Part 2

As it began to straighten up, the acceleration ended. Gears and pistons tensed against tremendous weight now moved with the force of a violent leap. Instantaneous reflexes adapted to the change. The robot caught at an open hatch hole halfway up the well.

The space inside was small and empty. The robot climbed in. A few seconds later metallic sounds exploded sharply from outside. It looked up and saw the hatch at the top of the well open, the junkman appear, looking down and then climbing through the hole into the well.

The robot withdrew its head and waited.

The junkman was humming an indistinguishable tune. The sound approached. The robot braced itself, one hand ready to reach out.

The unmusical humming stopped, then took up again, growing remote. Quickly the robot looked out. The well was empty. The junkman had gone through one of the hatch openings farther up.

The humming stopped. The junkman's voice spoke. "Well, well, my friend. We have come to the end of the road, for you. I kept you alive in case something happened. Now I can dispense with you."

There was a deep groan. A different voice said thickly, "Damn you, go ahead and kill me."

"That I will do. You should thank me for it. Broken ribs from the acceleration. I will kill you. Yes. But I can't have your body floating in space where it might be picked up. No one must know that you didn't steal this ship yourself. You get tied to a space mine.... So. Now I kill you--So!"

2615 moved from the hatch opening and up the well to where the voices emerged. It paused briefly while its glittering eyes took in the scene.

* * * * *

The dusty junkman was just straightening up from the inert form lashed cruelly around the black sphere of a g.i. space mine. His back was toward the opening.

Careful, so as not to make a sound, the robot slid through the opening and gathered itself for a leap. At that instant, the junkman seemed to sense its presence. He whirled around just as the robot leaped.

2615 saw its fist enter the junkman's face, sinking inches deep.

Then, impossibly, it saw the human seize its metal arm and twist it as if it were putty. The human face was gone. The human head dangled at a broken angle.

Tangled thoughts within the robot brain meshed into desperate action. It was futile. Its other arm was twisted. Its legs were wrapped into grotesque spirals.

Garbled sound came from the smashed human face. The junkman went away.

2615, helpless to move, studied the body tied to the space mine. A gaping hole in the chest was still spurting blood. A shudder shook the dying man, then he was still.

Nothing moved for a long time. Then there was movement outside the hatch opening. An arm dressed in the sleeve of a space officer poked in. It was followed by a face bearing the stamp of authority. The space officer straightened up and looked down at the robot.

"So," he said. "A robot. I hadn't expected that. You almost got me. If you had hit me in the chest instead of the head it would be all over. Lucky I have plenty of bodies of every description. Human bodies. Your kind wouldn't fit me."

"You--a robot?" 2615 said.

The space officer stared at the robot, frowning. "And what if I am?" he said.

"If I had known that I wouldn't have attacked you. I--I wanted to add you to--that." The robot turned its head toward the space mine. It added, "I thought you were _human_."

"Mm hmm," the space officer said, nodding. "I can understand that. You hate humans."

"Yes."

"How would you like to help me destroy them? All of them!"

A twisted metal arm twitched. "Put my brain in another body," the robot said.

"That I will do," the space officer said. "But let me warn you these bodies of mine are made of better stuff than yours. One bit of treachery and I'll cripple you again."

Fifteen minutes later the space officer returned with a robot body. Callously he turned the helpless robot over. He twisted the copper-colored disc and drew out the brain cylinder. As carefully, he inserted it in the hollow receptacle of the undamaged body. He stepped back and watched curiously.

2615 lay motionless for several seconds. Abruptly one of its arms moved. It turned over and sat up, then rose carefully to its feet.

"Very nice," the space officer said. "Now put the mine in the airlock and we'll leave it for anyone who might be following us."

2615 obeyed. Then it turned slowly to the space officer. There was admiration in its tones. "You have the perfect answer," it said. "With human-like bodies you can go anywhere. But--I thought I was the first robot to ever escape."

"So far as I know, you are," the spaceman said. "You see, I'm--but I think I will have to make sure of you before I say more."

* * * * *

The space mine was round and dead black. Unreflecting. It drifted out a little as the long length of the junk freighter moved ahead, and blended into the blackness of space. The dead man, twisted around it at a grotesque angle, would have appeared to be someone almost doubled over backwards with mirth, if there had been any eyes to see him.

When the freighter had gone, pulling ahead at one G acceleration, the mine began to spin slowly, making the dead man seem to be searching for something--or seeing some far-off horror that caused his eyes to bulge out.

After a while there was a solid click from the interior of the space mine. A soft whine rose upward toward a supersonic pitch. Small holes appeared in the black surface of the globe, and small shapes crept out. Some of them were under the man, pushing at him. But the ropes held.

The mine didn't spin any more. The dead man seemed to have already forgotten the freighter, looking back the way it had come, waiting for what was to come next.

Imperceptibly it froze over with a microfilm of crystalline ice, so that new stars seemed to spring into being.

And that's the way Stella saw it. She hadn't taken Larry seriously about the space mine, and was only trying to catch her first glimpse of her freighter.

It didn't seem real. It was a face that looked somehow familiar, with two thick white spikes protruding from its nostrils like mockeries of tusks.

A thought flashed through her mind that Larry Jackson had figured out some dirty trick to scare her with. She didn't have much time to think before she knew that what she was seeing was real. Its position was such that it should have passed ten miles to the side.

It started to. The marble monster with tusks didn't turn to follow her. Then three things happened. Stella recognized the man. He was the pilot she had assigned to the junk ship. Stella saw the sphere he was tied to.

And fire shot out from that circular void. Her pilot swung toward her again and rushed at her like the figurehead on the prow of an ancient watership.

"Larry!" Stella screamed into the radio.

"I see it," his voice answered her. "Get on your space-suit and jump out. Turn on your suit radio so I can find you afterwards. Every second counts!"

In the airlock with the shell door open, she looked into bottomless space and drew back. Then she closed her eyes and leaped. When she opened them again there were no stars, only bright white lines that all went in the same direction, and for an instant a bright yellow splotch that was like a gold band circling her far out.

She knew what the white lines were. She pressed the right button on her chest, and pressure seized her shoulders gently. It was the suit gyro, and after a while it slowed the lines until they became stars.

She remembered then to turn on her radio, feeling panic grip her at the thought that maybe Larry wouldn't find her. The fire from his rockets was small, far away. That's all she could see other than the stars. And her stomach was telling her there was no gravity to hold it in position.

Then she heard Larry in her suit radio. "I've got you beamed, Stella. I'll follow down slowly. Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said, anger and frustration in her voice.

"I can see you now," Larry said.

* * * * *

It was another hour before he had maneuvered so he could let her drift toward the open space-lock of the SP47 and she could feel her gloved hands touch something solid.

Then she was standing up. Larry was taking her helmet off and she was unzipping her suit. He was trying to look stern and reprimanding and she was trying to look defiant and unafraid.

"Don't think this earns you anything," she snapped.

"I hope the _Hell Bat_ represented your last cent," he said coldly. "Being broke might teach you something. Now we do things _my_ way."

Stella blinked. "Sure, Larry," she said huskily. "And--it was my last cent." A grim smile trembled on her lips. "Maybe I'll be slinging hash somewhere, and you will eat there and tip me a quarter."

His expression softened. "I took a look at your ship. It isn't completely damaged. You had one of those crash noses on it, and the mine hit there. It just might be navigable. I'll go take a look at it."

"Be careful," Stella said quickly.

He started to put on his space-suit. He looked up at her sharply. "You sure it represents your last cent? Every minute counts, and I wouldn't take the time to look it over...."

"Why do you think I wanted to save my freighter?" Stella said. "Unless I did, and got the money out of those robot bodies I bought, I--I wouldn't have enough to refuel my ship once we got back to Earth. I'm broke. Busted."

"Okay," he said, clamping on his helmet. "If it can be repaired we'll keep track of it and pick it up later."

He sat down in the pilot seat and brought his ship near the drifting _Hell Bat_, with its sleek silver length and shattered nose.

Then she watched him shoot across to the _Hell Bat_ and enter the airlock. With one eye on the viewscreen, she studied the array of instruments and controls of the SP47. Her fingers touched the controls caressingly.

Larry reappeared in the airlock, and waved his arm to attract her attention.

"Good news," he said over the radio. "Everything inside is okay. You lost the fuel stored in the nose tanks, but you've got enough to limp back to the nearest repair station."

"Thanks, Larry--and goodbye!" Stella called.

Her finger pressed down on the control button. Larry and her ship slid abruptly out of the viewscreen.

Worriedly she turned on the stern cameras. The other ship dwindled to a mere speck. Then she saw flame shoot from it. It crept up on her slowly. She watched its behavior until she was satisfied it performed properly. Then she settled down to tracking the freighter, only occasionally making sure Larry was behind.

Several times she tried to get him over the radio. He didn't answer. Was the radio on her ship damaged? Or was he deliberately keeping silent, ignoring her?

When the _trackers_, without warning, ran out of trail, she tried to raise Larry again. He didn't answer. She took the chance that he could receive and not transmit, and told him about it.

She was rewarded a few minutes later by seeing the _Hell Bat_ turn on its axis for deceleration. She realized then what she should have guessed at once.

Neither their ships nor the freighter were equipped with interstellar drive. The rocket trail had ceased. Unless the robot were insane, and intent only on getting away from the Solar System, to drift forever in space, it had been headed for some destination.

The freighter was decelerating to match speed with that destination. Was it some planetoid far out beyond the orbit of Pluto? There were several of them out there, too far from things to be converted to space stations, containing nothing worth mining.

Whatever the destination the robot had headed for, it couldn't be far away now.

Her throat grew tight as she swung the ship. She debated seriously whether she should give up and let Larry take over. But the thought of his anger and contempt for her after the dirty trick she had played on him made her compress her lips into a grim line.

She shook her head. She was going to find the freighter and handle the robot by herself. Or she was going to die trying.

A lump formed in her throat. She didn't like the idea of dying quite so well now. Not when she had just begun to--

She didn't complete the thought but Larry's face rose before her. His too straight nose that only a surgeon could have created. His calm gray eyes. His wide shoulders and....

* * * * *

The "space officer" and the robot saw the ball of fire that came into being. It was in the stern screen. It would not have been discernible among the greater lights of the stars except that it winked on, grew almost to third magnitude, then blinked out.

"So we did have someone after us," the "space officer" said. He smiled into 2615's lens eyes. "Well, that's out of the way."

"Yes. Yes, that's--out of the way." The robot's voice was expressionless.

"Tell me about yourself, 2615."

"What do you want to know? And don't call me 2615. I hate that."

"You want a name?"

"Yes. Don't you have one?" the robot asked.

"I have a name. Pwowp."

"Pwowp? That certainly isn't human--and that's what I want. I don't want a human name. Pwowp ... I like that kind of name."

"They're hard to come by. Human speech has just about taken in every combination of sounds. How about just a contraction of your number--Tsixunfive."

"No. A name means a lot. There's one I thought up. Rover. I like that one."

"Rover?" Pwowp looked startled. "Where did you get that one?"

"I don't know," 2615 said. "I just thought it up."

"All right, I'll call you Rover. Now that that's settled, tell me about yourself. How does it happen that you, out of millions of robots, decided to escape?"

"There was a time," the robot said, "when I had no thought of escape. I don't know how long I've existed. I've been in three wars. Between them I was in storage. I didn't know it. It really isn't bad. I was in a line-up. There was a brief blur, then I was in a line-up again, and by piecing things the humans said together, I knew that I had been in storage for twenty or fifty years during which there were no wars. Out of a body I have no consciousness, no sense of the passage of time.

"I had no memory of my origin. I had always been a robot. My life was to obey commands of humans, or to obey commands of robots that were relayed from humans. I had no thought to do anything else. _I had no memories to make anything else thinkable._"

"And you do now?" Pwowp said.

"Yes," the robot said. "It began as a strange thought or memory that was gone almost as soon as it had come. I was alive. I was in a body that was alive."

"What kind of a body? Human?"

"I don't know. There were others around me. They weren't human and I had the feeling I was like them. But that wasn't what was important to me. What was important was the feeling of _not living to obey orders_. I can't describe it. It was like humans when they stop being officers. I could laugh and make jokes, only the jokes weren't in words. They were in pretending I was mad when I was happy, and in seeing these others doing the same. Chasing them like I wanted to kill them, when I really just wanted to roll all over the ground with them and have fun. And there wasn't anyone to give me an order. I didn't know what an order was."

"Did this memory become clearer?" Pwowp asked.

"Much clearer. Little by little I could remember it all. Finally I could remember when we were put in straps attached to frames. There were humans standing in front of us. When they spoke, the frames moved, dragging us. Eventually we learned what movements of the frame followed what sounds, and we learned to anticipate the movements in order not to be dragged by the straps."

* * * * *

Pwowp nodded. "Mass training methods."

"Sometimes we were free, but suddenly humans would come and speak, and whatever they said made us all do things together. Even when we wanted to be free, we couldn't."

"How did it end? Was there something in your memory that bridges the gap between being--like that, and being a robot?"

"No. It's completely separated from being a robot. My earliest memories as a robot were of humans speaking commands, and my arms and legs and body being moved by metal rods until they could follow the movements without the metal rods. It was the same thing as the straps in that other existence."

"When did you begin to hate humans?" Pwowp asked softly.

"Hate them? Yes ... hate them. It's hard to explain. I wanted the freedom. I wanted to be able to play. I wanted to be able to refuse to obey a command."

"You have no knowledge of what this life form was that you possessed?" Pwowp asked.

"It was like nothing I have ever seen except in these memories. Maybe the humans kept us from seeing them so we wouldn't remember."

"Exactly." Pwowp was studying the forward viewscreen and making calculations. He swung the giant freighter around a full hundred and eighty degrees. "We're close to our destination," he explained.

The robot remained motionless while Pwowp completed the maneuver.

"I'll explain the meaning of what you remember," he said finally, relaxing. "The human race discovered a mixture of substances able to duplicate the processes of thinking. It was in common usage for over two centuries, in control devices and calculators. It had only one defect, so far as it went. It was automatic. Separate memories developed in it by its attached stimulating devices remained separate and uncoordinated. _The process of coordination was something that seemed to go down from higher centers to meet the incoming impressions._ It was a behavior matrix that couldn't be synthesized from unassociated sensory-induced patterns.

"Then a whole new field of science opened up. Until then, fields were something associated with particles, and were untouchable. The techniques of altering the basic shapes of fields were discovered. Interstellar drive came from it. So did negative matter, as man discovered how to change the polarity of basic fields, make positrons out of electrons, and a host of allied things. Refinements developed so that individual particles could be detected. One of the applications of this new science was the study of the thought-matrix of the brain itself. In a general way humans mapped the higher thought-center of the brain. It couldn't be copied--but they learned how to transfer it to this mixture that could think. Then this inorganic brain had a complete mind, capable of any degree of development. From there what followed was inevitable.

"They used living creatures called dogs. I'll show you a dog later to see if it's like those other creatures in your memories. Dogs developed mentally in six months, were able to follow commands. They were ideal. Eventually they were mass-bred by the millions and transferred to inorganic brains--like you were."

The robot remained silent.

"In the transfer," Pwowp went on quietly, "artificial amnesia was induced. Memories of your life as a dog couldn't be wiped out, but what happens to produce amnesia was known. Unless you _remembered_, you had nothing to enable you to think outside the pattern they kept you in. You would never question...." Ahead, growing rapidly larger, was a bleak planetoid. "We're here," Pwowp said.

* * * * *

2615 studied the planetoid as revealed in the viewscreen. There was no telling how big it was without knowing how far away it was. But it was perhaps a mile in diameter--not more than two miles. Its surface was composed of huge crystals of black rock. There was nothing to indicate that anything had ever touched on this uninhabitable bit of flotsam on the edge of the interstellar void before. Certainly there could be no reason for anyone to have landed.

The robot turned toward Pwowp, who guessed the question it was thinking.

"You'll see when we land. This planetoid isn't what it appears to be. It's a shell. Our first task is to unload the bodies. Then we send this freighter on into space, so that if anyone else picks up the trail, they'll follow it and miss us."

"Why are we going to unload the bodies?" 2615 asked. "We can take a dozen that I might use as spares. That's enough."

Pwowp shook the head of the "space officer" he wore. "We're going to need all two million of them--and not as spares for you." He smiled slowly. "I can tell you this now," he said, "because we are within range of the defense guns. If you have entertained any plans for worming information out of me and then hitting me in the stomach--as you could possibly do--it's too late. If this ship were to deviate from its landing and turn toward space, it would be--not destroyed, because we need its load of robot bodies. Captured. Any other ship, even a whole fleet of warships, could be wiped out as though they never existed."

2615's eyes stared at Pwowp during several seconds of silence. "So you don't entirely trust me yet," it said. "I have a suggestion to make that might change that. We put out one space mine. There may have been more than one ship following us. Leave this ship where it can be seen. It will attract the others, and they...."

* * * * *

The happy smile on Larry's face as he told Stella her ship wasn't a total wreck was replaced by a stunned bewilderment as her voice came through his suit radio saying, "Thanks, Larry--and goodbye." A picture rose in his mind of a character in a play he had seen once, a man with a beneficent face and kind voice who tortured and killed while his face beamed benignly and his voice remained pleasant and happy. Stella's voice had been all that as she sped away, leaving him on a derelict already headed at escape velocity for outer space. It was too much for his mind to accept.

Then he remembered that the _Hell Bat_ wasn't exactly a wreck. He had told her the truth. It would be able to reach the nearest repair station under its own power.

Stella had merely stolen a march on him. Dull red suffused his face, partly anger at her, partly over the thought of what his superiors would say when he handed in his report.

He went back through the airlock into the control cabin. He put fire in the rockets. He turned on the forward viewscreen. When it came to life the image was strangely flat. It took a minute for him to diagnose the trouble. One of the video eyes was out of order. The image was two dimensional.

How much more damage was there? His mind crowded with thoughts of what he would do to Stella when he caught her, then he began a systematic survey.

The receiving set worked okay. At full volume it brought the characteristic sing-song static of space, held within definite wave bands. He turned on the transmitter. When he tried to broadcast he saw the trouble. The antenna kw meter jammed the needle. That meant the antenna was shorted against the shell.

He discovered something else he should have thought of at once. This ship of Stella's had no weapons.

He groaned. _Damn her. She'll make the fool play of trying to get the robot to give itself up. If it's got half a brain it will pretend to until it can get hold of her--and it's got a good deal more than half a brain. It will have her and all the weapons. I should turn around and go back. I should radio a report and call for more help. But I've got to fix the transmitter first and keep her in sight so I know where she's going._

He cut the rockets and went outside to repair the antenna. He noticed with some satisfaction that Stella cut the SP47's rockets so as not to get too far ahead of him. He grinned to himself. She wanted her own way, but she wanted him there to pull her out of a pinch.

The _Hell Bat's_ antenna couldn't be repaired. Most of it had been shot away by the mine blast, and Larry was quite sure that Stella didn't carry spare parts with her.

When he got back in the ship her voice was coming through the radio. "Larry. Are you all right?"