Expeto stood irresolutely, trying to mak& sense out of it still. Dollars—something… The clerk had swung back to watching the set, and he reached out for the scrawny shoulder, drawing the man around.
“But look…” Then it was no use. The shoulder had crumpled in his hand like a rotten stick, and the man had lapsed into a faint with a single shriek.
Expeto stood outside, swaying while the sickness washed away slowly, and he told himself the doctors would fix the man up; that was what they were for. They’d fix him, and no real harm had been done. He hadn’t meant to hurt the man. He’d only meant to ask him what dollars were and how to get them.
Then he moved on into a little park and dropped onto a seat. But the sickness was still there, a sickness he hadn’t noticed, but which had been growing on him even before he’d hurt the clerk. It was as if something were slowly eroding his mind. Even the curious memory of ideas and words was going!
He was sitting there, his head in his hands, trying to catch himself, when the car drove up. Obanion and Kal-lik got out, but Obanion came over alone.
“Come on, Expeto. It won’t work. You might as well come back. And there’s only an hour left!”
Expeto got up slowly, nodding wearily. The doctor was right—there was no place for such a monster as he in the world.
“Left before what?” he asked dully, as he climbed into the rear of the car, and watched Obanion lock the door and the glass slide between him and the front seat.
For a second Obanion hesitated, then he shrugged. “All right. Maybe you should know. In another hour you’ll be dead! And nothing can prevent it.”
Expeto took it slowly, letting the thought sink into the muddying depths of his mind. But he was important… they’d told him so. Or had they? They’d
chased him about, bound him down, refused to tell him what he needed, refused him even civil decency and told him he was the hope of the world. Or had he only imagined it?
“I never wanted anything but myself. Only myself. And they wouldn’t let me have that—not even for a few hours. They had to hound me…” He realized he was muttering aloud and stopped it.
But from the front seat, the voices came back, muffled by the glass, Kallik speaking first. “See, paranoia all right. Thinks he’s being persecuted.”
“He
“You talk as if he were a human being. Remember the other—XP One? Crazy, killing people, or trying to. I tell you, the robots can’t be made trustworthy yet, no matter what you cybernetics boys have found in the last ten years. This one only had six hours instead of ten for the other, and he’s already threatened us and hurt two people.”
“Maybe. We. don’t know all the story yet.” Obanion wiped his forehead. “And damn it, he
Expeto—Experiment Two—stared at the hands he held before his face. He bent the fingers, looking at the veins and muscles. Then, slowly, with his other hand, he twisted at them, stretching them out and out, until there could be no doubt of the rubbery plastic they were.
A monster! A thing grown in a laboratory, made out of mechanical parts, and fed bits of human education from tapes in cybernetics machines! A thing that would walk on the moon without air and take over enemy
bases, or do all men’s work—but that could never be taken as a man by human beings, who grew from something or other, but were never built. A thing to be animated for a few hours, and deliberately set to die at the end of that time, as a precaution—because it had no real life, and it wasn’t murder to kill a built thing!
A thing that somehow couldn’t kill men, it seemed, judging by the sickness he’d felt when he’d hurt or threatened them. But a thing of which they couldn’t be sure—until they’d tested him and found he was complete and sane.
He rocked back and forth on the seat, moaning a little. He didn’t want to die; but already, the eroded places in his brain were growing larger. It didn’t matter; he had never been anyone; he never could be anyone. But he didn’t want to die!
“Hah’ an hour left,” the cyberneticist, Obanion, said slowly. “And less than that, unless we make sure he doesn’t exert himself. He’s about over.”
Then the car was coming into the garage, and Obanion got out with Kallik. Expeto went with them quietly, knowing that Obanion was right. Already, he was finding it hard to use his legs or control what passed for muscles. They went back to the room with the instruments and the waiting technicians.
For a moment, he looked at the humans there. Obanion’s eyes were veiled, but the others were open to his gaze. And there was no pity there. Men don’t pity a car that is too old and must go to the scrap heap. He was only a machine, no matter how valuable. And after him, other machines would see the faces of men turned away from them, generation after generation.
Slowly, he kicked at the chair, tipping it over without splintering it, and his voice came out as high and shrill as his faltering control could force’it. “No! No more! You’ve persecuted me enough. You’ve tried to kill me—me, the hope of your puny race! You’ve laughed at me and tortured me. But I’m smarter than you—greater than you! I can kill you—all of you—the whole world, with my bare hands.”
He saw shock on Obanion’s face, and sadness, and
for that he was almost sorry. But the smug satisfaction of Kallik as the zep-gun came up and the horror on the faces of the others counteracted it. He yelled once, and charged at them.
For a moment, he was afraid that he would not be stopped before he had to injure at least one of them. But then the zep-gun in Kallik’s hand spoke silently, and the bullet smashed against the mockery of Expeto’s body.
He lay there, watching them slowly recover from their fright. It didn’t matter when one of them came over and began kicking him senselessly. It didn’t even matter when Obanion put a stop to it.
His senses were fading now, and he knew that the excitement had shortened his brief time, and that the crystals were about to break apart and put an end to his short existence. But in a curious way, while he still hated and feared death, he was resigned to it.
They’d be better off. Maybe the first experimental robot had known that. Expeto let the thought linger, finding it good. He couldn’t believe the other had grown insane; it, too, must have found the bitter truth, and tried to do the only possible thing, even when that involved genuine injury to a few of the humans.
Now they’d have two such failures, and it would be perhaps years before they’d risk another, when their checks failed to show the reason for the nonexistent flaws. They’d have to solve their own problems of war or peace, without mechanical monsters to make them almost gods in power, while teaching them the disregard of devils for life other than their own.
And there’d be no more of his kind to be used and despised, and persecuted. Persecuted? The word stirred up thoughts… something about paranoia and insanity.
But it faded. Everything faded. And he sank through vague content into growing blackness. His thoughts were almost happy as death claimed him.
The Years Draw Nigh
Mars was harsh and old, worn with the footsteps of two races that had come and gone, leaving only scant traces behind. Even the wind was tired, and its thin wailing was a monotonous mutter of memories from its eroded past.
Zeke Lerner stared out from the dust-covered observation port of the hastily-reconditioned little rocket, across the scarred runways and sand-filled pits for the star ships, toward the ruins of what had once been the great Star Station. His face was gray and dull as he watched a figure coming across the pitted sand of the field toward his ship.
