Ellison Wonderland

level. The gay uniforms of the Guard were ranked in the hall as McCollum steadied his sodden cargo into the building.

“My God, purulent!” one Guardsman snorted sourly.

“Is that Packett?” a dapper, balding Guardsman asked. His shoulders bore Commander boards. McCollum nodded. He tried to move past with Packett.

The Commander stopped them. McCollum explained, “He was on the Stripo He’s not been well.”

“Don’t cover for him, McCollum. He’s a waste, and there should be no glossing. The man is a waste. Can he talk?”

McCollum shrugged still supporting Packett, whose legs were taffy. “I suppose. I don’t know how much coherence you’ll get out of him, but I suppose he can talk.”

The Commander nudged a thumb toward a conference room. “Bring him along.”

They started toward the room, and Packett began to blather. Even as they thrust him into a chair, his words fumbled and roiled. “They with power…laws and can’t do, and do, and have this with what they let you do. I know! I’ve always known! The wheels with grinding down and they are afraid, so they rule you…rule…”

He went on ramblingly, almost semi-conscious, his words—more, his accents—tirades against authority and government. They had hampered him, but he would get even.

The Guard listened closely, for after all, this was Packett, the inventor of Walkaway. They listened, and finally, the Commander put his gloved hand, his crimson gloved hand, across Packett’s mouth. “That will be enough, man,” he deep-throated, with suppressed fury.

“Tell him what we want, McCollum,” the esoteric purulent-caller urged the Frericks man.

McCollum’s eyebrows went up and his lips thinned with resignation. The military never could pull its weight in these matters. “Leon,” McCollum said, slipping to one knee beside Packett’s chair. “Leon, they want to take Walkaway back to the drawing boards. They think he has too much initiative. Leon? Can you understand—” “No!

“No, by God, damn their eyes, no! Not a touch. Not a wire. Nothing! He stays as he is! If they want to use him, damn them they’ve robbed me of my fortune, now they’d pick my brain work apart, no I say!”

They argued and pleaded and cajoled and screeched at him for the better part of five hours. But he was firm.

He still owned Walkaway. The Frericks Foundation employed Packett by grant, but Walkaway was still his own, and when it came down to it, not a military personnel at all. Walkaway was a free entity. A bond slave of metal set free. If they wanted him to go to Carina—as Packett had resolved it to himself—he would go as he was now, today, now.

So the Guard had to accept it that way. They had to take Walkaway with his individuality…too much for a robot? And they had to send him on the first bounce to the stars, as a metal man with thoughts of his own. That was as it should have been.

For had not Leon Packett created Walkaway?

Had not Packett re-arranged the circuits to provide a hidden factor the Guard knew nothing about?

Had it not all been planned that way?

To results we know now.

The ship was crazily-shaped. It was a sundial. With a thick trunk, and two clear face-plates at either end.

Great face plates of clear substance, through which Walkaway could train his turret eyes, and see the universe as it whirled by in not-space. The drive apertures were set at angles around the thick trunk of the ship, and there were no sleeping compartments, no galley, no chairs, nothing a metal servant would find useless.

The ship W-1 blasted free of Bounce Point on March 24th, 2111, its sole occupant a robot named Walkaway, whose face was a triple-turret tri-vid camera, and whose mind was the mind of a metal man with initiative. A certain initiative that only one man knew existed.

The ship left on March 24th. On March 31st, Leon Packett gripped a pair of heavy scissors and thrust them deep into his neck.

His will was a masterpiece of maudlin self-pity; but it released Walkaway from all human obligations, setting him in toto free. He was a singular now. Not an invention, but a civilian employee of the military Guard. He was to receive payment per diem for his work, and his accounts were to be handled by the Frericks Foundation.

Whatever Walkaway earned, remained his own.

The ship went out on March 24th 2111.

It returned three hundred and sixty-five years later.

And the future began.

Oh, Lord! The records were covered with dust. But valid, that was the rub. The Frericks Foundation had sunk in its own mismanagement, and a pleasure sanctuary had risen on its whited bones. The New Portion was now called the Underside, for tiers had risen high on high to the fiftieth level above that tier. Now there was a planetwide government, and the ship W-1 had become a legend. The robot Walkaway had become a Myth. The ship had never been heard from again, and as will happen, with all cultures, time had passed the concept of star travel by.

There was a broken-nosed statue of Leon Packett on the third tier, many miles from where the Frericks Foundation had stood. A statue that called him one of the great inventors of all time and all Mankind. There were no scissors in the statue.

When the ship came down past the Moon, and its warning gear telemetered out the recog-signals, the Earth Central control tower was lost in disbelief. A sloe-eyed brunette who was in charge of deciphering and matching recog-signals with the call letters of those ships out, called for a checker. Her section chief, a woman who had been on the job for eighteen years, matched the recog-signals, and turned to the younger girl with a word lost on her lips. The call went in to Guard Central immediately.

They denied landing co-ordinates to the W-1 and held it aspace till they had found the records in the sub-cellar of the pleasure sanctuary on the third level. When they had the files, they knew the story completely, and they sent word to berth-in the W-1.

Walkaway looked the same.

Huge and graceful, his face vaguely human, his body a sort of homo sapiens plus, he slid down a nylex rope