He met a few hurrying robots who were in too much of a rush to pass the time of day. But he met no humans.
And that, he knew quite suddenly, was the wrongness of the place. It was not a human town.
There were no distinctly human buildings — no stores or residences, no churches and no restaurants. There were gaunt shelter barracks and sheds for the storing of equipment and machines, great sprawling warehouses and vast industrial plants. But that was all there was. It was a bare and dismal place compared to the streets that he had known on Earth.
It was a robot town, he knew. And a robot planet. A world that was barred to humans, a place where humans could not live, but so rich in some natural resource that it cried for exploitation. And the answer to that exploitation was to let the robots do it.
Luck, he told himself. His good luck still was holding. He had literally been dumped into a place where he could live without human interference. Here, on this planet, he would be with his own.
If that was what he wanted. And he wondered if it was. He wondered just exactly what it was he wanted, for he'd had no time to think of what he wanted. He had been too intent on fleeing Earth to think too much about it. He had known all along what he was running from, but had not considered what he might be running to.
He walked a little further and the town came to an end. The Street became a path and went wandering on into the wind-blown fogginess.
So he turned around and went back up the street.
There had been one barracks, he remembered, that had a TRANSIENTS sign hung out, and be made his way to it.
Inside, an ancient robot sat behind the desk. His body was old-fashioned and somehow familiar. And it was familiar, Richard Daniel knew, because it was as old and battered and as out-of-date as his.
He looked at the body, just a bit aghast, and saw that while it resembled his, there were little differences. The same ancient model, certainly, but a different series. Possibly a little newer, by twenty years or so, than his.
"Good evening, stranger," said the ancient robot. "You came in on the ship?"
Richard Daniel nodded.
"You'll be staying till the next one?"
"I may be settling down," said Richard Daniel. "I may want to stay here."
The ancient robot took a key from off a hook and laid it on the desk.
"You representing someone?"
"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 be 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.