He tried to find within himself some logic for this consuming passion to do the proper thing, for the bond of honor involved within a contract. But there was no clear-cut logic; it was just the way it was. It was the robot way, one of the many conditioning factors which went into a robot’s makeup.
So there was no way out of it. He faced another decade of carrying out the contract, of getting drunk, of stumbling down the street, of acting out the besotted, ambitionless, degraded human being—and all to the end that there should be no such actual human.
And being all of this, he thought, choked with bitterness, while knowing he was fit for better things, fit under his present rating for sociological engineering at the supervisor level.
He put out his arm and leaned it on the table and heard the rustle underneath his arm.
The letter. He’d forgotten it.
He picked up the envelope and looked at it and there was no return address and he was fairly certain who it might be from.
He tore it open and took out the folded sheet of paper and he had been right. The letterhead was that of the Society for the Advancement and Betterment of the Human Race.
The letter read:
Dear Associate:
You will be glad to know that your recent rating has been analyzed and that the final computation shows you to be best fitted as a co-ordinator and expediter with a beginning human colony. We feel that you have a great deal to offer in this type of employment and would be able to place you immediately if there were no other consideration.
But we know that you are under a contractual obligation and perhaps do not feel free to consider other employment at the moment.
If there should be a change in this situation, please let us know at once.
The letter was signed with an undecipherable scrawl.
Carefully, he folded the sheet and stuffed it in his pocket.
He could see it now: Out to another planet that claimed another star for sun, helping to establish a human colony, working with the colonists, not as a robot—for in sociology, one never was a robot—but as another human being, a normal human being, a member of the colony.
It would be a brand-new job and a brand-new group of people and a brand-new situation.
And it would be a straight role. No more comedy, no more tragedy. No more clowning, ever.
He got up and paced the floor.
It wasn’t right, he told himself. He shouldn’t waste another ten years here.
He owed this village nothing—nothing but his contract, a sacred obligation.
Sacred to a robot.
And here he was, tied to this tiny dot upon the map, when he might go among the stars, when he might play a part in planting among those stars the roots of human culture.
It would not be a large group that would be going out. There was no longer any massive colonizing being done. It had been tried in the early days and failed. Now the groups were small and closely tied together by common interests and old associations.
It was more, he told himself, like homesteading than colonizing. Groups from home communities went out to try their luck, even little villages sending out their bands as in the ancient past the eastern communities had sent their wagon trains into the virgin west.
And he could be in on this great adventure if he could only break his contract, if he could walk out on this village, if he could quit this petty job.
But he couldn’t. There was nothing he could do. He’d reached the bare and bitter end of ultimate frustration.
There was a knocking on the door and he stopped his pacing, stricken, for it had been years since there’d been a knock upon the door. A knock upon the door, he told himself, could mean nothing else but trouble. It could only mean that he’d been recognized back there on the road—just when he’d been beginning to believe that he’d gone unrecognized.
He went slowly to the door and opened it and there stood the four of them—the village banker, Herman Frobisher; Mrs. Halvorsen, the wife of the Baptist minister; Bud Anderson, the football coach; and Chris Lambert, the editor of the weekly paper.
And he knew by the looks of them that the trouble would be big—that here was something he could not brush lightly to one side. They had a dedicated and an earnest look about them—and as well the baffled look of people who had been very wrong and had made up their minds most resolutely to do what they could about it.
Herman held out his pudgy hand with a friendly forcefulness so overdone it was ridiculous.
«Tobe,» he said, «I don’t know how to thank you, I don’t have the words to thank you for what you did tonight.»
Tobias took his hand and gave it a quick clasp, then tried to let go of it, but the banker’s hand held on almost tearfully.
«And running off,» shrilled Mrs. Halvorsen, «without waiting to take any credit for how wonderful you were. I can’t, for the life of me, know what got into you.»
«Oh,» Tobias said uncomfortably, «it really wasn’t nothing.»
The banker let go of Tobias’ hand and the coach grabbed hold of it, almost as if he had been waiting for the chance to do so.
«Randy will be all right, thanks to you,» he said. «I don’t know what we’d have done without him, Tobe, in the game tomorrow night.»
«I’ll want a picture of you, Tobe,» said the editor. «Have you got a picture? No, I suppose you haven’t. We’ll take one tomorrow.»
«But first,» the banker said, «we’ll get you out of here.»
«Out of here?» asked Tobias, really frightened now. «But, Mr. Frobisher, this place is my home!»
«Not any more, it isn’t,» shrilled Mrs. Halvorsen. «We’re going to see that you get the chance that you never had. We’re going to talk to AA about you.»
«AA?» Tobias asked in a burst of desperation.
«Alcoholics Anonymous,» the pastor’s wife said primly. «They will help you stop your drinking.»
«But suppose,» the editor suggested, «that Tobe here doesn’t want to.»
Mrs. Halvorsen clicked her teeth, exasperated. «Of course he does,» she said. «There never was a man—»
«Now, now,» said Herman, «I think we may be going just a bit too fast. We’ll talk to Tobe tomorrow—»
«Yeah,» said Tobias, reaching for the door, «talk to me tomorrow.»
«No, you don’t,» said Herman. «You’re coming home with me. The wife’s got a supper waiting and we have a room for you and you can stay with us until we get this straightened out.»
«I don’t see,» protested Tobias, «there’s much to straighten out.»
«But there is,» said Mrs. Halvorsen. «This town has never done a thing for you. We’ve all stood calmly by and watched you stagger past. And it isn’t right. I’ll talk to Mr. Halvorsen about it.»
The banker put a companionable arm around Tobias’s shoulder.
«Come on, Tobe,» he said. «We never can repay you, but we’ll do the best we can.»
He lay in bed, with a crisp white sheet beneath him and a crisp white sheet on top and now he had the job, when everyone was asleep, of sneaking to the bathroom and flushing all the food they’d insisted he should eat down the toilet bowl.
And he didn’t need white sheets. He didn’t need a bed. He had one in his shack, but it was just for the looks of things. But here he had to lie between white sheets and Herman even had insisted that he take a bath and he had needed one, all right, but it had been quite a shock.
His whole life was all loused up, he told himself. His job was down the drain. He’d failed, he thought, and failed most miserably. And now he’d never get a chance to go on a colonizing venture—even after his present job was all wrapped up and done, he’d never have a chance at a really good job.