Hall lay unmoving in the middle of the floor, his legs and arms fastened in greaves of permallium.
Jordan was embarrassed. He did not look directly at the robot.
“I don’t know whether you want to talk to me or not,” he started. “If you don’t want to, that’s all right. But, I’ve followed you since you landed on Earth, and I don’t understand why you did what you did. You don’t have to tell me, but I wish you would. It would make me feel better.”
The robot shrugged—a very human gesture, Jordan noted.
“G-go ahead and ask me,” he said. “It d-doesn’t make any difference now.”
Jordan sat down on the floor. “The boy was the one who gave you away. If not for him, no one would have ever known what planet you were on. Why did you let the kid get away?”
The robot looked straight at the agent. “Would you kill a child?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” Jordan said a little bit annoyed, “but I’m not a robot either.” He waited for a further explanation, but when he saw none was coming, he said: “I don’t know what you were trying to do in that powerhouse at Ballarat, but, whatever it was, that old man couldn’t have stopped you. What happened?”
“I l-lost my head,” the robot said quietly. “The alarm and the lights rattled me, and I got into a p-panic.”
“I see,” said Jordan, frustrated, not really seeing at all. He sat back and thought for a moment. “Let me put it this way. Why do you stutter?”
Hall smiled a wry smile. “Th-that used to be a m-military secret,” he said. “It’s our one weakness—the one Achilles heel in a m-machine that was meant to be invulnerable.”
He struggled to a sitting position. “You see, we were m-made as s-soldiers and had to have a certain loyalty to the country that m-made us. Only living things are loyal—machines are not. We had to think like human beings.”
Jordan’s brows contracted as he tried to understand the robot.
“You mean you have a transplanted human brain?” he asked incredulously.
“In a way,” Hall said. “Our b-brains are permallium strips on which the mind of some human donor was m-magnetically imprinted. My mind was copied f-from a man who stuttered and who got panicky when the going got rough, and who couldn’t kill a child no matter what was at s-stake.”
Jordan felt physically ill. Hall was human and he was immortal. And according to galactic decree, he, like his fellows, was to be manacled in permallium and fixed in a great block of cement, and that block was to be dropped into the deep silent depths of the Grismet ocean, to be slowly covered by the blue sediment that gradually filters down through the miles of ocean water to stay immobile and blind for countless millions of years.
Jordan arose to his feet. He could think of nothing further to say.
He stopped, however, with the door half open, and asked: “One more question—what did you want with the electrical generator plants on Earth?”
Slowly and without emotion Hall told him, and when he understood, he became even sicker.
He went across to his cabin and stood for a while looking out the window. Then he lit a cigarette and lay down on his bunk thinking. After a time, he put out the cigarette and walked into the hall where he paced up and down.
As he passed the cell door for about the tenth time, he suddenly swung around and lifted the latch and entered. He went over to the robot, and with a key that he took from his pocket, he unlocked the greaves and chains.
“There’s no point in keeping you bound up like this,” he said. “I don’t think you’re very dangerous.” He put the key back in his pocket.
“I suppose you know that this ship runs on an atomic pile,” he said in a conversational tone of voice. “The cables are just under the floor in the control room and they can be reached through a little trap door.”
Jordan looked directly into Hall’s face. The robot was listening with great intentness.
“Well,” the agent said, “we’ll probably be leaving Earth’s atmosphere in about fifteen minutes. I think I’ll go play pinochle with the pilot.”
He carefully left the door of the cell unlatched as he left. He walked to the control room and found Wilkins, a dry cigar butt clenched between his teeth, absorbed in a magazine.
“Let’s have another game,” Jordan said. “I want some of that seventy-six dollars back.”
Wilkins shook his head. “I’m in the middle of a good story here, Real sexy. I’ll play you after we take off.”
“Nothing doing,” Jordan said sharply. “Let’s play right now.”
Wilkins kept reading. “We got an eighteen-hour flight in front of us. You have lots of time.”
The agent snatched the magazine out of his hands. “We’re going to play right now in my cabin,” he said.
“You quit when I have aces and a flush, and now you come back and want to play again. That’s not sportsmanlike,” Wilkins complained, but he allowed himself to be led back to Jordan’s cabin. “I never saw anybody so upset about losing a miserable seventy-six bucks,” was his final comment.
The robot lay perfectly still until he heard the door to Jordan’s cabin slam shut, and then he arose as quietly as he could and stole out into the hall. The steel of the hall floor groaned, but bore his weight, and carefully, trembling with excitement inside of his ponderous metallic body, he made his way to the control room. He knelt and lifted the little trap door and found the naked power cable, pulsating with electrical current.
In a locker under the panel board he found a length of copper wire. It was all he needed for the necessary connection.
Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair, but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons.
“We are going to have our chance,” he told them. “We won’t have much time, but we will have our chance.”
He closed the circuit and a tremendous tide of electric power flowed into his head. Inside that two inch shell of permallium was a small strip of metal tape on whose electrons and atoms were written the borrowed mind of a man. Connected to the tape was a minute instrument for receiving and sending electromagnetic impulses—the chain by which the mind of one robot was tied to that of another.
The current surged in and the tiny impulses swelled in strength and poured out through the hull of the; ship in a great cone that penetrated Earth’s atmosphere in a quadrant that extended from Baffin Land to Omaha, and from Hawaii to Labrador. The waves swept through skin and bone and entered the sluggish gelatinous brain of sentient beings, setting up in those organs the same thoughts and pictures that played among the electrons of the permallium strip that constituted Jon Hall’s mind.
All nineteen clamored to be heard, for Hall to relay their voices to Earth, but he held them off and first he told his story.
The Cassiopeian delegate to the Galactic Senate was at the moment finishing his breakfast. He was small and furry, not unlike a very large squirrel, and he sat perched on a high chair eating salted roast almonds of which he was very fond.
Suddenly a voice started talking inside of his head, just as it did at that very second inside the heads of thirteen billion other inhabitants of the northwest corner of Earth. The Cassiopeian delegate was so startled that he dropped the dish of almonds, his mouth popping open, his tiny red tongue inside flickering nervously. He listened spellbound.