Some hundreds of hours later one of the crewmen found him and took him to the captain.
The captain glowered at him.
'Who are you?' he asked.
'A stowaway,' Richard Daniel told him.
'Your name,' said the captain, drawing a sheet of paper before him and picking up a pencil, 'your planet of residence and owner.'
'I refuse to answer you,' said Richard Daniel sharply and knew that the answer wasn't right, for it was not right and proper that a robot should refuse a human a direct command.
But the captain did not seem to mind. He laid down the pencil and stroked his black beard slyly.
'In that case,' he said, 'I can't exactly see how I can force the information from you. Although there might be some who'd try. You are very lucky that you stowed away on a ship whose captain is a most kind-hearted man.'
He didn't look kind-hearted. He did look foxy. Richard Daniel stood there, saying nothing.
'Of course,' the captain said, 'there's a serial number somewhere on your body and another on your brain. But I suppose that you'd resist if we tried to look for them.'
'I am afraid I would.'
'In that case,' said the captain, 'I don't think for the moment we'll concern ourselves with them.'
Richard Daniel still said nothing, for he realized that there was no need to. This crafty captain had it all worked out and he'd let it go at that.
'For a long time,' said the captain, 'my crew and I have been considering the acquiring of a robot, but it seems we never got around to it. For one thing, robots are expensive and our profits are not large.'
He sighed and got up from his chair and looked Richard Daniel up and down.
'A splendid specimen,' he said. 'We welcome you aboard. You'll find us congenial.'
'I am sure I will,' said Richard Daniel. 'I thank you for your courtesy.'
'And now,' the captain said, 'you'll go up on the bridge and report to Mr. Duncan. I'll let him know you're coming. He'll find some light and pleasant duty for you.'
Richard Daniel did not move as swiftly as he might, as sharply as the occasion might have called for, for all at once the captain had become a complex diagram. Not like the diagrams of ships or robots, but a diagram of strange symbols, some of which Richard Daniel knew were frankly chemical, but others which were not.
'You heard me!' snapped the captain. 'Move!'
'Yes, sir,' said Richard Daniel, willing the diagram away, making the captain come back again into his solid flesh.
Richard Daniel found the first mate on the bridge, a horse-faced, somber man with a streak of cruelty ill- hidden, and slumped in a chair to one side of the console was another of the crew, a sodden, terrible creature.
The sodden creature cackled. 'Well, well, Duncan, the first non-human member of the Rambler's crew.'
Duncan paid him no attention. He said to Richard Daniel: 'I presume you are industrious and ambitious and would like to get along.'
'Oh, yes,' said Richard Daniel, and was surprised to find a new sensation — laughter — rising in himself.
'Well, then,' said Duncan, 'report to the engine room. They have work for you. When you have finished there, I'll find something else.'
'Yes, sir,' said Richard Daniel, turning on his heel.
'A minute,' said the mate. 'I must introduce you to our ship's physician, Dr. Abram Wells. You can be truly thankful you'll never stand in need of his services.'
'Good day, Doctor,' said Richard Daniel, most respectfully.
'I welcome you,' said the doctor, pulling a bottle from his pocket. 'I don't suppose you'll have a drink with me. Well, then, I'll drink to you.'
Richard Daniel turned around and left. He went down to the engine room and was put to work at polishing and scrubbing and generally cleaning up. The place was in need of it. It had been years, apparently, since it had been cleaned or polished and it was about as dirty as an engine room can get — which is terribly dirty. After the engine room was done there were other places to be cleaned and furbished up and he spent endless hours at cleaning and in painting and shinning up the ship. The work was of the dullest kind, but he didn't mind. It gave him time to think and wonder, time to get himself sorted out and to become acquainted with himself, to try to plan ahead.
He was surprised at some of the things he found in himself. Contempt, for one — contempt for the humans on this ship. It took a long time for him to become satisfied that it was contempt, for he'd never held a human in contempt before.
But these were different humans, not the kind he'd known.
These were no Barringtons. Although it might be, he realized, that he felt contempt for them because he knew them thoroughly. Never before had he known a human as he knew these humans. For he saw them not so much as living animals as intricate patternings of symbols. He knew what they were made of and the inner urgings that served as motivations, for the patterning was not of their bodies only, but of their minds as well. He had a little trouble with the symbology of their minds, for it was so twisted and so interlocked and so utterly confusing that it was hard at first to read. But he finally got it figured out and there were times he wished he hadn't.
The ship stopped at many ports and Richard Daniel took charge of the loading and unloading, and he saw the planets, but was unimpressed. One was a nightmare of fiendish cold, with the very atmosphere turned to drifting snow. Another was a dripping, noisome jungle world, and still another was a bare expanse of broken, tumbled rock without a trace of life beyond the crew of humans and their robots who manned the huddled station in this howling wilderness.
It was after this planet that Jenks, the cook, went screaming to his bunk, twisted up with pain — the victim of a suddenly inflammed vermiform appendix.
Dr. Wells came tottering in to look at him, with a half-filled bottle sagging the pocket of his jacket. And later stood before the captain, holding out two hands that trembled, and with terror in his eyes.
'But I cannot operate,' he blubbered. 'I cannot take the chance. I would kill the man!'
He did not need to operate. Jenks suddenly improved. The pain went away and he got up from his bunk and went back to the galley and Dr. Wells sat huddled in his chair, bottle gripped between his hands, crying like a baby.
Down in the cargo hold, Richard Daniel sat likewise huddled and aghast that he had dared to do it — not that he had been able to, but that he had dared, that he, a robot, should have taken on himself an act of interference, however merciful, with the body of a human.
Actually, the performance had not been too difficult. It was, in a certain way, no more difficult than the repairing of an engine or the untangling of a faulty circuit. No more difficult — just a little different. And he wondered what he'd done and how he'd' gone about it, for he did not know. He held the technique in his mind, of that there was ample demonstration, but he could in no way isolate or pinpoint the pure mechanics of it. It was like an instinct, he thought — unexplainable, but entirely workable.
But a robot had no instinct. In that much he was different from the human and the other animals. Might not, he asked himself, this strange ability of his be a sort of compensating factor given to the robot for his very lack of instinct? Might that be why the human race had failed in its search for paranormal powers? Might the instincts of the body be at certain odds with the instincts of the mind?
For he had the feeling that this ability of his was just a mere beginning, that it was the first emergence of a vast body of abilities which some day would be rounded out by robots. And what would that spell, he wondered, in that distant day when the robots held and used the full body of that knowledge? An adjunct to the glory of the human race, or equals of the human race, or superior to the human race — or, perhaps, a race apart?
And what was his role, he wondered. Was it meant that he should go out as a missionary, a messiah, to carry to robots throughout the universe the message that he held? There must be some reason for his having learned this truth. It could not be meant that he would hold it as a personal belonging, as an asset all his own.
He got up from where he sat and moved slowly back to the ship's forward area, which now gleamed spotlessly from the work he'd done on it, and he felt a certain pride.
He wondered why he had felt that it might be wrong, blasphemous, somehow, to announce his abilities to the world? Why had he not told those here in the ship that it had been he who had healed the cook, or mentioned the
