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 robot 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.
Perhaps he'd seen no diagram at all. Perhaps the diagram was no more than some sort of psychic rationalization to mask whatever he had seen or sensed. Seeing the ship and robot with the surfaces stripped away from them and their purpose and their function revealed fully to his view, he had sought some explanation of his strange ability, and his subconscious mind had devised an explanation, an analogy that, for the moment, had served to satisfy him.
Like when he'd been in hyperspace, he thought. He'd seen a lot of things out there he had not understood. And that was it, of course, he thought excitedly. Something had happened to him out in hyperspace. Perhaps there'd been something that had stretched his mind. Perhaps he'd picked up some sort of new dimension-seeing, some new twist to his mind.
He remembered how, back on the ship again, with his mind wiped clean of all the glory and the knowledge, he had felt like weeping. But now he knew that it had been much too soon for weeping. For although the glory and the knowledge (if there'd been a knowledge) had been lost to him, be had not lost everything. He'd gained a new perceptive device and the ability to use it somewhat fumblingly — and it didn't really matter that he still was at a loss as to what he did to use it. The basic fact that he possessed it and could use it was enough to start with.
Somewhere out in front there was someone calling — someone, he now realized, who had been calling for some little time….
'Hubert, where are you? Hubert, are you around? Hubert…'
Hubert?
Could Hubert be the ancient robot? Could they have missed him already?
Richard Daniel jumped to his feet for an undecided moment, listening to the calling voice. And then sat down again. Let them call, he told himself. Let them go out and hunt.
He was safe in this cubicle. He had rented it and for the moment it was home and there was no one who would dare break in upon him.
But it wasn't home. No matter how hard he tried to tell himself it was, it wasn't. There wasn't any
