He sprang toward the door and there wasn’t any door. There was only wall.
He staggered back into the center of the cubicle and spun around to view each wall in turn. There was no door in any of the walls. The metal went up from floor to ceiling without a single break.
The walls began to move, closing in on him, sliding in, retracting.
He watched, incredulous, frozen, thinking that perhaps he’d imagined the moving of the walls.
But it was not imagination. Slowly, inexorably, the walls were closing in. Had he put out his arms, he could have touched them on either side of him.
“Ship!” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm.
“Yes, Mr. Sherwood.”
“You are malfunctioning. The walls are closing in.”
“No,” said the Ship. “No malfunction, I assure you. A very proper function. My brain grows tired and feeble. It is not the body only—the brain also has its limits. I suspected that it might, but I could not know. There was a chance, of course, that separated from the poison of a body, it might live in its bath of nutrients forever.”
“No!” rasped Sherwood, his breath strangling in his throat. “No, not me!”
“Who else?” asked the Ship. “I have searched for years and you are the first who fitted.”
“Fitted!” Sherwood screamed.
“Why, of course,” the Ship said calmly, happily. “A man who would not be missed. No one knowing where you were. No one hunting for you. No one who will miss you. I had hunted for someone like you and had despaired of finding one. For I am humane. I would cause no one grief or sadness.”
The walls kept closing in.
The Ship seemed to sigh in metallic contentment.
“Believe me, Mr. Sherwood,” it said, “finding you was a very miracle.”
Colophon
Short Fiction
was published between and by
Clifford D. Simak.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions produced between and by
Greg Weeks, dpcfmander, Sankar Viswanathan, Stephen Blundell, Mary Meehan, and Distributed Proofreaders
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Lake George Reflection,
a painting completed around by
Georgia O’Keeffe.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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