“I don’t know what to say,” said Richard Daniel, stammering. “You see, I’m not …”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the other happily. “No need for gratitude. Your sentence worked out longer than the judge expected. This just makes up for it.”
“I thank you, then,” said Richard Daniel. “I thank you very much.”
And was astounded at himself, astonished at the ease with which he said it, confounded at his sly duplicity.
But if they forced it on him, why should he refuse? There was nothing that he needed more than a modern body!
It was still working out, he told himself. He was still riding luck. For this was the last thing that he needed to cover up his tracks.
“All newly plasticated and everything,” said Andy. “Hans did an extra special job.”
“Well, then,” said Richard Daniel, “let’s get on with it.”
The other robot grinned. “I don’t blame you for being anxious to get out of there. It must be pretty terrible to live in a pile of junk like that.”
He came around from behind the desk and advanced on Richard Daniel.
“Over in the corner,” he said, “and kind of prop yourself. I don’t want you tipping over when I disconnect you. One good fall and that body’ll come apart.”
“All right,” said Richard Daniel. He went into the corner and leaned back against it and planted his feet solid so that he was propped.
He had a rather awful moment when Andy disconnected the optic nerve and he lost his eyes and there was considerable queasiness in having his skull lifted off his shoulders and he was in sheer funk as the final disconnections were being swiftly made.
Then he was a blob of grayness without body or a head or eyes or anything at all. He was no more than a bundle of thoughts all wrapped around themselves like a pail of worms and this pail of worms was suspended in pure nothingness.
Fear came to him, a taunting, terrible fear. What if this were just a sort of ghastly gag? What if they’d found out who he really was and what he’d done to Hubert? What if they took his brain and tucked it away somewhere for a year or two—or for a hundred years? It might be, he told himself, nothing more than their simple way of justice.
He hung onto himself and tried to fight the fear away, but the fear ebbed back and forth like a restless tide.
Time stretched out and out—far too long a time, far more time than one would need to switch a brain from one body to another. Although, he told himself, that might not be true at all. For in his present state he had no way in which to measure time. He had no external reference points by which to determine time.
Then suddenly he had eyes.
And he knew everything was all right.
One by one his senses were restored to him and he was back inside a body and he felt awkward in the body, for he was unaccustomed to it.
The first thing that he saw was his old and battered body propped into its corner and he felt a sharp regret at the sight of it and it seemed to him that he had played a dirty trick upon it. It deserved, he told himself, a better fate than this—a better fate than being left behind to serve as a shabby jailhouse on this outlandish planet. It had served him well for six hundred years and he should not be deserting it. But he was deserting it. He was, he told himself in contempt, becoming very expert at deserting his old friends. First the house back home and now his faithful body.
Then he remembered something else—all that money in the body!
“What’s the matter, Hubert?” Andy asked.
He couldn’t leave it there, Richard Daniel told himself, for he needed it. And besides, if he left it there, someone would surely find it later and it would be a give-away. He couldn’t leave it there and it might not be safe to forthrightly claim it. If he did, this other robot, this Andy, would think he’d been stealing on the job or running some side racket. He might try to bribe the other, but one could never tell how a move like that might go. Andy might be full of righteousness and then there’d be hell to pay. And besides, he didn’t want to part with any of the money.
All at once he had it—he knew just what to do. And even as he thought it, he made Andy into a diagram.
That connection there, thought Richard Daniel, reaching out his arms to catch the falling diagram that turned into a robot. He eased it to the floor and sprang across the room to the side of his old body. In seconds he had the chest safe open and the money safely out of it and locked inside his present body.
Then he made the robot on the floor become a diagram again and got the connection back the way that it should be.
Andy rose shakily off the floor. He looked at Richard Daniel in some consternation.
“What happened to me?” he asked in a frightened voice.
Richard Daniel sadly shook his head. “I don’t know. You just keeled over. I started for the door to yell for help, then I heard you stirring and you were all right.”
Andy was plainly puzzled. “Nothing like this ever happened to me before,” he said.
“If I were you,” counseled Richard Daniel, “I’d have myself checked over. You must have a faulty relay or a loose connection.”
“I guess I will,” the other one agreed. “It’s downright dangerous.”
He walked slowly to the desk and picked up the other brain, started with it toward the battered body leaning in the corner.
Then he stopped and said: “Look, I forgot. I was supposed to tell you. You better get up to the warehouse. Another ship is on its way. It will be coming in any minute now.”
“Another one so soon?”
“You know how it goes,” Andy said, disgusted. “They don’t even try to keep a schedule here. We won’t see one for months and then there’ll be two or three at once.”
“Well, thanks,” said Richard Daniel, going out the door.
He went swinging down the street with a new-born confidence. And he had a feeling that there was nothing that could lick him, nothing that could stop him.
For he was a lucky robot!
Could all that luck, he wondered, have been gotten out in hyperspace, as his diagram ability, or whatever one might call it, had come from hyperspace? Somehow hyperspace had taken him and twisted him and changed him, had molded him anew, had made him into a different robot than he had been before.
Although, so far as luck was concerned, he had been lucky all his entire life. He’d had good luck with his human family and had gained a lot of favors and a high position and had been allowed to live for six hundred years. And that was a thing that never should have happened. No matter how powerful or influential the Barringtons had been, that six hundred years must be due in part to nothing but sheer luck.
In any case, the luck and the diagram ability gave him a solid edge over all the other robots he might meet. Could it, he asked himself, give him an edge on Man as well? No—that was a thought he should not think, for it was blasphemous. There never was a robot that would be the equal of a man.
But the thought kept on intruding and he felt not nearly so contrite over this leaning toward bad taste, or poor judgment, whichever it might be, as it seemed to him he should feel.
As he neared the spaceport, he began meeting other robots and some of them saluted him and called him by the name of Hubert and others stopped and shook him by the hand and told him they were glad that he was out of pokey.
This friendliness shook his confidence. He began to wonder if his luck would hold, for some of the robots, he was certain, thought it rather odd that he did not speak to them by name, and there had been a couple of remarks that he had some trouble fielding. He had a feeling that when he reached the warehouse he might be sunk without a trace, for he would know none of the robots there and he had not the least idea what his duties might include. And, come to think of it, he didn’t even know where the warehouse was.