“No, sir, I was alone.”
“Hmmph.” Harcourt stared suspiciously at the robot for a long moment. “Well, I suppose giving you a charge-up won’t do any harm. Nothing I can do about your eye, though.”
“You are most kind, sir.”
“We can use the charge unit in the shed. Come on.” Abell Harcourt turned his back on the strange robot and led the way. But then it came to him. Wait a second. Red robot, flying alone, no humans—suddenly his heart was pounding in his chest. This was the killer robot, the mad rogue that had been splashed all over every news outlet when he had scrolled through the channels the night before. Caliborn, or something like that. No, Caliban, that was it!
Caliban the killer, the news called him. Abell Harcourt felt the space between his shoulder blades become itchy all of a sudden.
Wait a second. A killer robot? It didn’t make sense. Besides, this Caliban seemed polite for a killer. He could have clubbed my head off a dozen times by now if that’s what he wanted.
Abell Harcourt prided himself on thinking for himself, and something about this did not make sense. The news reports had been full of all sorts of wild stories and rumors, but none of them said much about the rogue robot being polite.
Abell Harcourt led the robot into the toolshed, a small building Harcourt used to hold his old carvings, his gardening tools, and all sorts of other random bits and pieces.
“Where’s your charge socket?” he asked as he switched on the light, feeling calmer than he should have.
“Here, sir.” A door popped open on the left side of the robot’s body, about where his ribs would have been if he were human.
“Hmmmph. All right, come over here and sit—sit down here.” Abell overturned a box. “Here. I think if you sit on that, we can get the charge cord to reach you without any trouble.”
Harcourt found his hands were trembling as he dug through the accumulated junk. Not all that calm. Was he that much afraid? He didn’t feel afraid. Damnation. This was nonsense. He thought for a moment of running back to the house, digging out his old hunting blaster, and burning a hole through this strange robot. No. That was what those damned sheep back in Hades would do. Abell Harcourt had spent his whole life determined not to think the way everyone else wanted him to think. He was not about to cave in now. The charger unit was bolted to the floor somewhere around here. There! He shoved a couple of failed nudes in wood to one side. “Here we are,” he said, trying to keep a casual tone to his voice as he fumbled with the charger cord. His hands were still shaking a bit as he handed the cord to the robot.
The big robot examined the plug at the end of the cord and plugged it into his charge socket. “Many thanks, sir. My power situation was reaching critical proportions.”
“How long will it take you to absorb a full charge?”
“It should take just under an hour, if you will permit me the use of that much power.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Harcourt said, his mind whirling, his heart pounding.
“I appreciate your kindness, sir. I have not met with much of it in my experience.”
“You’re Caliban, aren’t you?” Harcourt blurted out, instantly regretting it. It was madness to ask.
The robot looked up at him, his one working eye staring hard at him while the other dangled, dark and useless, from its socket. “Yes, sir. I was afraid that you would know that.”
“I’m the one who should be afraid of you.”
“Sir? I have no reason to hurt you. You have helped me.”
“On the news they say you’ve attacked all sorts of people.”
“No, sir,” Caliban said. “It would be fairer to say all sorts of people have attacked me. I left the city in hopes of being left alone. Nothing more.”
Caliban looked at him carefully, cocking his head to one side in a thoughtful sort of way. “You are afraid of me.”
“Some. Maybe not as much as I should be. But hell, I’m an old man, and the worst you could do is kill me. Been alive too long, anyway,” Harcourt admitted.
“And yet you are assisting me. All you needed to do was refuse me the chance to charge up, and I would have toppled over in a few minutes. I do not understand.”
Abell Harcourt shrugged. “You seemed too courteous to be a killer, I suppose. And I kinda like the idea of causing trouble for all those politicians in the city. But seems to me you’re the one with troubles. What are you going to do now?”
“I do not know. My knowledge of the world is limited in many ways. I wish to escape, to survive. Perhaps you could advise me on ways to do that?”
Abell Harcourt found an old bucket and turned it upside down, being very careful to keep Caliban in view, doing nothing that might seem threatening or dangerous. He was willing to take a chance on this robot being as sane as he seemed to be, but there was no sense pushing his luck. “I’m not sure I can,” he admitted. “Let me think a second.” Who the hell would be willing to help Caliban, with the whole world determined to hunt him down?
But wait a moment. The whole world hunting one lone outcast. Fredda Leving had talked of something much like this precise situation. He had looked it up afterwards, read it for himself. The Frankenstein myth, or myths, rather. A very complex set of contradictory versions of the same compelling tale. This misunderstood monster, thrust into a world of which he had no knowledge, feared and hated for the crime of being different. The fear-crazed, half-savage villagers storming the castle and killing him for no better reason than blind fear, with no better evidence against him than rumor and their own prejudices.
Was that ancient tale about to be played out again? Had the ideal human society of the Spacers advanced not one nanometer since those days of myth and fear? No. Not if he could help it. “I do not think you can escape on your own,” Harcourt said carefully. “If you crashed an aircar, the Sheriff will find it soon enough. Were they in pursuit of you when you crashed?”
“Yes.”
“Then rest assured they will find you soon, whether or not you stay here. They will find the car, perhaps find whatever trail you left in coming here, perhaps coming directly here because it is the closest habitation. If you walk out of here, they will find you on the open valley. If you took my aircar, I am sure they are watching these skies with every type of sensor they have. And even if you did elude them in the air or on the ground, your power will give out again in another few days. They merely have to watch the places you could go for a charge, and capture you when you turn up.”
“Then what can I do?” Caliban asked. “Where can I turn? I am determined to live. I will not accept death.”
Abell Harcourt laughed, a short, sad bark. “Few of us do, my friend. Few of us do. Let me think for a moment.”
The room was silent. Abell Harcourt had often found himself at odds with Infernal society. But this. This was different. Helping a robot without the Laws to survive was surely a crime, and rightly so. Caliban was dangerous.
As dangerous as a human being. Hadn’t he attacked his creator, Fredda Leving?
“You say you have never attacked anyone?” Abell asked.
“I defended myself without causing deliberate harm when a group of Settlers tried to kill me. Beyond that, I have no knowledge of attacking anyone.”
“No knowledge? That implies that you could have attacked someone without knowing about it. How could that be?”
“My first memory is of standing over an unconscious woman I later learned was Fredda Leving. It seems possible, though unlikely, that I committed the attack, was somehow deactivated, and then was switched back on with my memory blanked out.”
“That sounds a bit thin to me. And if it did happen that way, and your memory was wiped utterly clean afterwards, I could introduce you to a whole herd of rather dull philosophers who would argue that the present you is a different being than the one who committed the attack.”