You have broken other laws, said the leech in Richard Daniel’s brain. What of breaking just one more? Why, if necessary, not break a hundred more. It is all or nothing. Having come this far, you can’t afford to fail. You can allow no one to stand in your way now.
The ancient robot half turned away and Richard Daniel lifted up the bar of steel, and suddenly the ancient robot no longer was a robot, but a diagram. There, with all the details of a blueprint, were all the working parts, all the mechanism of the robot that walked in the street before him. And if one detached that single bit of wire, if one burned out that coil, if—
Even as he thought it, the diagram went away and there was the robot, a stumbling, falling robot that clanged on the cobblestones.
Richard Daniel swung around in terror, looking up the street, but there was no one near.
He turned back to the fallen robot and quietly knelt beside him. He gently put the bar of steel down into the street. And he felt a thankfulness—for, almost miraculously, he had not killed.
The robot on the cobblestones was motionless. When Richard Daniel lifted him, he dangled. And yet he was all right. All anyone had to do to bring him back to life was to repair whatever damage had been done his body. And that served the purpose, Richard Daniel told himself, as well as killing would have done.
He stood with the robot in his arms, looking for a place to hide him.
He spied an alley between two buildings and darted into it. One of the buildings, he saw, was set upon stone blocks sunk into the ground, leaving a clearance of a foot or so. He knelt and shoved the robot underneath the building. Then he stood up and brushed the dirt and dust from his body.
Back at the barracks and in his cubicle, he found a rag and cleaned up the dirt that he had missed. And, he thought hard.
He’d seen the ship as a diagram and, not knowing what it meant, hadn’t done a thing. Just now he’d seen the ancient robot as a diagram and had most decisively and neatly used that diagram to save himself from murder—from the murder that he was fully ready to commit.
But how had he done it? And the answer seemed to be that be really had done nothing. He’d simply thought that one should detach a single wire, burn out a single coil—he’d thought it and it was done.
Perhaps he’d seen no diagram at all. Perhaps the diagram was no more than some sort of psychic rationalization to mask whatever he had seen or sensed. Seeing the ship and robot with the surfaces stripped away from them and their purpose and their function revealed fully to his view, he had sought some explanation of his strange ability, and his subconscious mind had devised an explanation, an analogy that, for the moment, had served to satisfy him.
Like when he’d been in hyperspace, he thought. He’d seen a lot of things out there he had not understood. And that was it, of course, he thought excitedly. Something had happened to him out in hyperspace. Perhaps there’d been something that had stretched his mind. Perhaps he’d picked up some sort of new dimension-seeing, some new twist to his mind.
He remembered how, back on the ship again, with his mind wiped clean of all the glory and the knowledge, he had felt like weeping. But now he knew that it had been much too soon for weeping. For although the glory and the knowledge (if there’d been a knowledge) had been lost to him, he had not lost everything. He’d gained a new perceptive device and the ability to use it somewhat fumblingly—and it didn’t really matter that he still was at a loss as to what he did to use it. The basic fact that he possessed it and could use it was enough to start with.
Somewhere out in front there was someone calling—someone, he now realized, who had been calling for some little time. …
“Hubert, where are you? Hubert, are you around? Hubert …”
Hubert?
Could Hubert be the ancient robot? Could they have missed him already?
Richard Daniel jumped to his feet for an undecided moment, listening to the calling voice. And then sat down again. Let them call, he told himself. Let them go out and hunt. He was safe in this cubicle. He had rented it and for the moment it was home and there was no one who would dare break in upon him.
But it wasn’t home. No matter how hard he tried to tell himself it was, it wasn’t. There wasn’t any home.
Earth was home, he thought. And not all of Earth, but just a certain street and that one part of it was barred to him forever. It had been barred to him by the dying of a sweet old lady who had outlived her time; it had been barred to him by his running from it.
He did not belong on this planet, he admitted to himself, nor on any other planet. He belonged on Earth, with the Barringtons, and it was impossible for him to be there.
Perhaps, he thought, he should have stayed and let them reorient him. He remembered what the lawyer had said about memories that could become a burden and a torment. After all, it might have been wiser to have started over once again.
For what kind of future did he have, with his old outdated body, his old outdated brain? The kind of body that they put a robot into on this planet by way of punishment. And the kind of brain—but the brain was different, for he had something now that made up for any lack of more modern mental tools.
He sat and listened, and he heard the house—calling all across the light years of space for him to come back to it again. And he saw the faded living room with all its vanished glory that made a record of the years. He remembered, with a twinge of hurt, the little room back of the kitchen that had been his very own.
He arose and paced up and down the cubicle—three steps and turn, and then three more steps and turn for another three.
The sights and sounds and smells of home grew close and wrapped themselves about him and he wondered wildly if he might not have the power, a power accorded him by the universe of hyperspace, to will himself to that familiar street again.
He shuddered at the thought of it, afraid of another power, afraid that it might happen. Afraid of himself, perhaps, of the snarled and tangled being he was—no longer the faithful, shining servant, but a sort of mad thing that rode outside a spaceship, that was ready to kill another being, that could face up to the appalling sweep of hyperspace, yet cowered before the impact of a memory.
What he needed was a walk, he thought. Look over the town and maybe go out into the country. Besides, he remembered, trying to become practical, he’d need to get that plastication job he had been warned to get.
He went out into the corridor and strode briskly down it and was crossing the lobby when someone spoke to him.
“Hubert,” said the voice, “just where have you been? I’ve been waiting hours for you.”
Richard Daniel spun around and a robot sat behind the desk. There was another robot leaning in a corner and there was a naked robot brain lying on the desk.
“You are Hubert, aren’t you,” asked the one behind the desk. Richard Daniel opened up his mouth to speak, but the words refused to come.
“I thought so,” said the robot. “You may not recognize me, but my name is Andy. The regular man was busy, so the judge sent me. He thought it was only fair we make the switch as quickly as possible. He said you’d served a longer term than you really should. Figures you’d be glad to know they’d convicted someone else.”
Richard Daniel stared in horror at the naked brain lying on the desk.
The robot gestured at the metal body propped into the corner.
“Better than when we took you out of it,” he said with a throaty chuckle. “Fixed it up and polished it and got out all the dents. Even modernized it some. Brought it strictly up to date. You’ll have a better body than you had when they stuck you into that monstrosity.”