"I'm interested in that flight you were telling me about," said Jadiver.
"We've changed rates," the robot clerk replied, beaming. "It was a
bargain before, but just listen to the revised offer. We pay you, on a
per diem basis--subjective, of course. When you arrive, you actually
have a bank account waiting for you."
Per diem, subjective--the time that _seemed_ to elapse when the rocket
was traveling near the speed of light. It wasn't as good as the robot
made it sound.
"Never mind that," said Jadiver. "I'll take it if it's going far."
"Going far!" echoed the clerk.
A policeman sauntered by outside, just looking, but that was enough.
"I said I'd take it," Jadiver repeated in a loud voice.
The clerk deflated. "I wish I could go with you," it explained
wistfully. It reached under the counter and pulled out a perforated
tape. "This will get you on the ship, and it also constitutes the
contract. Just present it at the other end and collect your money. You
can send for your baggage after you're on board."
Jadiver opened his mouth and then closed it. His baggage was intangible,
mostly experience, not much of it pleasant.
"I'll do that," he said.
The clerk came out from behind the counter and watched Jadiver leave.
Lights from the rocketport glittered in its robot eyes.
* * * * *
Jadiver paced about the ship. It was not enough to be on it, for the
police could still trace him. And if they did, they could get him off.
It was not only himself, there was his unknown friend. They had ways to
learn about that.
He passed a vision port on his way through the ship. It was night, but
it didn't seem so on the vast, brightly lighted concrete plain. A
strange vehicle streaked across the surface of the rocketport in
defiance of all regulations and common sense.
It was coming his way. It dodged in and out of rockets landing and
taking off, escaping blazing destruction with last minute, intricate
maneuvers. The driver had complete control of the vehicle and was
fantastically skillful.
It was a strange machine. Jadiver had never seen anything quite like it.
As far as he knew, it resembled nothing the police used.
It didn't halt outside the ship. The loading ramp was down and the
machine came up without hesitation. The entrance was too narrow and the
vehicle would never get through--that seemed evident. An instant later,
he was not so sure. The ship quivered and groaned and vibrations ran
throughout the structure.
He leaned over the railing and looked down. The machine was inside,
dented and scraped.
"Captain," bellowed a voice from the vehicle. It was an authoritative
voice and it puzzled Jadiver.
The captain came running, either in response to the command or to find
out how much damage had been done in the crash and why.
"Take off, Captain," said the voice. "Take off at once."
The captain sputtered. "I give orders here. I'll take off when I get
ready."
"You're ready when the ship reaches a certain mass. As soon as I came on
board, you attained it. Check your mass gauges, Captain."
The captain hurried to the gauges and glanced at them. He stared back at
the machine.
"Captain," purred the machine, "you have a little daughter. By the time
you get back, she will be grown and will have children of her own. The
sooner you leave, the sooner you will see her again. I will regard it as
a personal favor if you see that we take off immediately."
The captain looked at the machine. Tentacles and eye stalks rose up out
of the tip as he watched. It was a big machine, well put together, and
it appeared quite capable of handling a roomful of armed men. As a
matter of fact, it just had.
The captain shrugged and gave the order to lift ship.
* * * * *
It was none too soon. Out of the visionport, Jadiver could see uniformed
men edging up from the underground shelters. They backed out of sight
when the rockets began to flame.
Faster the ship rose and higher. They were in the dense clouds and then
through them, out in the clear black of space, away from Venus.
Jadiver looked down at the machine. It wasn't a vehicle. It was a robot,
and it was familiar.
"It ought to be familiar," said the robot softly. That voice was for him
alone, directly on the auditory nerve. "You designed most of it back on
Earth, remember?"
He remembered. It was not a pretty imitation of a human--it was his
perfect robot. And it was also, his unknown friend, the one who had
watched over him.
He walked slowly down the stairs and stood beside it.
The robot switched to the regular speaking voice. "They built your
design, after all. They needed a big and powerful mobile robot, one that
could house, in addition to the regular functions, an extensive and
delicate mechanism."
That was the voice that had haunted him so long and in so many
situations. It was not Jadiver's own voice, but it resembled his. A
third person might not recognize the difference.
"That other mechanism," said Jadiver. "Is that the one that monitors the
circuit in my body?"
"That _parallels_ the circuit in your body." Tentacles were busy
straightening out the dents. "When I was built, they gave me a good
mind, better than your own in certain respects. What I lacked was
sensory perception. Eyes and ears, to be sure, good ones in a way, but
without the delicate shadings a human has, particularly tactile
interpretations. I didn't need better, they thought, because my function
was to observe and report on the parallel circuit I mentioned.
"In the beginning, that circuit was a formless matrix and only faintly
resembled your nervous system. As nerve data was exchanged back and
forth, it began to resemble you more and more, especially your mind.
Now, for practical purposes, it is you and I can look into it at will."
Jadiver stirred uneasily.
"Don't you understand?" asked the robot. "My mind isn't yours, and vice
versa. But we do have one thing in common, a synthetic nervous system
which, if you were killed, would begin to disintegrate slowly and
painfully. And now that it's developed as much as it is, I would
probably die, too, since that synthetic nervous system is an otherwise
unused part of my brain."
"There were two other victims before me," said Jadiver.
"There were, but they were derelicts--dead, really, before the
experiment got started. They lasted a few hours. I tried to help them,
but it was too late. It was not pleasant for me."
* * * * *
Not only was it a friend; it had a vital interest in keeping him alive.
He could trust it, had to. After what had happened, doubt wasn't called
for.
Jadiver rubbed his weary eyes. "That shield I used," he said. "Did it
work?"
The robot laughed--Jadiver's laughter. It had copied him in many ways.
"It worked to your disadvantage. The circuit signals got through to me,
but I couldn't send any back until Doumya Filone chipped off part of
your disguise. Then I spoke to you. Before that, I had to misdirect the
police. I built up a complete and false history for you and kept them
looking where you weren't."
If he had thought, he would have known it had to be that way. The police
were efficient; they could have taken him long ago without the aid of
the circuit. But it had seemed so easy and they had trusted the
robot--had to where the circuit was concerned. No man could sit in front
of a screen and interpret the squiggles that meant his hand was touching
an apple.
Jadiver sat down. The strain was over and he was safe, bound for some
far-off place.
"The police used you, though not as much as you used them," he said.
"Still, they didn't develop the theory."
"They didn't. There was a man on Earth, a top-notch scientist. He worked
out the theory and set up the mechanism. He had a surgical assistant, a
person who would never be more than that on Earth because she wasn't
good on theory, though she was a whiz at surgery. She realized it and
got his permission to build another machine and take it to Venus.
Originally it was intended to accumulate data on the workings of the
human nervous system.
"On Venus, things were different. Laws concerning the rights of
individuals are not so strict. She got the idea of examining the whole
nervous system at once, not realizing what it meant because it had never
been done that way. She discussed it with officials from the police
department who saw instantly what she didn't--that once an extensive
circuit was in a human, there was no way to get it out, except by death.
They had no objections and were quite willing to furnish her with
specimens, for their own purposes and only incidentally hers. Once the
first man died, they had her and wouldn't let her back out, though she
wanted to."
"Specimen," repeated Jadiver. "Yeah, I was a specimen to her." His head
was heavy. "Why didn't you tell me this in the beginning?"
"Would you have listened when I first contacted you?" asked the robot.
"Later, perhaps. But once you put on the shield, I couldn't get in touch
with you until you were with Doumya Filone."
* * * * *
Would Jadiver have listened? Not until it became a matter of raw
survival. Even now he hated to leave Earth and what it meant for the
unknown dangers and tedium of a planet circling an alien sun. It was
more than that, of course. Just as he'd had a design for a perfect
robot, he had in mind a perfect woman. He could recognize either when he
saw it.
"Doumya Filone was the assistant?"
"She was." The robot was his now, Jadiver knew. Others had built it, but
it belonged to him by virtue of a nervous system. It had as good a mind
as his, but it wouldn't dispute his claim. "Like yourself," continued
the robot, "in the Solar System she would never have been more than
second rate, and she wanted to be first. Hardly anyone recognizes it,
but the Solar System is not what it once was. It's like a nice
neighborhood that decays so slowly that the people in it don't notice
what it's become. There are some who can rise even in a slum, but
they're the rare exceptions.
"Others need greater opportunity than slums offer. They have to leave if
they expect to develop freely. But the hold of a whole culture is strong
and it's hard to persuade them that they have to go." The robot paused.
"Take a last look at a blighted area."
Outside planets glimmered in the distance.
Jadiver was tired and his eyes were closing. Now he could sleep safely,
but not in peace.
"Don't regret it," advised the robot. "Where you're going, you'll have
real designs to work on. No more pretty robot faces."
"Where is it--Alpha Centauri?" Jadiver asked disinterestedly.
"That ship left yesterday. They got their quota and left within the
hour, before any of the passengers could change their minds. We're going
farther, to Sirius."
* * * * *
Sirius. A mighty sun, with planets to match. It was a place to be big.
Big and lonely.
"I can't force you to do anything," said the robot. It sounded pleased.
"But I have no inhibitions about others."
The robot flipped up its cowl. There was a storage space and a woman in
it.
Except for her hands, she was bound tightly by tangle strands.
"I don't think she likes you at the moment," said the robot. "She'll
tell you that as soon as she's able to speak. She may relent later, when
she realizes what it's really like on Sirius. You've got the whole
voyage to convince her."
The eye-stalks of the robot followed Jadiver interestedly. "Are you
looking for the tongs? Remember that the tangle stuff is repelled by
your skin."
Jadiver willingly used his hands and the tangle strands fell off.
As the robot had predicted, Doumya Filone was not silent--at first.