Heinlein, Robert A – Have Space Suit will Travel

“That guy talks too much. What’s new?”

“Nothing. I ate and you didn’t come back, so I took a nap. You woke me. What did you find out?”

“Let me order dinner and I’ll tell you while I eat.”

I was chasing the last bit of gravy when a bellhop robot came for us. It was like the other one except that it had in glowing gold on its front that triangle with three spirals. “Follow me,” it said in English.

I looked at Peewee. “Didn’t the Mother Thing say she was coming back?”

“Why, I thought so.”

The machine repeated, “Follow me. Your presence is required.”

I laid my ears back. I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn’t have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. “Go climb a rope!” I said. “You’ll have to drag me.”

This is not what to say to a robot. It did.

Peewee yelled, “Mother Thing! Where are you? Help us!”

Her birdsong came out of the machine. (“It’s all right, dears. The servant will lead you to me.”)

I quit struggling and started to walk. That refugee from an appliance dealer took us into another lift, then into a corridor whose walls whizzed past as soon as we entered. It nudged us through an enormous archway topped by the triangle and spirals and herded us into a pen near one wall. The pen was not apparent until we moved-more of that annoying solid air.

It was the biggest room I have ever been in, triangular, unbroken by post or pillar, with ceiling so high and walls so distant that I half expected local thunderstorms. An enormous room makes me feel like an ant; I was glad to be near a wall. The room was not empty-hundreds in it-but it looked empty because they were all near the walls; the giant floor was bare.

But there were three wormfaces out in the center-Wormface’s trial was in progress.

I don’t know if our own Wormface was there. I would not have known even if they had not been a long way off as the difference between two wormfaces is the difference between having your throat cut and being beheaded. But, as we learned, the presence or absence of the individual offender was the least important part of a trial. Wormface was being tried, present or not-alive or dead.

The Mother Thing was speaking. I could see her tiny figure, also far out on the floor but apart from the wormfaces. Her birdsong voice reached me faintly but I heard her words clearly-in English; from somewhere near us her translated words were piped to us. The feel of her was in the English translation just as it was in her bird tones.

She was telling what she knew of wormface conduct, as dispassionately as if describing something under a microscope, like a traffic officer testifying: “At 9:17 on the fifth, while on duty at-” etc. The facts. The Mother Thing was finishing her account of events on Pluto. She chopped it off at the point of explosion.

Another voice spoke, in English. It was flat with a nasal twang and reminded me of a Vermont grocer we had dealt with one summer when I was a kid. He was a man who never smiled nor frowned and what little he said was all in the same tone, whether it was, “She is a good woman,” or, “That man would cheat his own son,” or, “Eggs are fifty-nine cents,” cold as a cash register. This voice was that sort.

It said to the Mother Thing: “Have you finished?”

“I have finished.”

“The other witnesses will be heard. Clifford Russell-”

I jumped, as if that grocer had caught me in the candy jar.

The voice went on: “-listen carefully.” Another voice started.

My own-it was the account I had dictated, flat on my back on Vega Five.

But it wasn’t all of it; it was just that which concerned wormfaces. Adjectives and whole sentences had been cut-as if someone had taken scissors to a tape recording. The facts were there; what I thought about them was missing.

It started with ships landing in the pasture back of our house; it ended with that last wormface stumbling blindly down a hole. It wasn’t long, as so much had been left out-our hike across the Moon, for example. My description of Wormface was left in but had been trimmed so much that I could have been talking about Venus de Milo instead of the ugliest thing in creation.