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.”