“As you wish,” said Richard Daniel.
For it didn’t matter. It made no difference to him at all what the captain did or thought. And he wondered why the respect even of a robot should mean so much to a human like the captain, why he should guard his small position with so much zealousness.
“In another twenty hours,” the captain said, “we hit another port.”
“I know,” said Richard Daniel. “Sleepy Hollow on Arcadia.”
“All right, then,” said the captain, “since you know so much, get down into the hold and get the cargo ready to unload. We been spending too much time in all these lousy ports loading and unloading. You been dogging it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Richard Daniel, turning back and heading for the hold.
He wondered faintly if he were still robot—or was he something else? Could a machine evolve, he wondered, as Man himself evolved? And if a machine evolved, whatever would it be? Not Man, of course, for it never could be that, but could it be machine?
He hauled out the cargo consigned to Sleepy Hollow and there was not too much of it. So little of it, perhaps, that none of the regular carriers would even consider its delivery, but dumped it off at the nearest terminal, leaving it for a roving tramp, like the Rambler, to carry eventually to its destination.
When they reached Arcadia, he waited until the thunder died and the ship was still. Then he shoved the lever that opened up the port and slid out the ramp.
The port came open ponderously and he saw blue skies and the green of trees and the far-off swirl of chimney smoke mounting in the sky.
He walked slowly forward until he stood upon the ramp and there lay Sleepy Hollow, a tiny, huddled village planted at the river’s edge, with the forest as a background. The forest ran on every side to a horizon of climbing folded hills. Fields lay near the village, yellow with maturing crops, and he could see a dog sleeping in the sun outside a cabin door.
A man was climbing up the ramp toward him and there were others running from the village.
“You have cargo for us?” asked the man.
“A small consignment,” Richard Daniel told him. “You have something to put on?”
The man had a weatherbeaten look and he’d missed several haircuts and he had not shaved for days. His clothes were rough and sweat-stained and his hands were strong and awkward with hard work.
“A small shipment,” said the man. “You’ll have to wait until we bring it up. We had no warning you were coming. Our radio is broken.”
“You go and get it,” said Richard Daniel. “I’ll start unloading.”
He had the cargo half unloaded when the captain came storming down into the hold. What was going on, he yelled. How long would they have to wait? “God knows we’re losing money as it is even stopping at this place.”
“That may be true,” Richard Daniel agreed, “but you knew that when you took the cargo on. There’ll be other cargos and goodwill is something …”
“Goodwill be damned!” the captain roared. “How do I know I’ll ever see this place again?”
Richard Daniel continued unloading cargo.
“You,” the captain shouted, “go down to that village and tell them I’ll wait no longer than an hour …”
“But this cargo, sir?”
“I’ll get the crew at it. Now, jump!”
So Richard Daniel left the cargo and went down into the village.
He went across the meadow that lay between the spaceport and the village, following the rutted wagon tracks, and it was a pleasant walk. He realized with surprise that this was the first time he’d been on solid ground since he’d left the robot planet. He wondered briefly what the name of that planet might have been, for he had never known. Nor what its importance was, why the robots might be there or what they might be doing. And he wondered, too, with a twinge of guilt, if they’d found Hubert yet.
And where might Earth be now? he asked himself. In what direction did it lie and how far away? Although it didn’t really matter, for he was done with Earth.
He had fled from Earth and gained something in his fleeing. He had escaped all the traps of Earth and all the snares of Man. What he held was his, to do with as he pleased, for he was no man’s robot, despite what the captain thought.
He walked across the meadow and saw that this planet was very much like Earth. It had the same soft feel about it, the same simplicity. It had far distances and there was a sense of freedom.
He came into the village and heard the muted gurgle of the river running and the distant shouts of children at their play and in one of the cabins a sick child was crying with lost helplessness.
He passed the cabin where the dog was sleeping and it came awake and stalked growling to the gate. When he passed it followed him, still growling, at a distance that was safe and sensible.
An autumnal calm lay upon the village, a sense of gold and lavender, and tranquility hung in the silences between the crying of the baby and the shouting of the children.
There were women at the windows looking out at him and others at the doors and the dog still followed, but his growls had stilled and now he trotted with prick-eared curiosity.
Richard Daniel stopped in the street and looked around him and the dog sat down and watched him and it was almost as if time itself had stilled and the little village lay divorced from all the universe, an arrested microsecond, an encapsulated acreage that stood sharp in all its truth and purpose.
Standing there, he sensed the village and the people in it, almost as if he had summoned up a diagram of it, although if there were a diagram, he was not aware of it.
It seemed almost as if the village were the Earth, a transplanted Earth with the old primeval problems and hopes of Earth—a family of peoples that faced existence with a readiness and confidence and inner strength.
From down the street he heard the creak of wagons and saw them coming around the bend, three wagons piled high and heading for the ship.
He stood and waited for them and as he waited the dog edged a little closer and sat regarding him with a not-quite-friendliness.
The wagons came up to him and stopped.
“Pharmaceutical materials, mostly,” said the man who sat atop the first load, “It is the only thing we have that is worth the shipping.”
“You seem to have a lot of it,” Richard Daniel told him.
The man shook his head. “It’s not so much. It’s almost three years since a ship’s been here. We’ll have to wait another three, or more perhaps, before we see another.”
He spat down on the ground.
“Sometimes it seems,” he said, “that we’re at the tail-end of nowhere. There are times we wonder if there is a soul that remembers we are here.”
From the direction of the ship, Richard Daniel heard the faint, strained violence of the captain’s roaring.
“You’d better get on up there and unload,” he told the man. “The captain is just sore enough he might not wait for you.”
The man chuckled thinly. “I guess that’s up to him,” he said.
He flapped the reins and clucked good-naturedly at the horses.
“Hop up here with me,” he said to Richard Daniel. “Or would you rather walk?”
“I’m not going with you,” Richard Daniel said. “I am staying here. You can tell the captain.”
For there was a baby sick and crying. There was a radio to fix. There was a culture to be planned and guided. There was a lot of work to do. This place, of all the places he had seen, had actual need of him.
The man chuckled once again. “The captain will not like it.”
“Then tell him,” said Richard Daniel, “to come down and talk to me. I am my own robot. I owe the captain nothing. I have more than paid any debt I owe him.”