judge’s bald head. His Honor’s eyes were bulging. “She squirted hot lead at me!” he said accusingly. “Maliciously and with malice aforethought.” He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his bald head. His hands were steady. “If that lead had fallen on me,” he said plaintively, “it would have baked my skull. Why did she try to do that to me?”
“You made fun of her poetry,” High-Pockets pointed out. With a certain amount of pleasure he reflected that His Honor could hardly allege contempt, under the circumstances.
But his honor looked at High-Pockets with a new light in his eyes. “You may have saved my life,” he said thoughtfully.
Arturius Wickware looked desperate. “It can’t squirt,” he said. “The plunger pin isn’t in.”
High-Pockets pointed to the metal on the floor. “It did,” he said.
Arturius looked at No. 7 dourly and shut off the motor. “Please take No. 8,” he begged High-Pockets. It was the first time he had said “please” in thirty years.
High-Pockets was staring at the proof like a man in a trance.
Suddenly he made half a dozen long strides to the machinist’s bench. He laid hands on a twelve-pound sledgehammer. He came back with it over his shoulder, and before the horrified Arturius could utter a word, High-Pockets had gone to the rear of No. 7 and swung the sledge in one devastating left-handed blow that sheared through the ninth and tenth cams. Then he stepped to the right and crashed the hammer down on the pot-pump cam.
He stepped back, breathing hard, the hammer over his shoulder. Pieces of cast iron tinkled to the floor. “Well,” boomed High-Pockets, “I guess I fixed it, didn’t I?”
There was no answer. High-Pockets looked around. Arturius had quietly fainted. The judge looked horrified.
They revived Arturius by the simple expedient of putting a screwdriver in his big hand. He opened his eyes and stared at High-Pockets and shook his head slowly, incredulously.
High-Pockets helped him up. “Don’t worry,” he said.
Arturius sputtered and almost detonated. “Don’t worry!” he snorted. “Five hundred dollars worth of cams busted up and he says, ‘Don’t worry!’ ”
“It won’t cost that much,” said High-Pockets. “I’ll help you piece the cams together. You can get them welded.”
“No,” said Arturius. “I’ll get new ones.”
“It won’t work,” said High-Pockets.
“What won’t work?”
“I did that to chastise the machine. If it wants to be so independent, it will have to endure the penalties as well as enjoy the privileges. If you put in new cams, it will think it’s smart and go right ahead raising hell. But if you have the old ones welded and put back in, the welds, like scars, will remind No. 7 that she’s supposed to be a lady. As long as they are there, No. 7 will behave. I guarantee it.”
The judge wiped his bald head again. “I do believe you’ve got something there, Mr. Jones. If a machine assumes the right of self-determination, what would be more natural than to treat it as you would treat any other self-determining creature?”
High-Pockets heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. He saw now that his stay in the city would not be terminated as a guest in the workhouse. High-Pockets was very happy indeed.
“How can you be sure?” Arturius demanded.
“I’ll show you,” said High-Pockets. “Turn on the motor.”
Arturius did. A strange thing happened. No. 7 began to turn. She pulled herself off of the cast. Somehow she broke loose the hardened metal on her vise-jaws. It dropped to the floor in one big piece. She came to a normal stop and stood there obediently.
“That’s utterly impossible!” Arturius shouted. “It can’t even turn over—with those cams broken out.”
“She’s chastened,” High-Pockets said gently. “All you have to do from now on is to be firm.”
The judge came closer. “Mr. Jones,” he said, “I am beginning to believe that even a linotype operator has a place in this modern world. Suppose we all three go out and have a drink.”
High-Pockets turned off the motor. “I heard you the first time, Your Honor, and I am happy to report that there are no extenuating circumstances. Shall we go?”
The Wealth of Echindul
He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old Father Neptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from his cheap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp and weary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.
Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting to keep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the green sand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turned around slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadly swamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he had come.
With fingers that would hardly function from weariness he took off his diving-suit and straightened up. His stooping shoulders were free of that weight for the first time in forty days. He was a small man, hardly over four feet tall, and not well formed. It seemed incredible that he had crossed the Great Sea-Swamp on foot.
And as he looked back at the distant rim of green fire that marked the mountains it seemed incredible to him too. A great sigh of relief and gratefulness shook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve and colossal willpower that had carried him for six months, suddenly flowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot about the ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitched forward on his face in the sand, and slept.
Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awake instantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often as had his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from the Acid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.
He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue flame, saw it falling;
