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