But already Tobias was reaching down blindly into the darkness of the car’s interior and now there was smoke as well as smell and the area beneath the hood was a gushing redness.
He found something alive and soft and struggling and somehow got a hold on it and hauled. A girl came out; a limp, bedraggled thing she was and scared out of her wits.
«Get out of here!» Tobias yelled and pushed the man so that he tumbled off the car and scrambled up the ditchside until he reached the road.
Tobias jumped, half carrying, half dragging the girl, and behind him the car went up in a gush of flame.
They staggered up the road, the three of them, driven by the heat of the burning car. Somewhere, somehow, the man got the girl out of Tobias’ grasp and stood her on her feet. She seemed to be all right except for the trickle of darkness that ran out of her hairline, down across her face.
There were people running down the road now. Doors were banging far away and there was shouting back and forth, while the three of them stood in the road and waited, all of them just a little dazed.
And now, for the first time, Tobias saw the faces of those other two. The man, he saw, was Randy Frobisher, Millville’s football hero, and the girl was Betty Halvorsen, the musical daughter of the Baptist minister.
Those who were running down the road were getting close by now and the pillar of flame from the burning car was dying down a bit. There was no further need, Tobias told himself, for him to stick around. For it had been a great mistake, he told himself; he never should have done it.
He abruptly turned around and went humping down the road, as rapidly as he could manage short of actual running. He thought he heard one of the two standing in the road call out after him, but he paid them no attention and kept on moving, getting out of there as fast as he was able.
He reached the intersection and crossed it and left the road and went up the path to where his shack perched in all its loneliness on the hill above the swamp.
And he forgot to stagger.
But it didn’t matter now, for there was no one watching.
He felt all cold and shivery and there was a sense of panic in him. For this might spoil everything; this might jeopardize his job.
There was a whiteness sticking out of the rusty, battered mail box nailed beside the door and he stared at it with wonder, for it was very seldom that he got a piece of mail.
He took the letter from the box and went inside. He found the lamp and lit it and sat down in the rickety chair beside the table in the center of the room.
And now his time was his, he thought, to do with as he wished.
He was off the job—although, technically, that was not entirely true, for he was never off the job entirely.
He rose and took off his tattered jacket and hung it on the chair back, then opened up his shirt to reveal a hairless chest. He sought the panel in his chest and pushed against it and it slid open underneath his hand. At the sink, he took out the container and emptied the beer that he had swallowed.
Then he put the container back into his chest again and slid the panel shut.
He buttoned up his shirt.
He let his breathing die.
He became comfortably himself.
He sat quietly in the chair and let his brain run down, wiping out his day.
Then, slowly, he started up his brain again and made it a different kind of brain—a brain oriented to this private life of his, when he no longer was a drunken bum or a village conscience or a horrible example.
But tonight the day failed to be wiped out entirely and there was bitterness again—the old and acid bitterness that he should be used to protect the humans in the village against their human viciousness.
For there could be no more than one human derelict in any single village—through some strange social law there was never room for more than one of them. Old Bill or Old Charlie or Old Tobe—the pity of the people, regarded with a mingled sentiment of tolerance and disgust. And just as surely as there could not be more than one of them, there always was that one.
But take a robot, a Class One humanoid robot that under ordinary scrutiny would pass as a human being—take that robot and make him the village bum or the village idiot and you beat that social law. And it was perfectly all right for a manlike robot to be the village bum. Because in making him the bum, you spared the village a truly human bum, you spared the human race one blot against itself, you forced that potential human bum, edged out by the robot, to be acceptable. Not too good a citizen, perhaps, but at least marginally respectable.
To be a drunken bum was terrible for a human, but it was all right for a robot. Because robots had no souls. Robots didn’t count.
And the most horrible thing about it, Tobias told himself, was that you must stay in character—you must not step out of it except for that little moment, such as now, when you were absolutely sure no one could be watching.
But he’d stepped out of it this night. For a few isolated moments he’d been forced to step out of it. With two human lives at stake, there had been no choice.
Although, he told himself, there might be little harm. The two kids had been so shaken up that there was a chance they’d not known who he was. In the shock of the moment, he might have gone unrecognized.
But the terrible thing about it, he admitted to himself, was that he yearned for that recognition. For there was within himself a certain humanness that called for recognition, for any recognition, for anything at all that would lift him above the drunken bum.
And that was unworthy of himself, he scolded—unworthy of the tradition of the robot.
He forced himself to sit quietly in the chair, not breathing, not doing anything but thinking—being honest with himself, being what he was, not play-acting any more.
It would not be so bad, he thought, if it was all that he was good for—if, in being Millville’s horrible example he was working at the limit of his talent.
That, he realized, had been true at one time. It had been true when he’d signed the contract for the job. But it was true no longer. He was ready now for a bigger job.
For he had grown, in that subtle, inexplicable, curious way that robots grew.
And it wasn’t right that he should be stuck with this job when there were other, bigger jobs that he could handle easily.
But there was no remedy. There was no way out of it. There was no one he could go to. There was no way he could quit.
For in order to be effective in this job of his, it was basic that no one—no one, except a single contact, who in turn must keep the secret—know he was a robot. He must be accepted as a human. For if it should be known that he was not a human, then the effectiveness of his work would collapse entirely. As a drunken human bum he was a shield held between the town and petty, vulgar vice; as a drunken, lousy, no-good robot he would not count at all.
So no one knew, not even the village council which paid the annual fee, grumblingly, perhaps, to the Society for the Advancement and Betterment of the Human Race, not knowing for what specific purpose it might pay the fee, but fearful not to pay it. For it was not every municipality that was offered the unique and distinctive service of SABHR. Once the fee should be refused, it might be a long, long time before Millville could get on the list again.
So here he sat, he thought, with a contract to this town which would run another decade—a contract of which the town knew nothing, but binding just the same.
There was no recourse, he realized. There was no one he could go to.
There was none he could explain to, for once he had explained he’d have wiped out his total sum of service. He would have cheaply tricked the town.
And that was something no robot could ever bring himself to do. It would not be the proper thing.