he’d done to Hubert? What if they took his brain and tucked it away
somewhere for a year or two – or for a hundred years? It might be, he told
himself, nothing more than their simple way of justice.
He hung onto himself and tried to fight the fear away, but the fear
ebbed back and forth like a restless tide.
Time stretched out and out – far too long a time, far more time than
one would need to switch a brain from one body to another. Although, he told
himself, that might not be true at all. For in his present state he had no
way in which to measure time. He had no external reference points by which
to determine time.
Then suddenly he had eyes.
And he knew everything was all right.
One by one his senses were restored to him and he was back inside a
body and he felt awkward in the body, for he was unaccustomed to it.
The first thing that he saw was his old and battered body propped into
its corner and he felt a sharp regret at the sight of it and it seemed to
him that he had played a dirty trick upon it. It deserved, he told himself,
a better fate than this – a better fate than being left behind to serve as a
shabby jailhouse on this outlandish planet. It had served him well for six
hundred years and he should not be deserting it. But he was deserting it. He
was, he told himself in contempt, becoming very expert at deserting his old
friends. First the house back home and now his faithful body.
Then he remembered something else – all that money in the body!
“What’s the matter, Hubert?” Andy asked.
He couldn’t leave it there, Richard Daniel told himself, for he needed
it. And besides, if he left it there, someone would surely find it later and
it would be a give-away. He couldn’t leave it there and it might not be safe
to forthrightly claim it. If he did, this other robot, this Andy, would
think he’d been stealing on the job or running some side racket. He might
try to bribe the other, but one could never tell how a move like that might
go. Andy might be full of righteousness and then there’d be hell to pay.
And, besides, he didn’t want to part with any of the money.
All at once he had it – he knew just what to do. And even as he thought
it, he made Andy into a diagram.
That connection there, thought Richard Daniel, reaching out his arm to
catch the falling diagram that turned into a robot. He eased it to the floor
and sprang across the room to the side of his old body. In seconds he had
the chest safe open and the money safely out of it and locked inside his
present body.
Then he made the robot on the floor become a diagram again and got the
connection back the way that it should be.
Andy rose shakily off the floor. He looked at Richard Daniel in some
consternation.
“What happened to me?” he asked in a frightened voice. Richard Daniel
sadly shook his head. “I don’t know. You just keeled over. I started for the
door to yell for help, then I heard you stirring and you were all right.”
Andy was plainly puzzled. “Nothing like this ever happened to me
before,” he said.
“If I were you,” counseled Richard Daniel, “I’d have myself checked
over. You must have a faulty relay or a loose connection.”
“I guess I will,” the other one agreed. “It’s downright dangerous.”
He walked slowly to the desk and picked up the other brain, started
with it toward the battered body leaning in the corner.
Then he stopped and said: “Look, I forgot. I was supposed to tell you.
You better get up to the warehouse. Another ship is on its way. It will be
coming in any minute now.”
“Another one so soon?”
“You know how it goes,” Andy said, disgusted. “They don’t even try to
keep a schedule here. We won’t see one for months and then there’ll be two
or three at once.”
“Well, thanks,” said Richard Daniel, going out the door. He went
swinging down the street with a newborn confidence. And he had a feeling
that there was nothing that could lick him, nothing that could stop him.
For he was a lucky robot!
Could all that luck, he wondered, have been gotten out in hyperspace,
as his diagram ability, or whatever one might call it, had come from
hyperspace? Somehow hyperspace had taken him and twisted him and changed
him, had molded him anew, had made him into a different robot than he had
been before.
Although, so far as luck was concerned, he had been lucky all his
entire life. He’d had good luck with his human family and had gained a lot
of favors and a high position and had been allowed to live for six hundred
years. And that was a thing that never should have happened. No matter how
powerful or influential the Barringtons had been, that six hundred years
must be due in part to nothing but sheer 1uck.
In any case, the luck and the diagram ability gave him a solid edge
over all the other robots he might meet. Could it, he asked himself, give
him an edge on Man as well?
No – that was a thought he should not think, for it was blasphemous.
There never was a robot that would be the equal of a man.
But the thought kept on intruding and he felt not nearly so contrite
over this leaning toward bad taste, or poor judgment, whichever it might be,
as it seemed to him he should feel.
As he neared the spaceport, he began meeting other robots and some of
them saluted him and called him by the name of Hubert and others stopped and
shook him by the hand and told him they were glad that he was out of pokey.
This friendliness shook his confidence. He began to wonder if his luck
would hold, for some of the robots, he was certain, thought it rather odd
that he did not speak to them by name, and there had been a couple of
remarks that he had some trouble fielding. He had a feeling that when he
reached the warehouse he might be sunk without a trace, for he would know
none of the robots there and he had not the least idea what his duties might
include. And, come to think of it, he didn’t even know where the warehouse
was.
He felt the panic building in him and took a quick involuntary look
around, seeking some method of escape. For it became quite apparent to him
that he must never reach the warehouse.
He was trapped, he knew, and he couldn’t keep on floating, trusting to
his luck. In the next few minutes he’d have to figure something.
He started to swing over into a side street, not knowing what he meant
to do, but knowing he must do something, when he heard the mutter far above
him and glanced up quickly to see the crimson glow of belching rocket tubes
shimmering through the clouds.
He swung around again and sprinted desperately for the spaceport and
reached it as the ship came chugging down to a steady landing. It was, he
saw, an old ship. It had no burnish to it and it was blunt and squat and
wore a hangdog look.
A tramp, he told himself, that knocked about from port to port, picking
up whatever cargo it could, with perhaps now and then a paying passenger
headed for some backwater planet where there was no scheduled service.
He waited as the cargo port came open and the ramp came down and then
marched purposefully out onto the field, ahead of the straggling cargo crew,
trudging toward the ship. He had to act, he knew, as if he had a perfect
right to walk into the ship as if he knew exactly what he might be doing. If
there were a challenge he would pretend he didn’t hear it and simply keep on
going.
He walked swiftly up the ramp, holding back from running, and plunged
through the accordion curtain that served as an atmosphere control. His feet
rang across the metal plating of the cargo hold until he reached the catwalk
and plunged down it to another cargo level.
At the bottom of the catwalk he stopped and stood tense, listening.
Above him he heard the clang of a metal door and the sound of footsteps
coming down the walk to the level just above him. That would be the purser
or the first mate, he told himself, or perhaps the captain, coming down to
arrange for the discharge of the cargo.