“No! No!” the hobby protested frantically. “That is impossible. There exists great danger with the setting of the sun. You must be undercover by the time the sun is set.”
“Why don’t we do the way he says,” suggested Tuck, pulling his robe tight around himself. “I don’t like it out here. If there is no time now, we could come back and pick up the luggage later.”
Said Dobbin, “We’ll take the luggage now. There’ll be no time in the morning.”
“It seems to me,” I said to Dobbin, “you’re greatly pressed for time. If that’s the case, why don’t you simply turn around and go back where you came from. We can take care of ourselves.”
“Captain Ross,” said Sara Foster, firmly, “I’m not going to walk all that way if there’s a chance to ride. I think you’re being foolish.”
“That may well be,” I said, angrily, “but I don’t like snotty robots ordering me around.”
“We be hobbies,” Dobbin said. “We not be any robots.”
“You be human hobbies?”
“I do not know your meaning.”
“Human beings made you. Creatures very much like us.”
“I do not know,” said Dobbin.
“The hell you don’t,” I said. I turned to Smith. “George,” I said.
The blind man turned his puffy face toward me. The look of ecstasy still was pasted on it.
“What is it, captain?”
“In your talk back and forth with this friend of yours, did you ever mention hobbies?”
“Hobbies? Oh, you mean stamp collecting and...”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I mean hobbyhorses. Did you ever mention hobbyhorses?”
“Until this moment,” said the blind man, “I never heard of them.”
“But you had toys when you were ‘a child.”
The blind man sighed. “Not the kind you are thinking of. I was born blind. I have never seen. The kind of toys other children had were not...”
“Captain,” Sara said, angrily, “you are ridiculous. Why all this suspicion?”
“I’ll tell you that,” I said, just as angrily, “and it’s an easy answer...”
“I know,” she said. “I know. Suspicion, time and time again, has saved that neck of yours.”
“Gracious lady,” Dobbin said, “please believe there is great danger once the sun has set. I plead with you, I implore you, I urge you to come with us and most speedily at that.”
“Tuck,” said Sara, “get up that ladder and start getting down the stuff!” She swung belligerently toward me. “Have you objections, captain?”
“Miss Foster,” I told her, “it’s your ship and it’s your money. You’re paying for the show.”
“You’re laughing at me,” she stormed. “You’ve laughed all the way. You never really believed in anything I told you. You don’t believe at all-not in anything.”
“I got you here,” I told her, grimly, “and I’ll get you back. That’s the deal we made. All I ask is that you try not to make the job any harder than it has to be.”
And immediately that I said it, I was sorry that I had. We were on an alien planet and very far from home and we should stick together and not start off with bickering. More than likely, I admitted to myself, she had been quite right; I might have been ridiculous. But right away, I amended that. Ridiculous on the surface, maybe, but not in principle. When you hit an alien planet, you are on your own and you have to keep your senses and your hunches sharp. I’d been on a lot of alien planets and had always managed and so, of course, had Sara, but she’d always hit them with a good-sized expeditionary force and I’d been on my own.
Tuck, at the first word from her, had gone swarming up the ladder, with his robe tucked up underneath his belt so he wouldn’t trip, and now was handing down the duffle bags and the other plunder to Sara, who was halfway up the ladder, taking the stuff from him and dropping it as gently as she could at the ladder’s base. There was one thing you had to say about the gal-she never shirked the work. She was al. ways in there, doing ‘her fair share and perhaps a good deal more.
“All right,” I said to Dobbin, “run your packhorses over here. How do you handle this?”
“I regret,” said Dobbin, “that we haven’t any arms. But with the situation as it is, you’ll be forced to do the packing. Just heap the luggage on top the hobbies’ backs and when the load is completed, metal cinches will extrude from the belly and strap the load securely.”
“Ingenious,” I said.
Dobbin made a little forward dip upon his rockers, in the semblance of hewing. “Always,” he said, “we attempt to serve.”
Four of the horses came rocking up and I began loading them. When Tuck got through with handing down the gear, Sara came and helped me. Tuck closed the port and by the time he had climbed down the ladder, we were all set to go.
The sun was touching the city skyline and hunks were being nibbled out of it by the topmost towers. It was slightly more yellow than the sun of Earth-perhaps a K-type star. The ship would know, of course; the ship would have it all. The ship did all the work that a man was supposed to do. It gobbled up the data and pulled it all apart and put it back together. It knew about this planet and about the planet’s star, it knew about the atmosphere and the chemistry and all the rest of it and it would have been more than willing to give it out to anyone who asked. But
