The Creator and Other Stories Page 8

  So he lay, not caring greatly, with no fear or wonder, just resting and letting a fact seep into him here and there from many different points.

  He knew that, somehow, his body — that part of him which housed the rest of him — was still chained securely to the ship, and that knowledge, in itself, he knew, was the first small step towards reorienting himself. He had to reorient, he knew. He had to come to some sort of terms, if not to understanding, with this situation.

  He had opened up and he had scattered out — that essential part of him, the feeling and the knowing and the thinking part of him, and he lay thin across a universe that loomed immense in unreality.

  Was this, he wondered, the way the universe should be, or was it the unchained universe, the wild universe beyond the limiting disciplines of measured space and time.

  He started slowly reaching out, cautious as he had been in his crawling on the surface of the ship, reaching out toward the distant parts of him, a little at a time. He did not know how he did it, he was conscious of no particular technique, but whatever he was doing, it seemed to work, for he pulled himself together, bit by knowing bit, until he had gathered up all the scattered fragments of him into several different piles.

  Then he quit and lay there, wherever there might be, and tried to sneak up on those piles of understanding that he took to be himself.

  It took a while to get the hang of it, but once be did, some of the incomprehensibility went away, although the strangeness stayed. He tried to put it into thought and it was hard to do. The closest he could come was that he had been unchained as well as the universe — that whatever bondage had been imposed upon him by that chained and normal world had now become dissolved and he no longer was fenced in by either time or space.

  He could see — and know and sense — across vast distances, if distance were the proper term, and he could understand certain facts that he had not even thought about before, could understand instinctively, but without the language or the skill to coalesce the facts into independent data.

  Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.

  He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.

  He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the flat galactic plane.

  Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him — he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.

  There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder — and no actual knowledge, either.

  Then time came once again and suddenly his mind was stuffed back into its cage within his metal skull and he was again one with his body, trapped and chained and small and cold and naked.

  He saw that the stars were different and that he was far from home and just a little way ahead was a star that blazed like a molten furnace hanging in the black.

  He sat bereft, a small thing once again, and the universe reduced to package size.

  Practically, he checked the cable that held him to the ship and it was intact. His attachments kit was still tied to its rung. Everything was exactly as it had been before.

  He tried to recall the glories he had seen, tried to grasp again the fringe of knowledge which he had been so close to, but both the glory and the knowledge, if there had ever been a knowledge, had faded into nothingness.

  He felt like weeping, but he could not weep, and he was too old to lie down upon the ship and kick his heels in tantrum.

  So he sat there, looking at the sun that they were approaching and finally there was a planet that he knew must be their destination, and he found room to wonder what planet it might be and how far from Earth it was.

  He heated up a little as the ship skipped through atmosphere as an aid to braking speed and he had some rather awful moments as it spiraled into thick and soupy gases that certainly were a far cry from the atmosphere of Earth. He hung most desperately to the rungs as the craft came rushing down onto a landing field, with the hot gases of the rockets curling up about him. But he made it safely and swiftly clambered down and darted off into the smog-like atmosphere before anyone could see him.

  Safely off, he turned and looked back at the ship and despite its outlines being hidden by the drifting clouds of swirling gases, he could see it clearly, not as an actual structure, but as a diagram. He looked at it wonderingly and there was something wrong with the diagram, something vaguely wrong, some part of it that was out of whack and not the way it should be.

  He heard the clanking of cargo haulers coming out upon the field and he wasted no more time, diagram or not.

  He drifted back, deeper in the mists, and began to circle, keeping a good distance from the ship. Finally he came to the spaceport's edge and the beginning of the town.

  He found a street and walked down it leisurely and there was a wrongness in the town.

  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 repres
enting 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.

  There were robots running in the street, heading for the spaceport, where a dozen fires were burning and where sheds and other structures had been flattened by the blast.

  Someone tugged at his elbow and he turned around. It was the ancient robot.

  "You're the lucky one," the ancient robot said. "You got off it just in time."

  Richard Daniel nodded dumbly and had a terrible thought:

  What if they should think he did it? He had gotten off the ship; he had admitted that he was on the lam; he had rushed out suddenly, just a few seconds before the ship exploded. It would be easy to put it all together — that he had sabotaged the ship, then at the last instant had rushed out, remorseful, to undo what he had done. On the face of it, it was damning evidence.

  But it was all right as yet, Richard Daniel told himself. For the ancient robot was the only one that knew — he was the only one he'd talked to, the only one who even knew that he was in town.

  There was a way, Richard Daniel thought — there was an easy way. He pushed the thought away, but it came back. You are on your own, it said. You are already beyond the law. In rejecting human law, you made yourself an outlaw. You have become fair prey. There is just one law for you — self preservation.

  But there are robot laws, Richard Daniel argued. There are laws and courts in this community. There is a place for justice.

  Community law, said the leech clinging in his brain, provincial law, little more than tribal law — and the stranger's always wrong.

  Richard Daniel felt the coldness of the fear closing down upon him and he knew, without half thinking, that the leech was right.

  He turned around and started down the street, heading for the transients barracks. Something unseen in the street caught his foot and he stumbled and went down. He scrabbled to his knees, hunting in the darkness on the cobblestones for the thing that tripped him. It was a heavy bar of steel, some part of the wreckage that had been hurled this far. He gripped it by one end and arose.

  "Sorry," said the ancient robot. "You have to watch your step."

  And there was a faint implication in his word — a hint of something more than the words had said, a hint of secret gloating in a secret knowledge.

  You have broken other laws, said the leech in Richard Daniel's brain. What of breaking just one more? Why, if necessary, not break a hundred more. It is all or nothing. Having come this far, you can't afford to fail. You can allow no one to stand in your way now.

  The ancient ro
bot half turned away and Richard Daniel lifted up the bar of steel, and suddenly the ancient robot no longer was a robot, but a diagram. There, with all the details of a blueprint, were all the working parts, all the mechanism of the robot that walked in the street before him. And if one detached that single bit of wire, if one burned out that coil, if — Even as he thought it, the diagram went away and there was the robot, a stumbling, failing robot that clanged on the cobblestones.

  Richard Daniel swung around in terror, looking up the street, but there was no one near.

  He turned back to the fallen robot and quietly knelt beside him. He gently put the bar of steel down into the street. And he felt a thankfulness — for, almost miraculously, he had not killed.

  The robot on the cobblestones was motionless. When Richard Daniel lifted him, he dangled. And yet he was all right. All anyone had to do to bring him back to life was to repair whatever damage had been done his body. And that served the purpose, Richard Daniel told himself, as well as killing would have done.

  He stood with the robot in his arms, looking for a place to hide him. He spied an alley between two buildings and darted into it. One of the buildings, he saw, was set upon stone blocks sunk into the ground, leaving a clearance of a foot or so. He knelt and shoved the robot underneath the building. Then he stood up and brushed the dirt and dust from his body.

  Back at the barracks and in his cubicle, he found a rag and cleaned up the dirt that he had missed. And, he thought hard.

  He'd seen the ship as a diagram and, not knowing what it meant, hadn't done a thing. Just now he'd seen the ancient robot as a diagram and had most decisively and neatly used that diagram to save himself from murder — from the murder that he was fully ready to commit.

  But how had he done it? And the answer seemed to be that be really had done nothing. He'd simply thought that one should detach a single wire, burn out a single coil — he'd thought it and it was done.