“No,” said Richard Daniel.
“I thought maybe that you were. We get a lot of representatives. Humans can’t come here, or don’t want to come, so they send robots out here to represent them.”
“You have a lot of visitors?”
“Some. Mostly the representatives I was telling you about. But there are some that are on the lam. I’d take it, mister, you are on the lam.”
Richard Daniel didn’t answer.
“It’s all right,” the ancient one assured him. “We don’t mind at all, just so you behave yourself. Some of our most prominent citizens, they came here on the lam.”
“That is fine,” said Richard Daniel. “And how about yourself? You must be on the lam as well.”
“You mean this body. Well, that’s a little different. This here is punishment.”
“Punishment?”
“Well, you see, I was the foreman of the cargo warehouse and I got to goofing off. So they hauled me up and had a trial and they found me guilty. Then they stuck me into this old body and I have to stay in it, at this lousy job, until they get another criminal that needs punishment. They can’t punish no more than one criminal at a time because this is the only old body that they have. Funny thing about this body. One of the boys went back to Earth on a business trip and found this old heap of metal in a junkyard and brought it home with him—for a joke, I guess. Like a human might buy a skeleton for a joke, you know.”
He took a long, sly look at Richard Daniel. “It looks to me, stranger, as if your body …”
But Richard Daniel didn’t let him finish.
“I take it,” Richard Daniel said, “you haven’t many criminals.”
“No,” said the ancient robot sadly, “we’re generally a pretty solid lot.”
Richard Daniel reached out to pick up the key, but the ancient robot put out his hand and covered it.
“Since you are on the lam,” he said, “it’ll be payment in advance.”
“I’ll pay you for a week,” said Richard Daniel, handing him some money.
The robot gave him back his change.
“One thing I forgot to tell you. You’ll have to get plasticated.”
“Plasticated?”
“That’s right. Get plastic squirted over you to protect you from the atmosphere. It plays hell with metal. There’s a place next door will do it.”
“Thanks. I’ll get it done immediately.”
“It wears off,” warned the ancient one. “You have to get a new job every week or so.”
Richard Daniel took the key and went down the corridor until he found his numbered cubicle. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was small, but clean. It had a desk and chair and that was all it had.
He stowed his attachments bag in one corner and sat down in the chair and tried to feel at home. But he couldn’t feel at home, and that was a funny thing—he’d just rented himself a home.
He sat there, thinking back, and tried to whip up some sense of triumph at having done so well in covering his tracks. He couldn’t.
Maybe this wasn’t the place for him, he thought. Maybe he’d be happier on some other planet. Perhaps he should go back to the ship and get on it once again and have a look at the next planet coming up.
If he hurried, he might make it. But he’d have to hurry, for the ship wouldn’t stay longer than it took to unload the consignment for this place and take on new cargo.
He got up from the chair, still only half decided.
And suddenly he remembered how, standing in the swirling mistiness, he had seen the ship as a diagram rather than a ship, and as he thought about it, something clicked inside his brain and he leaped toward the door.
For now he knew what had been wrong with the spaceship’s diagram—an injector valve was somehow out of kilter, he had to get back there before the ship took off again.
He went through the door and down the corridor. He caught sight of the ancient robot’s startled face as he ran across the lobby and out into the street. Pounding steadily toward the spaceport, he tried to get the diagram into his mind again, but it would not come complete—it came in bits and pieces, but not all of it.
And even as he fought for the entire diagram, he heard the beginning take-off rumble.
“Wait!” he yelled. “Wait for me! You can’t …”
There was a flash that turned the world pure white and a mighty invisible wave came swishing out of nowhere and sent him reeling down the street, falling as he reeled. He was skidding on the cobblestones and sparks were flying as his metal scraped along the stone. The whiteness reached a brilliance that almost blinded him and then it faded swiftly and the world was dark.
He brought up against a wall of some sort, clanging as he hit, and he lay there, blind from the brilliance of the flash, while his mind went scurrying down the trail of the diagram.
The diagram, he thought—why should he have seen a diagram of the ship he’d ridden through space, a diagram that had shown an injector out of whack? And how could he, of all robots, recognize an injector, let alone know there was something wrong with it. It had been a joke back home, among the Barringtons, that he, a mechanical thing himself, should have no aptitude at all for mechanical contraptions. And he could have saved those people and the ship—he could have saved them all if he’d immediately recognized the significance of the diagram. But he’d been too slow and stupid and now they all were dead.
The darkness had receded from his eyes and he could see again and he got slowly to his feet, feeling himself all over to see how badly he was hurt. Except for a dent or two, he seemed to be all right.
There were robots running in the street, heading for the spaceport, where a dozen fires were burning and where sheds and other structures had been flattened by the blast.
Someone tugged at his elbow and he turned around. It was the ancient robot.
“You’re the lucky one,” the ancient robot said. “You got off it just in time.”
Richard Daniel nodded dumbly and had a terrible thought: What if they should think he did it? He had gotten off the ship; he had admitted that he was on the lam; he had rushed out suddenly, just a few seconds before the ship exploded. It would be easy to put it all together—that he had sabotaged the ship, then at the last instant had rushed out, remorseful, to undo what he had done. On the face of it, it was damning evidence.
But it was all right as yet, Richard Daniel told himself. For the ancient robot was the only one that knew—he was the only one he’d talked to, the only one who even knew that he was in town.
There was a way, Richard Daniel thought—there was an easy way. He pushed the thought away, but it came back. You are on your own, it said. You are already beyond the law. In rejecting human law, you made yourself an outlaw. You have become fair prey. There is just one law for you—self preservation.
But there are robot laws, Richard Daniel argued. There are laws and courts in this community. There is a place for justice.
Community law, said the leech clinging in his brain, provincial law, little more than tribal law—and the stranger’s always wrong.
Richard Daniel felt the coldness of the fear closing down upon him and he knew, without half thinking, that the leech was right.
He turned around and started down the street, heading for the transients barracks. Something unseen in the street caught his foot and he stumbled and went down. He scrabbled to his knees, hunting in the darkness on the cobblestones for the thing that tripped him. It was a heavy bar of steel, some part of the wreckage that had been hurled this far. He gripped it by one end and arose.
“Sorry,” said the ancient robot. “You have to watch your step.”
And there was a faint implication in his words—a hint of something more than the words had said, a hint of secret gloating in a secret knowledge.