It was too late. Someone had indeed come along and it was George. From where he lay, Andrew could see him topping a small rise in the middle distance. He would have liked to signal for help. But the last order he had received was, "Don't make a sound," and he was bound by that until countermanded by its giver or some other human being.
George was looking this way, though. And now he was breaking into a trot. In another few moments he was there, somewhat winded, standing at Andrew's side looking down at him in dismay.
The two young men stepped back a little and waited, frowning, glancing uncertainly at each other.
George said anxiously, "Andrew, has anything gone wrong with you?"
Andrew said, "I am quite well, George."
"Why are you lying on the ground like that, then? Can't you get up?"
"I would have no difficulty in doing that, if you wished me to," Andrew said.
"Then do it! Don't just lie there!"
Andrew arose, gratefully, when he heard the order.
George said, " And why are your clothes scattered around all over the place? How come you're not wearing them? What's been going on here?"
The tall young man said, "That your robot, Mac?"
George turned sharply. "He's no one's robot. Have you two been playing games with him?"
"Well, we thought it was pretty weird that a robot would be wearing clothes. So we politely asked him to take them off. What's that to you if you don't own him?"
George said, "Were they trying to harm you, Andrew?"
Andrew said, "It was their intention in some way to dismember me. They were about to move me to a quiet spot and require me to dismember myself."
George looked at the two young men. He was attempting to appear fearless and bold even though he was outnumbered, but Andrew saw his chin tremble.
"Is this true?" George asked them sternly.
The two had evidently also noticed George's obvious discomfort, though, and plainly they had begun to decide that he represented no serious threat to them. George was no longer a young man. His children were grown, now, old enough so that his son Paul had joined the family law firm. George's russet hair had turned gray and his cheeks-without their flaring side-whiskers, now-were the soft pink cheeks of a sedentary man. He was hardly likely to put up much of a fight, no matter how fierce his manner might seem. As the two took note of that, their manner changed, becoming less wary and more confident.
The tall one said lightly, with a smirk on his face, "We wanted to see how he'd go about it, yes. Especially how he was going to manage things toward the end, when he only had one arm still attached."
"You have a peculiar way of amusing yourselves."
"Is that any business of yours?"
"As a matter of fact, it is."
The tall one laughed. " And what are you going to do about it, pudgy? Beat us up?"
"No," George said. "I don't have to. This robot has been with my family for over seventy years, are you aware of that? He knows us and he values us more than he values anyone else in the world. What I'm going to do is tell him that you two have been threatening my life, that you're planning to kill me. I'll ask him to defend me. He'll have to choose between my life and yours, and I know very well which choice he's going to make. -Do you know how strong a robot is? Do you know what's going to happen to you when Andrew attacks you?"
"Hey, wait a second-" the bulbous-nosed one said. He looked troubled again, now. So did the other. They were both beginning to back away a little.
George said sharply, "Andrew, I am in direct personal danger. These two young men are about to cause me harm. I order you to move toward them!"
Andrew obediently took a couple of steps forward, though he wondered what he would be able to do by way of defending George beyond that. In sudden inspiration he brought his arms up into what could perhaps have been interpreted as a menacing position. If the whole idea was simply to have him seem formidable, well, he would make himself look as formidable as he could.
He held the fierce pose. His photoelectric eyes glowed their strongest shade of red. His bare metallic form gleamed in the sunlight.
The two young men didn't choose to stay around to see what was going to happen next. They took off across the field as fast as they could run, and it was only when they were something like a hundred meters away and felt that they had reached a safe place that they turned and glared back, shaking their fists and yelling angry curses.
Andrew took a few more steps in their direction. They swung around and sped away over the top of the hill. Within moments they were down the far side and out of sight.
Even now, Andrew remained in his posture of threat.
"All right, Andrew, you can relax," said George. He was shaking and his face was pale and sweaty. He looked very much unstrung. George was well past the age where he could comfortably face the possibility of a physical confrontation with one young man, let alone two of them at once.
Andrew said, "It is just as well that they ran away. You know that I could never have hurt them, George. I could plainly see that they weren't attacking you."
"But they might have, if things had gone on any further."
"That is only a speculation. In my judgment, George-"
"Yes. I know. Most likely they'd never have had the guts to raise a hand against me. But in any case I didn't order you to attack them. I only told you to move toward them. Their own fears did all the rest. That and that prizefighter stance that you were clever enough to adopt."
"But how could they possibly fear robots? The First Law insures that a robot could never-"
"Fear of robots is a disease that much of mankind has, and there doesn't really seem to be any cure for it-not yet, at any rate. But never mind that. They're gone and you're still in one piece and that's all that matters right now. What I'd like to know, though, is what the devil were you doing here in the first place, Andrew?"
"I was going to the library."
"Yes. I know that. I found the note you left. But this isn't the way to the library. The library's back there, in town. And when I phoned the library the librarian said you hadn't been there, that she hadn't heard a thing from you. I went out looking for you on the library road and there wasn't any sign of you there, and nobody I met along the way to town had seen you either. So I knew you were lost. As a matter of fact, you've gotten yourself turned around by 180 degrees."
"I suspected that there was some error in my directional plan," Andrew said.
"There certainly was. I was just about ready to order a sky-search scan for you, do you know that? And then it occurred to me that you might have wandered over this way, somehow. -What were you doing going to the library anyway, Andrew? Sometimes you get the strangest ideas into your head. You know that I'd be happy to bring you any book you needed."
"Yes, I know that, George. But I am a-"
"Free robot. Yes. Yes. With every right to pick himself up and march off to town to use the library, if that's what he wants to do, even though his extraordinary robotic intelligence is mysteriously incapable of keeping him on the right road. And what was it, may I ask, that you wanted to get at the library?"
"A book on modern language."
"Are you planning to give up woodworking for linguistics, Andrew?"
"I feel inadequate in regard to speech."
"But you have a fantastic command of the language! Your vocabulary, your grammar-"
"The language-its metaphors, its colloquialisms, even its grammar-constantly changes, George. My programming does not. If I don't update myself, I will be almost unable to communicate with human beings in another few generations."
"Well-perhaps you have a point there."
"So I must study the patterns of linguistic change. And many other things as well." Suddenly Andrew heard himself saying, "George, I feel it's important that I get to know much more about human beings, about the world, about everything. I have lived such an isolated life all these years, in our beautiful estate here on this little secluded strip of coast. The world beyond my own doorstep is a mystery to me, really. -and I need to know more about robots also, George. I want to write a book about them."