Sheridan saw that Napoleon had set up his outdoors stove again.
He walked over to them and they turned their heads and greeted him, then went back to their game.
Sheridan watched them for a while and then walked slowly off.
He shook his head in some bewilderment – a continuing bewilderment over this robotic fascination with all the games of chance. It was, he supposed, just one of the many things that a human being – any human being – would never understand.
For gambling seemed entirely pointless from a robotic point of view. They had no property, no money, no possessions. They had no need of any and they had no wish for any – and yet they gambled madly.
It might be, he told himself, no more than an aping of their fellow humans. By his very nature, a robot was barred effectively from participating in most of the human vices. But gambling was something that he could do as easily and perhaps more efficiently than any human could.
But what in the world, he wondered, did they get out of it? No gain, no profit, for there were no such things as gain or profit so far as a robot was concerned. Excitement, perhaps? An outlet for aggressiveness?
Or did they keep a phantom score within their mind – mentally chalking up their gains and loss – and did a heavy winner at a game of chance win a certain prestige that was not visible to Man, that might, in fact, be carefully hidden from a man?
A man, he thought, could never know his robots in their entirety and that might be as well – it would be an unfair act to strip the final shreds of individuality from a robot.
For if the robots owed much to Man – their conception and their manufacture and their life – by the same token Man owed as much, or even more, to robots.
Without the robots, Man could not have gone as far or fast, or as effectively, out into the Galaxy. Sheer lack of transportation for skilled manpower alone would have held his progress to a crawl.
But with the robots there was no shipping problem.
And with the transmogs there was likewise no shortage of the kind of brains and skills and techniques – as there would otherwise have been – necessary to cope with the many problems found on the far-flung planets.
He came to the edge of the camp area and stood, with the lights behind him, facing out into the dark from which came the sound of running waves and the faint moaning of the wind.
He tilted back his head and stared up at the sky and marveled once again, as he had marveled many other times on many other planets, at the sheer, devastating loneliness and alienness of unfamiliar stars.
Man pinned his orientation to such fragile things, he thought – to the way the stars were grouped, to how a flower might smell, to the color of a sunset.
But this, of course, was not entirely unfamiliar ground. Two human expeditions already had touched down. And now the third had come, bringing with it a cargo sled piled high with merchandise.
He swung around, away from the lake, and squinted at the area just beyond the camp and there the cargo was, piled in heaps and snugged down with tough plastic covers from which the starlight glinted. It lay upon the alien soil like a herd of humpbacked monsters bedded for the night.
There was no ship built that could handle that much cargo – no ship that could carry more than a dribble of the merchandise needed for interstellar trade.
For that purpose, there was the cargo sled.
The sled, set in an orbit around the planet of its origin, was loaded by a fleet of floaters, shuttling back and forth. Loaded, the sled was manned by robots and given the start on its long journey by the expedition ship. By the dint of the engines on the sled itself and the power of the expedition ship, the speed built up and up.
There was a tricky point when one reached the speed of light, but after that it became somewhat easier – although, for interstellar travel, there was need of speed many times in excess of the speed of light.
And so the sled sped on, following close behind the expedition ship, which served as a pilot craft through that strange gray area where space and time were twisted into something other than normal space and time.
Without robots, the cargo sleds would have been impossible; no human crew could ride a cargo ship and maintain the continuous routine of inspection that was necessary.
Sheridan swung back toward the lake again and wondered if he could actually see the curling whiteness of the waves or if it were sheer imagination. The wind was moaning softly and the stranger stars were there, and out beyond the waters the natives huddled in their villages with the big red barns looming in the starlit village squares.
II
In the morning, the robots gathered around the conference table beneath the gay pavilion tent and Sheridan and Hezekiah lugged out the metal transmog boxes labeled SPECIAL-GARSON IV.
“Now I think,” said Sheridan, “that we can get down to business, if you gentlemen will pay attention to me.” He opened one of the transmog boxes. “In here, we have some transmogs tailor-made for the job that we’re to do. Because we had prior knowledge of this planet, it was possible to fabricate this special set. So on this job we won’t start from scratch, as we are often forced to do…”
“Cut out the speeches, Steve,” yelled Reuben, “and let’s get started with this business.”
“Let him talk,” said Abraham. “He certainly has the right to, just like any one of us.”
“Thank you, Abe,” Sheridan said.
“Go ahead,” said Gideon. “Rube’s just discharging excess voltage.”
“These transmogs are basically sales transmogs, of course. They will provide you with the personality and all the techniques of a salesman. But, in addition to that, they contain as well all the data pertaining to the situation here and the language of the natives, plus a mass of planetary facts.”
He unlocked another of the boxes and flipped back the lid. “Shall we get on with it?” he asked.
“Let’s get going,” demanded Reuben. “I’m tired of this spacehand transmog.”
Sheridan made the rounds, with Hezekiah carrying the boxes for him.
Back at his starting point, he shoved aside the boxes, filled now with spacehand and other assorted transmogs. He faced the crew of salesmen.
“How do they feel?” he asked.
“They feel okay,” said Lemuel. “You know, Steve, I never realized until now how dumb a spacehand is.”
“Pay no attention to him,” Abraham said, disgusted. “He always makes that crack.”
Maximilian said soberly: “It shouldn’t be too bad. These people have been acclimated to the idea of doing business with us. There should be no initial sales resistance. In fact, they may be anxious to start trading.”
“Another thing,” Douglas pointed out. “We have the kind of merchandise they’ve evinced interest in. We won’t have to waste our time in extensive surveys to find out what they want.”
“The market pattern seems to be a simple one,” said Abraham judiciously. “There should be no complications. The principal thing, it would appear, is the setting of a proper rate of exchange – how many podars they must expect to pay for a shovel or a hoe or other items that we have.”
“That will have to come,” said Sheridan, “by a process of trial and error.”
“We’ll have to bargain hard,” Lemuel said, “in order to establish a fictitious retail price, then let them have it wholesale. There are many times when that works effectively.”
Abraham rose from his chair. “Let’s get on with it. I suppose, Steve, that you will stay in camp.”
Sheridan nodded. “I’ll stay by the radio. I’ll expect reports as soon as you can send them.”
The robots got on with it. They scrubbed and polished one another until they fairly glittered. They brought out fancy dress hardware and secured it to themselves with magnetic clamps. There were colorful sashes and glistening rows of metals and large chunks of jewelry not entirely in the best of taste, but designed to impress the natives.
They got out their floaters and loaded up with samples from the cargo dump. Sheridan spread out a map and assigned each one a village. They checked their radios. They made sure they had their order boards.
By noon, they all were off.
Sheridan went back to the tent and sat down in his camp chair. He stared down the shelving beach to the lake, sparkling in the light of the noon-high sun.
Napoleon brought his lunch and hunkered down to talk, gathering his white cook’s apron carefully in his lap so it would not touch the ground. He pushed his tall white cap to a rakish angle.