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
aptitude at all for mechanical contraptions. And he could have saved those
people and the ship – he could have saved them all if he’d immediately
recognized the significance of the diagram. But he’d been too slow and
stupid and now they all were dead.
The darkness had receded from his eyes and he could see again and he
got slowly to his feet, feeling himself all over to see how badly he was
hurt. Except for a dent or two, he seemed to be all right.
There were robots running in the street, heading for the spaceport,
where a dozen fires were burning and where sheds and other structures had
been flattened by the blast.
Someone tugged at his elbow and he turned around. It was the ancient
robot.
“You’re the lucky one,” the ancient robot said. “You got off it just in
time.”
Richard Daniel nodded dumbly and had a terrible thought:
What if they should think he did it? He had gotten off the ship; he had
admitted that he was on the lam; he had rushed out suddenly, just a few
seconds before the ship exploded. It would be easy to put it all together –
that he had sabotaged the ship, then at the last instant had rushed out,
remorseful, to undo what he had done. On the face of it, it was damning
evidence.
But it was all right as yet, Richard Daniel told himself. For the
ancient robot was the only one that knew – he was the only one he’d talked
to, the only one who even knew that he was in town.
There was a way, Richard Daniel thought – there was an easy way. He
pushed the thought away, but it came back. You are on your own, it said. You
are already beyond the law. In rejecting human law, you made yourself an
outlaw. You have become fair prey. There is just one law for you – self
preservation.
But there are robot laws, Richard Daniel argued. There are laws and
courts in this community. There is a place for justice.
Community law, said the leech clinging in his brain, provincial law,
little more than tribal law – and the stranger’s always wrong.
Richard Daniel felt the coldness of the fear closing down upon him and
he knew, without half thinking, that the leech was right.
He turned around and started down the street, heading for the
transients barracks. Something unseen in the street caught his foot and he
stumbled and went down. He scrabbled to his knees, hunting in the darkness
on the cobblestones for the thing that tripped him. It was a heavy bar of
steel, some part of the wreckage that had been hurled this far. He gripped
it by one end and arose.
“Sorry,” said the ancient robot. “You have to watch your step.”
And there was a faint implication in his word – a hint of something
more than the words had said, a hint of secret gloating in a secret
knowledge.
You have broken other laws, said the leech in Richard Daniel’s brain.
What of breaking just one more? Why, if necessary, not break a hundred more.
It is all or nothing. Having come this far, you can’t afford to fail. You
can allow no one to stand in your way now.
The ancient robot half turned away and Richard Daniel lifted up the bar
of steel, and suddenly the ancient robot no longer was a robot, but a
diagram. There, with all the details of a blueprint, were all the working
parts, all the mechanism of the robot that walked in the street before him.
And if one detached that single bit of wire, if one burned out that coil, if
– Even as he thought it, the diagram went away and there was the robot, a
stumbling, failing robot that clanged on the cobblestones.
Richard Daniel swung around in terror, looking up the street, but there
was no one near.
He turned back to the fallen robot and quietly knelt beside him. He
gently put the bar of steel down into the street. And he felt a thankfulness
– for, almost miraculously, he had not killed.
The robot on the cobblestones was motionless. When Richard Daniel
lifted him, he dangled. And yet he was all right. All anyone had to do to
bring him back to life was to repair whatever damage had been done his body.
And that served the purpose, Richard Daniel told himself, as well as killing
would have done.
He stood with the robot in his arms, looking for a place to hide him.
He spied an alley between two buildings and darted into it. One of the
buildings, he saw, was set upon stone blocks sunk into the ground, leaving a
clearance of a foot or so. He knelt and shoved the robot underneath the
building. Then he stood up and brushed the dirt and dust from his body.