, out into the darkness, far out so he could circle
round and come upon the ship from the other side, so that the ship would be
between him and the flood lights on the warehouse. He hoped that there was
time.
He thudded out across the port, running in an arc, and came up to the
ship and there was no sign as yet that it was about to leave.
Frantically he dug into his attachments bag and found the things he
needed - the last things in that bag he'd ever thought he'd need. He found
the suction discs and put them on, one for each knee, one for each elbow,
one for each sole and wrist.
He strapped the kit about his waist and clambered up one of the mighty
fins, using the discs to pull himself awkwardly along. It was not easy. He
had never used the discs and there was a trick to using them, the trick of
getting one clamped down and then working loose another so that be could
climb.
But he had to do it. He had no choice but to do it. He climbed the fin
and there was the vast steel body of the craft rising far above him, like a
metal wall climbing to the sky, broken by the narrow line of a row of anchor
posts that ran lengthwise of the hull - and all that huge extent of metal
painted by the faint, illusive shine of starlight that glittered in his
eyes.
Foot by foot he worked his way up the metal wall. Like a humping
caterpillar, he squirmed his way and with each foot he gained he was a bit
more thankful.
Then he heard the faint beginning of a rumble and with the rumble came
terror. His suction cups, he knew, might not long survive the booming
vibration of the wakening rockets, certainly would not hold for a moment
when the ship began to climb.
Six feet above him lay his only hope - the final anchor post in the
long row of anchor posts.
Savagely he drove himself up the barrel of the shuddering craft,
hugging the steely surface like a desperate fly.
The rumble of the tubes built up to blot out all the world and he
climbed in a haze of almost prayerful, brittle hope. He reached that anchor
post or he was as good as dead. Should he slip and drop into that pit of
flaming gases beneath the rocket mouths and he was done for.
Once a cup came loose and he almost fell, but the others held and he
caught himself.
With a desperate, almost careless lunge, he hurled himself up the wall
of metal and caught the rung in his finger-tips and held on with a
concentration of effort that wiped out all else.
The rumble was a screaming fury now that lanced through brain and body.
Then the screaming ended and became a throaty roar of power and the
vibration left the ship entirely. From one corner of his eye he saw the
lights of the spaceport swinging over gently on their side.
Carefully, slowly, be pulled himself along the steel until he had a
better grip upon the rung, but even with the better grip he had the feeling
that some great hand had him in its fist and was swinging him in anger in a
hundred-mile-long arc.
Then the tubes left off their howling and there was a terrible silence
and the stars were there, up above him and to either side of him, and they
were steely stars with no twinkle in them. Down below, be knew, a lonely
Earth was swinging, but he could not see it.
He pulled himself up against the rung and thrust a leg beneath it and
sat up on the hull.
There were more stars than he'd ever seen before, more than he'd
dreamed there could be. They were still and cold, like hard points of light
against a velvet curtain; there was no glitter and no twinkle in them and it
was as if a million eyes were staring down at him. The Sun was underneath
the ship and over to one side; just at the edge of the left-hand curvature
was the glare of it against the silent metal, a sliver of reflected light
outlining one edge of the ship. The Earth was far astern, a ghostly
blue-green ball hanging in the void, ringed by the fleecy halo of its
atmosphere.
It was as if he were detached, a lonely, floating brain that looked out
upon a thing it could not understand nor could ever try to understand; as if
he might even be afraid of understanding it - a thing of mystery and delight
so long as he retained an ignorance of it, but something fearsome and
altogether overpowering once the ignorance had gone.
Richard Daniel sat there, flat upon his bottom, on the metal hull of
the speeding ship and he felt the mystery and delight and the loneliness and
the cold and the great uncaring and his mind retreated into a small and
huddled, compact defensive ball.
He looked. That was all there was to do. It was all right now, he
thought. But how long would he have to look at it? How long would he have to
camp out here in the open - the most deadly kind of open?
He realized for the first time that he had no idea where the ship was
going or how long it might take to get there. He knew it was a starship,
which meant that it was bound beyond the solar system, and that meant that
at some point in its flight it would enter hyperspace. He wondered, at first
academically, and then with a twinge of fear, what hyperspace might do to
one sitting naked to it. But there was little need, he thought
philosophically, to fret about it now, for in due time he'd know, and there
was not a thing that he could do about it - not a single thing.
He took the suction cups off his body and stowed them in his kit and
then with one hand he tied the kit to one of the metal rungs and dug around
in it until he found a short length of steel cable with a ring on one end
and a snap on the other. He passed the ring end underneath a rung and
threaded the snap end through it and snapped the snap onto a metal loop
underneath his armpit. Now he was secured; he need not fear carelessly
letting go and floating off the ship.
So here he was, he thought, neat as anything, going places fast, even
if he had no idea where he might be headed, and now the only thing he needed
was patience. He thought back, without much point, to what the religico had
said in the study back on Earth. Patience and humility and prayer, he'd
said, apparently not realizing at the moment that a robot has a world of
patience.
It would take a lot of time, Richard Daniel knew, to get where he was
going. But he had a lot of time, a lot more than any human, and he could
afford to waste it. There were no urgencies, he thought - no need of food or
air, or water, no need of sleep or rest... There was nothing that could
touch him.
Although, come to think of it, there might be.
There was the cold, for one. The space-hull was still fairly warm, with
one side of it picking up the heat of the Sun and radiating it around the
metal skin, where it was lost on the other side, but there would be a time
when the Sun would dwindle until it had no heat and then he'd be subjected
to the utter cold of space.
And what would the cold do to him. Might it make his body brittle?
Might it interfere with the functioning of his brain? Might it do other
things he could not even guess?
He felt the fears creep in again and tried to shrug them off and they
drew off, but they still were there, lurking at the fringes of his mind.
The cold, and the loneliness, he thought - but he was one who could
cope with loneliness. And if he couldn't, if he got too lonely, if he could
no longer stand it, he could always beat a devil's tattoo on the hull and
after a time of that someone would come out to investigate and they would
haul him in.
But that was the last move of desperation, he told himself. For if they
came out and found him, then he would be caught. Should he be forced to that
extremity, he'd have lost everything - there would then have been no point
in leaving Earth at all.
So he settled down, living out his time, keeping the creeping fears at
bay just beyond the outposts of his mind, and looking at the universe all
spread out before him.
The motors started up again with a pale blue flickering in the rockets
at the stern and although there was no sense of acceleration he knew that
the ship, now well off the Earth, had settled down to the long, hard drive
to reach the speed of light.
Once they reached that speed they would enter hyperspace. He tried not
to think of it, tried to tell himself there was not a thing to fear - but it
hung there just ahead of him, the great unknowable.
The Sun shrank until it was only one of many stars and there came a
time when he could no longer pick it out. And the cold clamped down but it
didn't seem to bother him, although he could sense the coldness.
Maybe, he said in answer to his fear, that would be the way it would be
with hyperspace as well. But he said it unconvincingly. The ship drove on
and on with the weird blueness in the tubes.
Then there was the instant when his mind went splattering across the
universe.
He was aware of the ship, but only aware of it in relation to an
awareness of much else, and it was no anchor point, no rallying position. He
was spread and scattered; he was opened out and rolled out until he was very
thin. He was a dozen places, perhaps a hundred places, all at once, and it
was confusing, and his immediate reaction was to fight back somehow against
whatever might have happened to him - to fight back and pull himself
together. The fighting did no good at all, but made it even worse, for in
certain instances it seemed to drive parts of him farther from other parts
of him and the confusion was made greater.
So he quit his fighting and his struggling and just lay there,
scattered, and let the panic ebb away and told himself he didn't care, and
wondered if he did.
Slow reason returned a dribble at a time and he could think again and
he wondered rather bleakly if this could be hyperspace and was pretty sure
it was. And if it were, he knew, he'd have a long time to live like this, a
long time in which to become accustomed to it and to orient himself, a long
time to find himself and pull himself together, a long time to understand
this situation if it were, in fact, understandable.
So he lay, not caring greatly, with no fear or wonder, just resting and
letting a fact seep into him here and there from many different points.
He knew that, somehow, his body - that part of him which housed the
rest of him - was still chained securely to the ship, and that knowledge, in
itself, he knew, was the first small step towards reorienting himself. He
had to reorient, he knew. He had to come to some sort of terms, if not to
understanding, with this situation.
He had opened up and he had scattered out - that essential part of him,
the feeling and the knowing and the thinking part of him, and he lay thin
across a universe that loomed immense in unreality.
Was this, he wondered, the way the universe should be, or was it the
unchained universe, the wild universe beyond the limiting disciplines of
measured space and time.
He started slowly reaching out, cautious as he had been in his crawling
on the surface of the ship, reaching out toward the distant parts of him, a
little at a time. He did not know how he did it, he was conscious of no
particular technique, but whatever he was doing, it seemed to work, for he
pulled himself together, bit by knowing bit, until he had gathered up all
the scattered fragments of him into several different piles.
Then he quit and lay there, wherever there might be, and tried to sneak
up on those piles of understanding that he took to be himself.
It took a while to get the hang of it, but once be did, some of the
incomprehensibility went away, although the strangeness stayed. He tried to
put it into thought and it was hard to do. The closest he could come was
that he had been unchained as well as the universe - that whatever bondage
had been imposed upon him by that chained and normal world had now become
dissolved and he no longer was fenced in by either time or space.
He could see - and know and sense - across vast distances, if distance
were the proper term, and he could understand certain facts that he had not
even thought about before, could understand instinctively, but without the
language or the skill to coalesce the facts into independent data.
Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a
different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe,
and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some
completer understanding and acceptance of it.
He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time,
but a great foreverness.
He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe
behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of
a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the
flat galactic plane.
Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and
felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him - he seemed
unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of
content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it
was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed,
there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place
apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no
place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring
stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.
There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder - and no actual
knowledge, either.
Then time came once again and suddenly his mind was stuffed back into
its cage within his metal skull and he was again one with his body, trapped
and chained and small and cold and naked.
He saw that the stars were different and that he was far from home and
just a little way ahead was a star that blazed like a molten furnace hanging
in the black.
He sat bereft, a small thing once again, and the universe reduced to
package size.
Practically, he checked the cable that held him to the ship and it was
intact. His attachments kit was still tied to its rung. Everything was
exactly as it had been before.
He tried to recall the glories he had seen, tried to grasp again the
fringe of knowledge which he had been so close to, but both the glory and
the knowledge, if there had ever been a knowledge, had faded into
nothingness.
He felt like weeping, but he could not weep, and he was too old to lie
down upon the ship and kick his heels in tantrum.
So he sat there, looking at the sun that they were approaching and
finally there was a planet that he knew must be their destination, and he
found room to wonder what planet it might be and how far from Earth it was.
He heated up a little as the ship skipped through atmosphere as an aid
to braking speed and he had some rather awful moments as it spiraled into
thick and soupy gases that certainly were a far cry from the atmosphere of
Earth. He hung most desperately to the rungs as the craft came rushing down
onto a landing field, with the hot gases of the rockets curling up about
him. But he made it safely and swiftly clambered down and darted off into
the smog-like atmosphere before anyone could see him.
Safely off, he turned and looked back at the ship and despite its
outlines being hidden by the drifting clouds of swirling gases, he could see
it clearly, not as an actual structure, but as a diagram. He looked at it
wonderingly and there was something wrong with the diagram, something
vaguely wrong, some part of it that was out of whack and not the way it
should be.
He heard the clanking of cargo haulers coming out upon the field and he
wasted no more time, diagram or not.
He drifted back, deeper in the mists, and began to circle, keeping a
good distance from the ship. Finally he came to the spaceport's edge and the
beginning of the town.
He found a street and walked down it leisurely and there was a
wrongness in the town.
He met a few hurrying robots who were in too much of a rush to pass the
time of day. But he met no humans.
And that, he knew quite suddenly, was the wrongness of the place. It
was not a human town.
There were no distinctly human buildings -no stores or residences, no
churches and no restaurants. There were gaunt shelter barracks and sheds for
the storing of equipment and machines, great sprawling warehouses and vast
industrial plants. But that was all there was. It was a bare and dismal
place compared to the streets that he had known on Earth.
It was a robot town, he knew. And a robot planet. A world that was
barred to humans, a place where humans could not live, but so rich in some
natural resource that it cried for exploitation. And the answer to that
exploitation was to let the robots do it.
Luck, he told himself. His good luck still was holding. He had
literally been dumped into a place where he could live without human
interference. Here, on this planet, he would be with his own.
If that was what he wanted. And he wondered if it was. He wondered just
exactly what it was he wanted, for he'd had no time to think of what he
wanted. He had been too intent on fleeing Earth to think too much about it.
He had known all along what he was running from, but had not considered what
he might be running to.
He walked a little further and the town came to an end. The Street
became a path and went wandering on into the wind-blown fogginess.
So he turned around and went back up the street.
There had been one barracks, he remembered, that had a TRANSIENTS sign
hung out, and be made his way to it.
Inside, an ancient robot sat behind the desk. His body was
old-fashioned and somehow familiar. And it was familiar, Richard Daniel
knew, because it was as old and battered and as out-of-date as his.
He looked at the body, just a bit aghast, and saw that while it
resembled his, there were little differences. The same ancient model,
certainly, but a different series. Possibly a little newer, by twenty years
or so, than his.
"Good evening, stranger," said the ancient robot. "You came in on the
ship?"
Richard Daniel nodded.
"You'll be staying till the next one?"
"I may be settling down," said Richard Daniel. "I may want to stay
here."
The ancient robot took a key from off a hook and laid it on the desk.
"You representing someone?"
"No," said Richard Daniel.
"I thought maybe that you were. We get a lot of representatives. Humans
can't come here, or don't want to come, so they send robots out here to
represent them."
"You have a lot of visitors?"
"Some. Mostly the representatives I was telling you about. But there
are some that are on the lam. I'd take it, mister, you are on the lam."
Richard Daniel didn't answer.
"It's all right," the ancient one assured him. "We don't mind at all,
just so you behave yourself. Some of our most prominent citizens, they came
here on the lam."
"That is fine," said Richard Daniel. "And how about yourself? You must
be on the lam as well."
"You mean this body. Well, that's a little different. This here is
punishment."
"Punishment?'
"Well, you see, I was the foreman of the cargo warehouse and I got to
goofing off. So they hauled me up and had a trial and they found me guilty.
Then they stuck me into this old body and I have to stay in it, at this
lousy job, until they get another criminal that needs punishment. They can't
punish no more than one criminal at a time because this is the only old body
that they have. Funny thing about this body. One of the boys went back to
Earth on a business trip and found this old heap of metal in a junkyard and
brought it home with him - for a joke, I guess. Like a human might buy a
skeleton for a joke, you know."
He took a long, sly look at Richard Daniel. "It looks to me, stranger,
as if your body..."
But Richard Daniel didn't let him finish.
"I take it," Richard Daniel said, "you haven't many criminals."
"No," said the ancient robot sadly, "we're generally a pretty solid
lot."
Richard Daniel reached out to pick up the key, but the ancient robot
put out his hand and covered it.
"Since you are on the lam," he said, "it'll be payment in advance."
"I'll pay you for a week," said Richard Daniel, handing him some money.
The robot gave him back his change.
"One thing I forgot to tell you. You'll have to get plasticated."
"Plasticated?"
"That's right. Get plastic squirted over you. To protect you from the
atmosphere. It plays hell with metal. There's a place next door will do it."
"Thanks. I'll get it done immediately."
"It wears off," warned the ancient one. "You have to get a new job
every week or so."
Richard Daniel took the key and went down the corridor until he found
his numbered cubicle. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was
small, but clean. It had a desk and chair and that was all it had.
He stowed his attachments bag in one corner and sat down in the chair
and tried to feel at home. But he couldn't feel at home, and that was a
funny thing - he'd just rented himself a home.
He sat there, thinking back, and tried to whip up some sense of triumph
at having done so well in covering his tracks. He couldn't.
Maybe this wasn't the place for him, he thought. Maybe he'd be happier
on some other planet. Perhaps he should go back to the ship and get on it
once again and have a look at the next planet coming up.
If he hurried, he might make it. But he'd have to hurry, for the ship
wouldn't stay longer than it took to unload the consignment for this place
and take on new cargo.
He got up from the chair, still only half decided.
And suddenly he remembered how, standing in the swirling mistiness, he
had seen the ship as a diagram rather than a ship, and as he thought about
it, something clicked inside his brain and he leaped toward the door.
For now he knew what had been wrong with the spaceship's diagram - an
injector valve was somehow out of kilter, he had to get back there before
the ship took off again.
He went through the door and down the corridor. He caught sight of the
ancient robot's startled face as he ran across the lobby and out into the
street. Pounding steadily toward the spaceport, he tried to get the diagram
into his mind again, but it would not come complete - it came in bits and
pieces, but not all of it.
And even as be fought for the entire diagram, he heard the beginning
take-off rumble.
"Wait!" he yelled. "Wait for me! You can't..."
There was a flash that turned the world pure white and a mighty
invisible wave came swishing out of nowhere and sent him reeling down the
street, falling as he reeled. He was skidding on the cobblestones and sparks
were flying as his metal scraped along the stone. The whiteness reached a
brilliance that almost blinded him and then it faded swiftly and the world
was dark.
He brought up against a wall of some sort, clanging as he hit, and he
lay there, blind from the brilliance of the flash, while his mind went
scurrying down the trail of the diagram.
The diagram, he thought - why should he have seen a diagram of the ship
he'd ridden through space, a diagram that had shown an injector out of
whack? And how could he, of all robots, recognize an injector, let alone
know there was something wrong with it. It had been a joke back home, among
the Barringtons, that he, a mechanical thing himself, should have no
© Copyright 1960 Clifford D.Simak
Prepared by: Anada Sucka, August 12, 1999
---------------------------------------------------------------
THE INVENTORY list was long. On its many pages, in his small and
precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and
all the rest of it - all the personal belongings that had been accumulated
by the Barringtons through a long family history.
And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the
last item of them all:
One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.
He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together
and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them - the
little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked
up that last visit she had made to Peking.
And having done that, his job came to an end.
He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked
across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the
family's past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon
had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece
itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of
moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon,
and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family
spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.
And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family
portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had
helped to fashion.
And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard
Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.
There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who
had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus,
Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind,
the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to
the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first
built the family fortune.
And many others - administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All
good men and true.
But this was at an end. The family had run out.
Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house - the family
room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the
library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal
and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and
aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each
of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom
where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line
of Barringtons.
The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a
house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a
false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything
within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The
rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a
last indignity, the house itself be sold.
Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He
was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.
Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple
sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one
would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And,
besides, there was the law - the law that said no robot could legally have
continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.
And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had
gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth
no hope.
"Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer
voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I
completely fail to see how your family got away with it."
"They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very
seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."
"Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There
must be a file on you..."
"The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many
influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before
they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many
other matters."
The lawyer grunted knowingly.
"What I can't quite understand," he said, "is why you should object so
bitterly. You'll not be changed entirely. You'll still be Richard Daniel."
"I would lose my memories, would I not?'
"Yes, of course you would. But memories are not too important. And
you'd collect another set."
"My memories are dear to me," Richard Daniel told him.
"They are all I have. After some six hundred years, they are my sole
worthwhile possession. Can you imagine, counselor, what it means to spend
six centuries with one family?"
"Yes, I think I can," agreed the lawyer. "But now, with the family
gone, isn't it just possible the memories may prove painful?"
"They're a comfort. A sustaining comfort. They make me feel important.
They give me perspective and a niche."
"But don't you understand? You'll need no comfort, no importance once
you're reoriented. You'll be brand new. All that you'll retain is a certain
sense of basic identity - that they cannot take away from you even if they
wished. There'll be nothing to regret. There'll be no leftover guilts, no
frustrated aspirations, no old loyalties to hound you."
"I must be myself," Richard Daniel insisted stubbornly. "I've found a
depth of living, a background against which my living has some meaning. I
could not face being anybody else."
"You'd be far better off," the lawyer said wearily. "You'd have a
better body. You'd have better mental tools. You'd be more intelligent."
Richard Daniel got up from the chair. He saw it was no use.
"You'll not inform on me?" he asked.
"Certainly not," the lawyer said. "So far as I'm concerned, you aren't
even here."
"Thank you," said Richard Daniel. "How much do I owe you?"
"Not a thing," the lawyer told him. "I never make a charge to anyone
who is older than five hundred."
He had meant it as a joke, but Richard Daniel did not smile. He had not
felt like smiling.
At the door he turned around.
"Why?" he was going to ask. "Why this silly law."
But he did not have to ask - it was not hard to see.
Human vanity, he knew. No human being lived much longer than a hundred
years, so neither could a robot. But a robot, on the other hand, was too
valuable simply to be junked at the end of a hundred years of service, so
there was this law providing for the periodic breakup of the continuity of
each robot's life. And thus no human need undergo the psychological
indignity of knowing that his faithful serving man might manage to outlive
him by several thousand years.
It was illogical, but humans were illogical.
Illogical, but kind. Kind in many different ways.
Kind, sometimes, as the Barringtons had been kind, thought Richard
Daniel. Six hundred years of kindness. It was a prideful thing to think
about. They had even given him a double name. There weren't many robots
nowadays who had double names. It was a special mark of affection and
respect.
The lawyer having failed him, Richard Daniel had sought another source
of help. Now, thinking back on it, standing in the room where Hortense
Barrington had died, he was sorry that he'd done it. For he had embarrassed
the religico almost unendurably. It had been easy for the lawyer to tell him
what he had. Lawyers had the statutes to determine their behavior, and thus
suffered little from agonies of personal decision.
But a man of the cloth is kind if he is worth his salt. And this one
had been kind instinctively as well as professionally, and that had made it
worse.
"Under certain circumstances," he had said somewhat awkwardly, "I could
counsel patience and humility and prayer. Those are three great aids to
anyone who is willing to put them to his use. But with you I am not
certain."
"You mean," said Richard Daniel, "because I am a robot." "Well, now..."
said the minister, considerably befuddled at this direct approach.
"Because I have no soul?"
"Really," said the minister miserably, "you place me at a disadvantage.
You are asking me a question that for centuries has puzzled and bedeviled
the best minds in the church."
"But one," said Richard Daniel, "that each man in his secret heart must
answer for himself."
"I wish I could," cried the distraught minister. "I truly wish I
could."
"If it is any help," said Richard Daniel, "I can tell you that
sometimes I suspect I have a soul."
And that, he could see, had been most upsetting for this kindly human.
It had been, Richard Daniel told himself, unkind of him to say it. For it
must have been confusing, since coming from himself it was not opinion only,
but expert evidence.
So he had gone away from the minister's study and come back to the
empty house to get on with his inventory work.
Now that the inventory was all finished and the papers stacked where
Dancourt, the estate administrator, could find them when be showed up in the
morning, Richard Daniel had done his final service for the Barringtons and
now must begin doing for himself.
He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him and went quietly
down the stairs and along the hallway to the little cubby, back of the
kitchen, that was his very own.
And that, he reminded himself with a rush of pride, was of a piece with
his double name and his six hundred years. There were not too many robots
who had a room, however small, that they might call their own.
He went into the cubby and turned on the light and closed the door
behind him.
And now, for the first time, he faced the grim reality of what he meant
to do.
The cloak and hat and trousers hung upon a hook and the galoshes were
placed precisely underneath them. His attachment kit lay in one corner of
the cubby and the money was cached underneath the floor board he had
loosened many years ago to provide a hiding place.
There was, he, told himself, no point in waiting. Every minute counted.
He had a long way to go and he must be at his destination before morning
light.
He knelt on the floor and pried up the loosened board, shoved in a hand
and brought out the stacks of bills, money hidden through the years against
a day of need.
There were three stacks of bills, neatly held together by elastic bands
- money given him throughout the years as tips and Christmas gifts, as
birthday presents and rewards for little jobs well done.
He opened the storage compartment located in his chest and stowed away
all the bills except for half a dozen which he stuffed into a pocket in one
hip.
He took the trousers off the hook and it was an awkward business, for
he'd never worn clothes before except when he'd tried on these very trousers
several days before. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that long-dead Uncle
Michael had been a portly man, for otherwise the trousers never would have
fit.
He got them on and zippered and belted into place, then forced his feet
into the overshoes. He was a little worried about the overshoes. No human
went out in the summer wearing overshoes. But it was the best that he could
do. None of the regular shoes he'd found in the house had been nearly large
enough.
He hoped no one would notice, but there was no way out of it. Somehow
or other, he had to cover up his feet, for if anyone should see them, they'd
be a giveaway.
He put on the cloak and it was a little short. He put on the hat and it
was slightly small, but he tugged it down until it gripped his metal skull
and that was all to the good, he told himself; no wind could blow it off.
He picked up his attachments - a whole bag full of them that he'd
almost never used. Maybe it was foolish to take them along, he thought, but
they were a part of him and by rights they should go with him. There was so
little that he really owned - just the money he had saved, a dollar at a
time, and this kit of his.
With the bag of attachments clutched underneath his arm, he closed the
cubby door and went down the hall.
At the big front door he hesitated and turned back toward the house,
but it was, at the moment, a simple darkened cave, empty of all that it once
had held. There was nothing here to stay for - nothing but the memories, and
the memories he took with him.
He opened the door and stepped out on the stoop and closed the door
behind him.
And now, he thought, with the door once shut behind him, he was on his
own. He was running off. He was wearing clothes. He was out at night,
without the permission of a master. And all of these were against the law.
Any officer could stop him, or any citizen. He had no rights at all.
And he had no one who would speak for him, now that the Barringtons were
gone.
He moved quietly down the walk and opened the gate and went slowly down
the street, and it seemed to him the house was calling for him to come back.
He wanted to go back, his mind said that he should go back, but his feet
kept going on, steadily down the street.
He was alone, he thought, and the aloneness now was real, no longer the
mere intellectual abstract he'd held in his mind for days. Here he was, a
vacant hulk, that for the moment had no purpose and no beginning and no end,
but was just an entity that stood naked in an endless reach of space and
time and held no meaning in itself.
But he walked on and with each block that he covered he slowly fumbled
back to the thing he was, the old robot in old clothes, the robot running
from a home that was a home no longer.
He wrapped the cloak about him tightly and moved on down the street and
now he hurried, for he had to hurry.
He met several people and they paid no attention to him. A few cars
passed, but no one bothered him.
He came to a shopping center that was brightly lighted and he stopped
and looked in terror at the wide expanse of open, brilliant space that lay
ahead of him. He could detour around it, but it would use up time and he
stood there, undecided, trying to screw up his courage to walk into the
light.
Finally he made up his mind and strode briskly out, with his cloak
wrapped tight about him and his hat pulled low.
Some of the shoppers turned and looked at him and he felt agitated
spiders running up and down his back. The galoshes suddenly seemed three
times as big as they really were and they made a plopping, squashy sound
that was most embarrassing.
He hurried on, with the end of the shopping area not more than a block
away.
A police whistle shrilled and Richard Daniel jumped in sudden fright
and ran. He ran in slobbering, mindless fright, with his cloak streaming out
behind him and his feet slapping on the pavement.
He plunged out of the lighted strip into the welcome darkness of a
residential section and he kept on running.
Far off he heard the siren and he leaped a hedge and tore across the
yard. He thundered down the driveway and across a garden in the back and a
dog came roaring out and engaged in noisy chase.
Richard Daniel crashed into a picket fence and went through it to the
accompaniment of snapping noises as the pickets and the rails gave way. The
dog kept on behind him and other dogs joined in.
He crossed another yard and gained the street and pounded down it. He
dodged into a driveway, crossed another yard, upset a birdbath and ran into
a clothesline, snapping it in his headlong rush.
Behind him lights were snapping on in the windows of the houses and
screen doors were banging as people hurried out to see what the ruckus was.
He ran on a few more blocks, crossed another yard and ducked into a
lilac thicket, stood still and listened. Some dogs were still baying in the
distance and there was some human shouting, but there was no siren.
He felt a thankfulness well up in him that there was no siren, and a
sheepishness, as well. For he had been panicked by himself, be knew; he had
run from shadows, he had fled from guilt.
But he'd thoroughly roused the neighborhood and even now, he knew,
calls must be going out and in a little while the place would be swarming
with police.
He'd raised a hornet's nest and he needed distance, so he crept out of
the lilac thicket and went swiftly down the street, heading for the edge of
town.
He finally left the city, and found the highway. He loped along its
deserted stretches. When a car or truck appeared, he pulled off on the
shoulder and walked along sedately. Then when the car or truck had passed,
he broke into his lope again.
He saw the spaceport lights miles before he got there.
When he reached the port, he circled off the road and came up outside a
fence and stood there in the darkness, looking.
A gang of robots was loading one great starship and there were other
ships standing darkly in their pits.
He studied the gang that was loading the ship, lugging the cargo from a
warehouse and across the area lighted by the floods. This was just the setup
he had planned on, although he had not hoped to find it immediately - he had
been afraid that he might have to hide out for a day or two before he found
a situation that he could put to use. And it was a good thing that he had
stumbled on this opportunity, for an intensive hunt would be on by now for a
fleeing robot, dressed in human clothes.
He stripped off the cloak and pulled off the trousers and the
overshoes; he threw away the hat. From his attachments bag he took out the
cutters, screwed off a hand and threaded the cutters into place. He cut the
fence and wiggled through it, then replaced the hand and put the cutters
back into the kit.
Moving cautiously in the darkness, he walked up to the warehouse,
keeping in its shadow.
It would be simple, he told himself. All he had to do was step out and
grab a piece of cargo, clamber up the ramp and down into the hold. Once
inside, it should not be difficult to find a hiding place and stay there
until the ship had reached first planet-fall.
He moved to the corner of the warehouse and peered around it and there
were the toiling robots, in what amounted to an endless chain, going up the
ramp with the packages of cargo, coming down again to get another load.
But there were too many of them and the line too tight. And the area
too well lighted. He'd never be able to break into that line.
And it would not help if he could, he realized despairingly - because
he was different from those smooth and shining creatures. Compared to them,
he was like a man in another century's dress; he and his
six-hundred-year-old body would stand out like a circus freak.
He stepped back into the shadow of the warehouse and he knew that be
had lost. All his best-laid plans, thought out in sober, daring detail, as
he had labored at the inventory, had suddenly come to naught.
It all came, he told himself, from never going out, from having no real
contact with the world, from not keeping up with robot-body fashions, from
not knowing what the score was. He'd imagined how it would be and he'd got
it all worked out and when it came down, to it, it was nothing like he
thought.
Now he'd have to go back to the hole he'd cut in the fence and retrieve
the clothing be had thrown away and hunt up a hiding place until be could
think of something else.
Beyond the corner of the warehouse he heard the harsh, dull grate of
metal, and he took another look.
The robots had broken up their line and were streaming back toward the
warehouse and a dozen or so of them were wheeling the ramp away from the
cargo port. Three humans, all dressed in uniform, were walking toward the
ship, heading for the ladder, and one of them carried a batch of papers in
his hand.
The loading was all done and the ship about to lift and here he was,
not more than a thousand feet away, and all that he could do was stand and
see it go.
There had to be a way, he told himself, to get in that ship. If he
could only do it his troubles would be over - or at least the first of his
troubles would be over.
Suddenly it struck him like a hand across the face. There was a way to
do it! He'd stood here, blubbering, when all the time there had been a way
to do it!
In the ship, he'd thought. And that was not necessary.
He didn't have to be in the ship.
He started running, out into the darkness, far out so he could circle
round and come upon the ship from the other side, so that the ship would be
between him and the flood lights on the warehouse. He hoped that there was
time.
He thudded out across the port, running in an arc, and came up to the
ship and there was no sign as yet that it was about to leave.
Frantically he dug into his attachments bag and found the things he
needed - the last things in that bag he'd ever thought he'd need. He found
the suction discs and put them on, one for each knee, one for each elbow,
one for each sole and wrist.
He strapped the kit about his waist and clambered up one of the mighty
fins, using the discs to pull himself awkwardly along. It was not easy. He
had never used the discs and there was a trick to using them, the trick of
getting one clamped down and then working loose another so that be could
climb.
But he had to do it. He had no choice but to do it. He climbed the fin
and there was the vast steel body of the craft rising far above him, like a
metal wall climbing to the sky, broken by the narrow line of a row of anchor
posts that ran lengthwise of the hull - and all that huge extent of metal
painted by the faint, illusive shine of starlight that glittered in his
eyes.
Foot by foot he worked his way up the metal wall. Like a humping
caterpillar, he squirmed his way and with each foot he gained he was a bit
more thankful.
Then he heard the faint beginning of a rumble and with the rumble came
terror. His suction cups, he knew, might not long survive the booming
vibration of the wakening rockets, certainly would not hold for a moment
when the ship began to climb.
Six feet above him lay his only hope - the final anchor post in the
long row of anchor posts.
Savagely he drove himself up the barrel of the shuddering craft,
hugging the steely surface like a desperate fly.
The rumble of the tubes built up to blot out all the world and he
climbed in a haze of almost prayerful, brittle hope. He reached that anchor
post or he was as good as dead. Should he slip and drop into that pit of
flaming gases beneath the rocket mouths and he was done for.
Once a cup came loose and he almost fell, but the others held and he
caught himself.
With a desperate, almost careless lunge, he hurled himself up the wall
of metal and caught the rung in his finger-tips and held on with a
concentration of effort that wiped out all else.
The rumble was a screaming fury now that lanced through brain and body.
Then the screaming ended and became a throaty roar of power and the
vibration left the ship entirely. From one corner of his eye he saw the
lights of the spaceport swinging over gently on their side.
Carefully, slowly, be pulled himself along the steel until he had a
better grip upon the rung, but even with the better grip he had the feeling
that some great hand had him in its fist and was swinging him in anger in a
hundred-mile-long arc.
Then the tubes left off their howling and there was a terrible silence
and the stars were there, up above him and to either side of him, and they
were steely stars with no twinkle in them. Down below, be knew, a lonely
Earth was swinging, but he could not see it.
He pulled himself up against the rung and thrust a leg beneath it and
sat up on the hull.
There were more stars than he'd ever seen before, more than he'd
dreamed there could be. They were still and cold, like hard points of light
against a velvet curtain; there was no glitter and no twinkle in them and it
was as if a million eyes were staring down at him. The Sun was underneath
the ship and over to one side; just at the edge of the left-hand curvature
was the glare of it against the silent metal, a sliver of reflected light
outlining one edge of the ship. The Earth was far astern, a ghostly
blue-green ball hanging in the void, ringed by the fleecy halo of its
atmosphere.
It was as if he were detached, a lonely, floating brain that looked out
upon a thing it could not understand nor could ever try to understand; as if
he might even be afraid of understanding it - a thing of mystery and delight
so long as he retained an ignorance of it, but something fearsome and
altogether overpowering once the ignorance had gone.
Richard Daniel sat there, flat upon his bottom, on the metal hull of
the speeding ship and he felt the mystery and delight and the loneliness and
the cold and the great uncaring and his mind retreated into a small and
huddled, compact defensive ball.
He looked. That was all there was to do. It was all right now, he
thought. But how long would he have to look at it? How long would he have to
camp out here in the open - the most deadly kind of open?
He realized for the first time that he had no idea where the ship was
going or how long it might take to get there. He knew it was a starship,
which meant that it was bound beyond the solar system, and that meant that
at some point in its flight it would enter hyperspace. He wondered, at first
academically, and then with a twinge of fear, what hyperspace might do to
one sitting naked to it. But there was little need, he thought
philosophically, to fret about it now, for in due time he'd know, and there
was not a thing that he could do about it - not a single thing.
He took the suction cups off his body and stowed them in his kit and
then with one hand he tied the kit to one of the metal rungs and dug around
in it until he found a short length of steel cable with a ring on one end
and a snap on the other. He passed the ring end underneath a rung and
threaded the snap end through it and snapped the snap onto a metal loop
underneath his armpit. Now he was secured; he need not fear carelessly
letting go and floating off the ship.
So here he was, he thought, neat as anything, going places fast, even
if he had no idea where he might be headed, and now the only thing he needed
was patience. He thought back, without much point, to what the religico had
said in the study back on Earth. Patience and humility and prayer, he'd
said, apparently not realizing at the moment that a robot has a world of
patience.
It would take a lot of time, Richard Daniel knew, to get where he was
going. But he had a lot of time, a lot more than any human, and he could
afford to waste it. There were no urgencies, he thought - no need of food or
air, or water, no need of sleep or rest... There was nothing that could
touch him.
Although, come to think of it, there might be.
There was the cold, for one. The space-hull was still fairly warm, with
one side of it picking up the heat of the Sun and radiating it around the
metal skin, where it was lost on the other side, but there would be a time
when the Sun would dwindle until it had no heat and then he'd be subjected
to the utter cold of space.
And what would the cold do to him. Might it make his body brittle?
Might it interfere with the functioning of his brain? Might it do other
things he could not even guess?
He felt the fears creep in again and tried to shrug them off and they
drew off, but they still were there, lurking at the fringes of his mind.
The cold, and the loneliness, he thought - but he was one who could
cope with loneliness. And if he couldn't, if he got too lonely, if he could
no longer stand it, he could always beat a devil's tattoo on the hull and
after a time of that someone would come out to investigate and they would
haul him in.
But that was the last move of desperation, he told himself. For if they
came out and found him, then he would be caught. Should he be forced to that
extremity, he'd have lost everything - there would then have been no point
in leaving Earth at all.
So he settled down, living out his time, keeping the creeping fears at
bay just beyond the outposts of his mind, and looking at the universe all
spread out before him.
The motors started up again with a pale blue flickering in the rockets
at the stern and although there was no sense of acceleration he knew that
the ship, now well off the Earth, had settled down to the long, hard drive
to reach the speed of light.
Once they reached that speed they would enter hyperspace. He tried not
to think of it, tried to tell himself there was not a thing to fear - but it
hung there just ahead of him, the great unknowable.
The Sun shrank until it was only one of many stars and there came a
time when he could no longer pick it out. And the cold clamped down but it
didn't seem to bother him, although he could sense the coldness.
Maybe, he said in answer to his fear, that would be the way it would be
with hyperspace as well. But he said it unconvincingly. The ship drove on
and on with the weird blueness in the tubes.
Then there was the instant when his mind went splattering across the
universe.
He was aware of the ship, but only aware of it in relation to an
awareness of much else, and it was no anchor point, no rallying position. He
was spread and scattered; he was opened out and rolled out until he was very
thin. He was a dozen places, perhaps a hundred places, all at once, and it
was confusing, and his immediate reaction was to fight back somehow against
whatever might have happened to him - to fight back and pull himself
together. The fighting did no good at all, but made it even worse, for in
certain instances it seemed to drive parts of him farther from other parts
of him and the confusion was made greater.
So he quit his fighting and his struggling and just lay there,
scattered, and let the panic ebb away and told himself he didn't care, and
wondered if he did.
Slow reason returned a dribble at a time and he could think again and
he wondered rather bleakly if this could be hyperspace and was pretty sure
it was. And if it were, he knew, he'd have a long time to live like this, a
long time in which to become accustomed to it and to orient himself, a long
time to find himself and pull himself together, a long time to understand
this situation if it were, in fact, understandable.
So he lay, not caring greatly, with no fear or wonder, just resting and
letting a fact seep into him here and there from many different points.
He knew that, somehow, his body - that part of him which housed the
rest of him - was still chained securely to the ship, and that knowledge, in
itself, he knew, was the first small step towards reorienting himself. He
had to reorient, he knew. He had to come to some sort of terms, if not to
understanding, with this situation.
He had opened up and he had scattered out - that essential part of him,
the feeling and the knowing and the thinking part of him, and he lay thin
across a universe that loomed immense in unreality.
Was this, he wondered, the way the universe should be, or was it the
unchained universe, the wild universe beyond the limiting disciplines of
measured space and time.
He started slowly reaching out, cautious as he had been in his crawling
on the surface of the ship, reaching out toward the distant parts of him, a
little at a time. He did not know how he did it, he was conscious of no
particular technique, but whatever he was doing, it seemed to work, for he
pulled himself together, bit by knowing bit, until he had gathered up all
the scattered fragments of him into several different piles.
Then he quit and lay there, wherever there might be, and tried to sneak
up on those piles of understanding that he took to be himself.
It took a while to get the hang of it, but once be did, some of the
incomprehensibility went away, although the strangeness stayed. He tried to
put it into thought and it was hard to do. The closest he could come was
that he had been unchained as well as the universe - that whatever bondage
had been imposed upon him by that chained and normal world had now become
dissolved and he no longer was fenced in by either time or space.
He could see - and know and sense - across vast distances, if distance
were the proper term, and he could understand certain facts that he had not
even thought about before, could understand instinctively, but without the
language or the skill to coalesce the facts into independent data.
Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a
different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe,
and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some
completer understanding and acceptance of it.
He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time,
but a great foreverness.
He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe
behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of
a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the
flat galactic plane.
Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and
felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him - he seemed
unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of
content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it
was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed,
there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place
apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no
place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring
stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.
There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder - and no actual
knowledge, either.
Then time came once again and suddenly his mind was stuffed back into
its cage within his metal skull and he was again one with his body, trapped
and chained and small and cold and naked.
He saw that the stars were different and that he was far from home and
just a little way ahead was a star that blazed like a molten furnace hanging
in the black.
He sat bereft, a small thing once again, and the universe reduced to
package size.
Practically, he checked the cable that held him to the ship and it was
intact. His attachments kit was still tied to its rung. Everything was
exactly as it had been before.
He tried to recall the glories he had seen, tried to grasp again the
fringe of knowledge which he had been so close to, but both the glory and
the knowledge, if there had ever been a knowledge, had faded into
nothingness.
He felt like weeping, but he could not weep, and he was too old to lie
down upon the ship and kick his heels in tantrum.
So he sat there, looking at the sun that they were approaching and
finally there was a planet that he knew must be their destination, and he
found room to wonder what planet it might be and how far from Earth it was.
He heated up a little as the ship skipped through atmosphere as an aid
to braking speed and he had some rather awful moments as it spiraled into
thick and soupy gases that certainly were a far cry from the atmosphere of
Earth. He hung most desperately to the rungs as the craft came rushing down
onto a landing field, with the hot gases of the rockets curling up about
him. But he made it safely and swiftly clambered down and darted off into
the smog-like atmosphere before anyone could see him.
Safely off, he turned and looked back at the ship and despite its
outlines being hidden by the drifting clouds of swirling gases, he could see
it clearly, not as an actual structure, but as a diagram. He looked at it
wonderingly and there was something wrong with the diagram, something
vaguely wrong, some part of it that was out of whack and not the way it
should be.
He heard the clanking of cargo haulers coming out upon the field and he
wasted no more time, diagram or not.
He drifted back, deeper in the mists, and began to circle, keeping a
good distance from the ship. Finally he came to the spaceport's edge and the
beginning of the town.
He found a street and walked down it leisurely and there was a
wrongness in the town.
He met a few hurrying robots who were in too much of a rush to pass the
time of day. But he met no humans.
And that, he knew quite suddenly, was the wrongness of the place. It
was not a human town.
There were no distinctly human buildings -no stores or residences, no
churches and no restaurants. There were gaunt shelter barracks and sheds for
the storing of equipment and machines, great sprawling warehouses and vast
industrial plants. But that was all there was. It was a bare and dismal
place compared to the streets that he had known on Earth.
It was a robot town, he knew. And a robot planet. A world that was
barred to humans, a place where humans could not live, but so rich in some
natural resource that it cried for exploitation. And the answer to that
exploitation was to let the robots do it.
Luck, he told himself. His good luck still was holding. He had
literally been dumped into a place where he could live without human
interference. Here, on this planet, he would be with his own.
If that was what he wanted. And he wondered if it was. He wondered just
exactly what it was he wanted, for he'd had no time to think of what he
wanted. He had been too intent on fleeing Earth to think too much about it.
He had known all along what he was running from, but had not considered what
he might be running to.
He walked a little further and the town came to an end. The Street
became a path and went wandering on into the wind-blown fogginess.
So he turned around and went back up the street.
There had been one barracks, he remembered, that had a TRANSIENTS sign
hung out, and be made his way to it.
Inside, an ancient robot sat behind the desk. His body was
old-fashioned and somehow familiar. And it was familiar, Richard Daniel
knew, because it was as old and battered and as out-of-date as his.
He looked at the body, just a bit aghast, and saw that while it
resembled his, there were little differences. The same ancient model,
certainly, but a different series. Possibly a little newer, by twenty years
or so, than his.
"Good evening, stranger," said the ancient robot. "You came in on the
ship?"
Richard Daniel nodded.
"You'll be staying till the next one?"
"I may be settling down," said Richard Daniel. "I may want to stay
here."
The ancient robot took a key from off a hook and laid it on the desk.
"You representing someone?"
"No," said Richard Daniel.
"I thought maybe that you were. We get a lot of representatives. Humans
can't come here, or don't want to come, so they send robots out here to
represent them."
"You have a lot of visitors?"
"Some. Mostly the representatives I was telling you about. But there
are some that are on the lam. I'd take it, mister, you are on the lam."
Richard Daniel didn't answer.
"It's all right," the ancient one assured him. "We don't mind at all,
just so you behave yourself. Some of our most prominent citizens, they came
here on the lam."
"That is fine," said Richard Daniel. "And how about yourself? You must
be on the lam as well."
"You mean this body. Well, that's a little different. This here is
punishment."
"Punishment?'
"Well, you see, I was the foreman of the cargo warehouse and I got to
goofing off. So they hauled me up and had a trial and they found me guilty.
Then they stuck me into this old body and I have to stay in it, at this
lousy job, until they get another criminal that needs punishment. They can't
punish no more than one criminal at a time because this is the only old body
that they have. Funny thing about this body. One of the boys went back to
Earth on a business trip and found this old heap of metal in a junkyard and
brought it home with him - for a joke, I guess. Like a human might buy a
skeleton for a joke, you know."
He took a long, sly look at Richard Daniel. "It looks to me, stranger,
as if your body..."
But Richard Daniel didn't let him finish.
"I take it," Richard Daniel said, "you haven't many criminals."
"No," said the ancient robot sadly, "we're generally a pretty solid
lot."
Richard Daniel reached out to pick up the key, but the ancient robot
put out his hand and covered it.
"Since you are on the lam," he said, "it'll be payment in advance."
"I'll pay you for a week," said Richard Daniel, handing him some money.
The robot gave him back his change.
"One thing I forgot to tell you. You'll have to get plasticated."
"Plasticated?"
"That's right. Get plastic squirted over you. To protect you from the
atmosphere. It plays hell with metal. There's a place next door will do it."
"Thanks. I'll get it done immediately."
"It wears off," warned the ancient one. "You have to get a new job
every week or so."
Richard Daniel took the key and went down the corridor until he found
his numbered cubicle. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was
small, but clean. It had a desk and chair and that was all it had.
He stowed his attachments bag in one corner and sat down in the chair
and tried to feel at home. But he couldn't feel at home, and that was a
funny thing - he'd just rented himself a home.
He sat there, thinking back, and tried to whip up some sense of triumph
at having done so well in covering his tracks. He couldn't.
Maybe this wasn't the place for him, he thought. Maybe he'd be happier
on some other planet. Perhaps he should go back to the ship and get on it
once again and have a look at the next planet coming up.
If he hurried, he might make it. But he'd have to hurry, for the ship
wouldn't stay longer than it took to unload the consignment for this place
and take on new cargo.
He got up from the chair, still only half decided.
And suddenly he remembered how, standing in the swirling mistiness, he
had seen the ship as a diagram rather than a ship, and as he thought about
it, something clicked inside his brain and he leaped toward the door.
For now he knew what had been wrong with the spaceship's diagram - an
injector valve was somehow out of kilter, he had to get back there before
the ship took off again.
He went through the door and down the corridor. He caught sight of the
ancient robot's startled face as he ran across the lobby and out into the
street. Pounding steadily toward the spaceport, he tried to get the diagram
into his mind again, but it would not come complete - it came in bits and
pieces, but not all of it.
And even as be fought for the entire diagram, he heard the beginning
take-off rumble.
"Wait!" he yelled. "Wait for me! You can't..."
There was a flash that turned the world pure white and a mighty
invisible wave came swishing out of nowhere and sent him reeling down the
street, falling as he reeled. He was skidding on the cobblestones and sparks
were flying as his metal scraped along the stone. The whiteness reached a
brilliance that almost blinded him and then it faded swiftly and the world
was dark.
He brought up against a wall of some sort, clanging as he hit, and he
lay there, blind from the brilliance of the flash, while his mind went
scurrying down the trail of the diagram.
The diagram, he thought - why should he have seen a diagram of the ship
he'd ridden through space, a diagram that had shown an injector out of
whack? And how could he, of all robots, recognize an injector, let alone
know there was something wrong with it. It had been a joke back home, among
the Barringtons, that he, a mechanical thing himself, should have no