He plunged out of the lighted strip into the welcome darkness of a residential section and he kept on running.
Far off he heard the siren and he leaped a hedge and tore across the yard. He thundered down the driveway and across a garden in the back and a dog came roaring out and engaged in noisy chase.
Richard Daniel crashed into a picket fence and went through it to the accompaniment of snapping noises as the pickets and the rails gave way. The dog kept on behind him and other dogs joined in.
He crossed another yard and gained the street and pounded down it. He dodged into a driveway, crossed another yard, upset a birdbath and ran into a clothesline, snapping it in his headlong rush.
Behind him lights were snapping on in the windows of the houses and screen doors were banging as people hurried out to see what the ruckus was.
He ran on a few more blocks, crossed another yard and ducked into a lilac thicket, stood still and listened. Some dogs were still baying in the distance and there was some human shouting, but there was no siren.
He felt a thankfulness well up in him that there was no siren, and a sheepishness, as well. For he had been panicked by himself, he knew; he had run from shadows, he had fled from guilt.
But he’d thoroughly roused the neighborhood and even now, he knew, calls must be going out and in a little while the place would be swarming with police.
He’d raised a hornet’s nest and he needed distance, so he crept out of the lilac thicket and went swiftly down the street, heading for the edge of town.
He finally left the city and found the highway. He loped along its deserted stretches. When a car or truck appeared, he pulled off on the shoulder and walked along sedately. Then when the car or truck had passed, he broke into his lope again.
He saw the spaceport lights miles before he got there. When he reached the port, he circled off the road and came up outside a fence and stood there in the darkness, looking.
A gang of robots was loading one great starship and there were other ships standing darkly in their pits.
He studied the gang that was loading the ship, lugging the cargo from a warehouse and across the area lighted by the floods. This was just the setup he had planned on, although he had not hoped to find it immediately—he had been afraid that he might have to hide out for a day or two before he found a situation that he could put to use. And it was a good thing that he had stumbled on this opportunity, for an intensive hunt would be on by now for a fleeing robot, dressed in human clothes.
He stripped off the cloak and pulled off the trousers and the overshoes; he threw away the hat. From his attachments bag he took out the cutters, screwed off a hand and threaded the cutters into place. He cut the fence and wiggled through it, then replaced the hand and put the cutters back into the kit.
Moving cautiously in the darkness, he walked up to the warehouse, keeping in its shadow.
It would be simple, he told himself. All he had to do was step out and grab a piece of cargo, clamber up the ramp and down into the hold. Once inside, it should not be difficult to find a hiding place and stay there until the ship had reached first planet-fall.
He moved to the corner of the warehouse and peered around it and there were the toiling robots, in what amounted to an endless chain, going up the ramp with the packages of cargo, coming down again to get another load.
But there were too many of them and the line too tight. And the area too well lighted. He’d never be able to break into that line.
And it would not help if he could, he realized despairingly—because he was different from those smooth and shining creatures. Compared to them, he was like a man in another century’s dress; he and his six hundred-year-old body would stand out like a circus freak.
He stepped back into the shadow of the warehouse and he knew that he had lost. All his best-laid plans, thought out in sober, daring detail, as he had labored at the inventory, had suddenly come to naught.
It all came, he told himself, from never going out, from having no real contact with the world, from not keeping up with robot-body fashions, from not knowing what the score was. He’d imagined how it would be and he’d got it all worked out and when it came down to it, it was nothing like he thought.
Now he’d have to go back to the hole he’d cut in the fence and retrieve the clothing he had thrown away and hunt up a hiding place until he could think of something else.
Beyond the corner of the warehouse he heard the harsh, dull grate of metal, and he took another look.
The robots had broken up their line and were streaming back toward the warehouse and a dozen or so of them were wheeling the ramp away from the cargo port. Three humans, all dressed in uniform, were walking toward the ship, heading for the ladder, and one of them carried a batch of papers in his hand.
The loading was all done and the ship about to lift and here he was, not more than a thousand feet away, and all that he could do was stand and see it go.
There had to be a way, he told himself, to get in that ship. If he could only do it his troubles would be over—or at least the first of his troubles would be over.
Suddenly it struck him like a hand across the face. There was a way to do it! He’d stood here, blubbering, when all the time there had been a way to do it!
In the ship, he’d thought. And that was not necessary. He didn’t have to be in the ship.
He started running, out into the darkness, far out so he could circle round and come upon the ship from the other side, so that the ship would be between him and the flood lights on the warehouse. He hoped that there was time.
He thudded out across the port, running in an arc, and came up to the ship and there was no sign as yet that it was about to leave.
Frantically he dug into his attachments bag and found the things he needed—the last things in that bag he’d ever thought he’d need. He found the suction discs and put them on, one for each knee, one for each elbow, one for each sole and wrist.
He strapped the kit about his waist and clambered up one of the mighty fins, using the discs to pull himself awkwardly along. It was not easy. He had never used the discs and there was a trick to using them, the trick of getting one clamped down and then working loose another so that he could climb.
But he had to do it. He had no choice but to do it.
He climbed the fin and there was the vast steel body of the craft rising far above him, like a metal wall climbing to the sky, broken by the narrow line of a row of anchor posts that ran lengthwise of the hull—and all that huge extent of metal painted by the faint, illusive shine of starlight that glittered in his eyes.
Foot by foot he worked his way up the metal wall. Like a humping caterpillar, he squirmed his way and with each foot he gained he was a bit more thankful.
Then he heard the faint beginning of a rumble and with the rumble came terror. His suction cups, he knew, might not long survive the booming vibration of the wakening rockets, certainly would not hold for a moment when the ship began to climb.
Six feet above him lay his only hope—the final anchor post in the long row of anchor posts.
Savagely he drove himself up the barrel of the shuddering craft, hugging the steely surface like a desperate fly.
The rumble of the tubes built up to blot out all the world and he climbed in a haze of almost prayerful, brittle hope. He reached that anchor post or he was as good as dead. Should he slip and drop into that pit of flaming gases beneath the rocket mouths, he was done for.
Once a cup came loose and he almost fell, but the others held and he caught himself.
With a desperate, almost careless lunge, he hurled himself up the wall of metal and caught the rung in his fingertips and held on with a concentration of effort that wiped out all else.