His face was contorted with rage. “You have no right to ask,” he screeched. “It is bad enough without you asking it.”
“We have every right to ask,” I said. “We need to know exactly what is going on. I’ll give you about five seconds.”
He didn’t take five seconds. He legs collapsed and he sat down hard upon the floor. He wrapped his scrawny arms about his middle, hard, and rocked back and forth as if he had the bellyache.
“I’ll tell,” he moaned. “Do not shoot-I’ll tell. But the shame of it! The shame, the shame, the shame.”
He looked up at me with beseeching eyes. “I cannot lie,” he said. “If I could, I would. But there is someone here who would know if I were lying.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It is me,” said Hoot.
“What have you got?” I asked “A built-in lie detector?”
“One of my feeble capabilities,” said Hoot. “Do not ask me how, for I cannot tell you. Deficiencies I have in amplitude, but of this and several others I have good command. And this personage, aware of it, has been telling a semblance of the truth, although not in all its fullness.”
The gnome was still staring up at me. “It seems that in times like this,” he pleaded, “us humanoids should somehow stick together. There is a common bond…”
I said, “Not between you and I, there isn’t.”
“You are being hard on him,” said Sara.
“Miss Foster,” I said, “I haven’t even started. I intend to hear this.”
“But if he has any reason. . .”
“He hasn’t any reason. Have you a reason, Buster?” He had a good look at me, then he shook his head.
“My pride is in the dust,” he said. “The memories of my ancestors are besmirched. It has been so long-we pretended for so long that at times even we ourselves believed it-that we were the ones who raised this wondrous city. And if you had let me alone, if you had never come, I finally could have died believing it, warm in the pretence that it were we who built it. Then it would have been all over, it would not have mattered if someone, or all the universe, should know we were not the architects. For I am the last of us and there is no one further to whom it will ever matter. There are no others after me. The duties I’ve performed then will be passed on to the hobbies and in the fullness of time they may find some other to whom they can pass those duties on. For there must be someone here to warn and save those who arrive upon this planet.”
I looked toward Dobbin. “Could you tell me,” I asked, “what this is all about?”
“Nothing I will tell you, sire,” said Dobbin. “You come to us with a heavy hand. We save your life by putting you in another world, then you suspicion we will not get you out. You are incensed greatly when you find your benefactor satisfying no more than normal curiosity in an examination of your luggage. And you talk of the giving of five seconds and you throw your weight around and act vastly ungracious in every sort of way and you. . .”
“That’s enough from you!” I shouted. “I won’t take that kind of talk from a crummy robot!”
“We not be robots,” Dobbin primly said. “I have told you, yet and yet again, that we be but simple hobbies.”
So we were back to that again, to this ridiculous assertion. This strange and stubborn pride. If I’d not been so sore at them, I would have bust out laughing. But as it stood, I’d had about as much of what was going on as I was able to take.
I reached down and grabbed the gnome by the slack of his robe that hung about his chest and lifted him. He dangled and his scrawny legs kicked and kept on kicking as if he were trying to run, but couldn’t, since his feet were in the air.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I told him. “I don’t know what it is all about and I don’t give a damn, but you’re giving us what we need and without any quibbling. If you don’t, I’ll snap your filthy neck.”
“Look out!” screamed Sara and as I jerked my head around, I saw the hobbies charging us, rocking forward on their rear rockers and their front rockers lifted menacingly.
I threw the gnome away. I didn’t look where I was throwing him. I just heaved him out of there and brought up my gun, remembering, with a sinking feeling, the lack of impression the laser beam had made upon that crystal landing field.. If the hobbies were fabricated of the same material, and it looked as if they were, I’d do just as well by standing off and pegging rocks at them.
But even as I brought the rifle up, Hoot scurried quickly forward and as he scurried forward, suddenly he blazed. That’s an awkward way of saying it, but I can’t think of any other way of describing it. There he was, scampering forward, his little feet clicking on the floor, then his body quivered with a bluish sort of haze, as if he were an electrical transformer that had gone haywire. The air seemed to shake and everything did a funny sort of jig, then it all was over and the way it was before. Except that all the hobbies were piled into a far corner of the room, all tangled up together, with their rockers waving in the air. I hadn’t seen them move-they just suddenly were there. It was as if they had been moved without actually traveling through space. One instant they had been charging us, with their rockers lifted, the next instant they were jammed into the corner.
“They be all right,” said Hoot, apologetically. “They damaged not at all. They be discommoded for the moment only. They be of use again. Sorry for surprise, but need of moving rapidly.”
The gnome was picking himself up slowly from the tangle of barrels and boxes and baskets where I had thrown him and I could see, just by looking at him, he had no fight left in him. Neither had the hobbies.
“Tuck,” I said, “get moving. Get the stuff together. As soon as we can get the hobbies loaded, we are moving out.”
FIVE
The city pressed close. It towered on every side. Its walls were straight up into the sky and where they stopped (if they did stop, for down at their base one had the feeling he could not be sure) there existed only a narrow strip of blue, sky so far and faint that it faded out almost to the whiteness of the walls. The narrow street did not run straight; it jogged and twisted, a trickle of a street that ran between the boulders that were buildings. The buildings all were the same. There was slight difference among them. There was no such a concept as architecture, unless one could call straight lines and massiveness a kind of architecture.
Everything was white, even the floor of the street we followed-and the floor could not be thought of as paving; it was, instead, a floor, a slab that extended between the buildings as if it were a part of them, and a slab that seemed to run on forever and forever, without a single joint or seam. There seemed no end to it, nor to the city either. One had the feeling that he would never leave the city, that he was caught and trapped and that there was no way out.
“Captain,” said Sara, walking along beside me, “I’m not entirely sure I approve of the manner in which you handle things.”
I didn’t bother to answer her. I knew that dissatisfaction with me had been nibbling at her for days-on board the ship and after we had landed. Sooner or later, it was certain that she would get around to chewing on me about it and there was nothing I could have said that would have made a difference.
I threw a glance over my shoulder and saw that the others were coming along behind us-Smith and Tuck riding two of the-hobbies and the rest of them loaded with our supplies and tins of water. Behind the hobbies came Hoot, like a dog hazing a flock of sheep, and at times sidewheeling along the way a dog will run. His body was built low to the ground and on each side of it he had a couple of dozen stubby legs, like a centipede, and I knew that so long as he was back there behind them, the hobbies would try no monkey business. They were scared pink of him.
“You are heavy handed,” Sara said when I didn’t answer her. “You simply bull ahead. You have absolutely no finesse and I think in time that can lead to trouble.”