Special Deliverance (6 page)

“There is no graffiti,” Mary said. “Not a single mark upon the walls.”

“Perhaps the walls are of a substance that will not take a mark,” said Sandra. “Any marking device would slide right over them.”

“I still think,” said the robot, “that we should examine it more closely. If we moved close up to it, we might find an answer to some of the questions we are asking.”

Having said that, he began to stride across the circle of sand. Lansing shouted a warning, but Jurgens made no sign that he had heard. Lansing sprang forward, sprinting to catch him. For that circle of sand, he now realized, held a subtle threat, something that all of them, with the exception of Jurgens, must have recognized as well. Jurgens was still striding ahead. Lansing closed on him, reached out a hand to grasp his shoulder. But in the instant before his fingers could close upon the shoulder, some obstruction buried in the sand caught his toe and threw him on his face.

As he struggled to his hands and knees, shaking his head to dislodge the sand that stuck to it, he heard the others shouting back of him. The Brigadier’s voice boomed above all the others: “You damn fool, come back! That place could be booby trapped!”

Jurgens was almost at the wall; he had not slacked his sturdy trudging. As if, Lansing thought, the fool planned to walk head on, full tilt into it. Then, in that instant that he conceived the thought, the robot was tossed into the air, twisting backward and falling in the sand. Lansing put up his hand as if to scrub his eyes, as if to clear his vision, for in that spilt second when Jurgens had been tossed, he had thought he’d seen something (like a snake, perhaps, although it could not have been a snake) emerge momentarily from the sand, striking from the sand and then being there no longer, too quick for the eye to catch, no more than a flicker in the air.

Jurgens, lying on his back, now was turning over, clawing with both hands and thrusting with one leg to skid himself back from the wall. The other leg dragged limply.

Lansing leaped to his feet and ran forward. He grasped the robot by one clawing arm and started dragging him back toward the road.

“Let me,” said someone, and looking up, Lansing saw the Parson standing over him. The Parson stooped, seized Jurgens about his waist and heaved him to his shoulder like a bag of grain, staggering slightly under the robot’s weight.

On the road the Parson let Jurgens down. Lansing knelt beside him.

“Tell me where you hurt,” he said.

“I do not hurt,” said Jurgens. “I am not equipped to hurt.”

“One leg was dragging,” said Sandra. “The right leg. He can’t use it.”

“Here,” said the Brigadier, “let me stand you up. Put you on your feet, see if you can bear your weight.”

He hauled mightily, pulling the robot to his feet, supporting him. Jurgens tottered on his left leg, seeking to put his weight on the right. The right leg folded under him. The Brigadier eased him to a sitting position.

Mary said, “It’s a mechanical problem. We can have a look at it. Or is it entirely mechanical? How about it, Jurgens?”

“I think it is mostly mechanical,” said Jurgens. “There might be some biologies involved. Some biological nerve function. I can’t be sure.”

“If we only had some tools,” said Mary. “Dammit, why didn’t we think to buy some tools?”

“I have a kit of tools,” said Jurgens. “A small kit. Perhaps sufficient of them.”

“Well, that’s better,” said Mary. “Maybe we can do something for you.”

“Did anyone see what happened out there?” Sandra asked.

The others shook their heads. Lansing said nothing; he could not be certain what he’d seen, if anything at all.

“Something hit me,” said Jurgens.

“Did you see what it was?” Sandra asked.

“I saw nothing. I just felt the hit.”

“We don’t want to stay out here in the road,” said the Brigadier. “It may take a while to make repairs on him. Let’s find a place to camp. It’s drawing on toward evening.”

They found a place to camp at the edge of a grove about half a mile distant. A nearby brook supplied water. Downed trees provided wood. Lansing helped Jurgens hobble to the site, sat him down beside a tree he could lean against.

The Brigadier took over. He said to Mary, “The rest of us will get the fire going and do the cooking and whatever else needs doing. Why don’t you get to work on Jurgens? Lansing can help you if you wish.”

He started to walk away and then came back. He said to Lansing, “The Parson and I talked it over. Not too amiably, but we talked. That little incident back on the trail: We agreed that we’d both been out of line. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks for telling me,” said Lansing.

D
AMMIT,“ SAID MARY, ”THERE’S that broken ratchet, or I’d guess it’s a ratchet. If only we had a replacement, he’d be as good as new.”

“I sorrow to tell you,” Jurgens said, “I do not carry such a part. A few ordinary parts, of course, but nothing like that. I cannot carry every part I possibly could need. I thank you, lady, for the job you’ve done on me. I would have been hard pressed to do it for myself.”

“The leg is stiff,” said Lansing. “He cannot bend the knee, and even with the repair the hip does not work too smoothly.”

“I can move,” said Jurgens, “but with no sprightliness. I’ll be slow at best. I will hold up the march.”

“I’ll fix you a crutch,” said Lansing. “It may take you a while to learn to use it, but once you get the hang of it, it will be of help.”

“To continue this journey with you,“ Jurgens said, ”I’d crawl on hands and knees.”

“Here are your tools,” said Mary. “I put them back into the case. You’d better lock them up again.”

“Thank you,” said Jurgens. He took the small case of tools, opened the door into his chest cavity, stored the case there and shut the door. He slapped his chest to make sure the door was closed.

“I think the coffee’s ready,” said Mary. “Maybe not the food, but I can smell the coffee and I want a cup. Edward, do you want to join me?”

“In a moment,” Lansing said.

Squatting beside Jurgens, he watched her walk toward the fire.

“Go and get your coffee,” Jurgens said. “No need to stay with me.”

“Coffee can wait a while,” said Lansing. “There was something that you said. That you would crawl on your hands and knees to go along with us. Jurgens, what’s going on? Do you know something that we don’t?”

“I know not a thing. I just want to be along.”

“But why? We’re a bunch of refugees. We’ve been hurled out of our worlds and our cultures and we don’t know why we’re here…”

“Lansing, what do you know of freedom?”

“Why, I suppose not too much. One doesn’t think of freedom until he doesn’t have it. Back where I came from, we had it. We didn’t have to strive for it. We took it for granted. It seldom crossed our minds. Don’t tell me that you—”

“Not in the way you think. In no way were the robots on my world repressed. In a way, I suppose, we were free. But we carried a burden, a responsibility. Let me try to tell you.”

“Please do,” said Lansing. “You said back at the inn that you took care of your humans, which was a strange way to say it. You said there were few humans left and you took care of them.”

“Before I say anything,” said Jurgens, “tell me one thing. You spoke of what your friend had said—I believe you said he babbled. About alternate worlds, alternate earths splitting off from one another at certain crisis points. I believe you said that was what may have happened.”

“Yes, I did. For all its madness…”

“And those alternate worlds each would follow its own world line. They’d exist simultaneously through time and space. Would that mean, if we indeed are from different alternate worlds, that all of us would come from the same time frame?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Lansing, “and I don’t really know. You understand that this all is supposition. But if the alternate world theory should be true and we do come from such worlds, I see no reason to believe we’d all have to be from the same time frame. Any agency that could put us here probably could be rather arbitrary about time as well.”

“I am glad to hear you say that, for it has bothered me. I must come from a frame much later in time than the rest of you. You see, I existed in a world that had been deserted by the human race.”

“Deserted?”

“Yes, everyone gone to other worlds circling other stars. Deep into space, I have no idea how far. The Earth, my Earth, was worn out. The environment had been ruined and natural resources gone. The last of the resources were used to build the ships that took the humans into space. They left it stripped and gutted…”

“But there were humans left. Only a few of them, you said.”

“There were humans left—the ne’er-do-wells, the utterly incompetent, the persistent fumblers, the idiots. The ones who were not worth the ship space they would have taken. There were robots left as well—the hopelessly obsolete, the outdated, those who had somehow escaped the scrap heap. The incompetents were left behind, both human and robot, while the others, the bright and normal humans, the sophisticated robots, went beyond the Earth to seek a brave new life. We, the rejects of thousands of years of evolution, were left behind to make our way as best we could. And we robots, the ones who were abandoned, have tried for centuries to do what we could for the humans who were left. We failed—for centuries we failed. The descendents of those pitiful humans who were left behind have not improved in mental or moral quality through the years. At times there would be a spark or two of hope, two or three in a single generation might show some promise, but the promise always lost in the morass of the gene pool, I finally admitted to myself that the humans were breeding down, not up, that there was no hope for them. Each generation they grew more foul, more cruel, more worthless.”

“So you were trapped,” said Lansing. “Trapped by your commitment to your humans.”

“You say it well,” said Jurgens. “You do understand. We were trapped, indeed. Still we felt we must stay on, for we owed those degenerating creatures the best that we could give them, which was never enough.”

“Now that you have broken out of your circumstance, you feel free.”

“Yes, free. More free than I have ever felt. Finally my own man, my own robot. Is this wrong of me?”

“I don’t think it’s wrong. A bad job come to an end.”

“Here, as you say,” said Jurgens, “we don’t know where we are nor what we are supposed to do. But at least a clean slate, a starting over.”

“And among people who are glad to have you.”

“I’m not sure of that. The Parson does not care for me.”

“Screw the Parson,” Lansing said. “I’m glad that you are here. With the possible exception of the Parson, we’re all glad you are here. You must remember that it was the Parson who came in and carried you out when you were injured. But the fact remains that he is a bigot.”

“I’ll prove myself,” said Jurgens. “Even the Parson will come to accept me.”

“Was that what you were doing when you rushed up to the wall? Trying to prove yourself?”

“I didn’t think so at the time. I only thought there was something that needed to be done and I set out to do it. But I suppose I was trying to prove—”

“Jurgens, it was a stupid thing to do. Promise me, no more stupidity.”

“I’ll try. Tell me when I’m stupid.”

“Next time,” said Lansing, “I’ll clobber you with whatever comes to hand.”

The Brigadier shouted at Lansing. “Come in. Supper’s ready.”

Lansing rose. “Won’t you come with me, join the others? You can lean on me. I’ll get you there.”

“I think not,” said Jurgens. “I have thinking that must be done.”

L
ANSING WORKED AT THE forked sapling he had cut, forming a crutch for Jurgens.

The Parson got up from where he was sitting and threw some more wood on the fire.

“Where is the Brigadier?” he asked.

“He went to help Jurgens in,” said Mary.

“Why should he do that? Why not leave him where he is?”

“Because it isn’t right,” said Mary. “Jurgens should be here with the rest of us.”

The Parson said nothing, sat down again.

Sandra walked around the fire to stand beside Mary. “There’s something nosing around out there in the dark,” she said. “I heard it sniffling.”

“It’s probably the Brigadier. He went out to get Jurgens.”

“It’s not the Brigadier. It goes on four feet. The Brigadier doesn’t sniffle.”

“Some small animal,” said Lansing, looking up from his work. “Whenever a campfire’s built there are always some of them around. Drawn by curiosity—they have to see what is going on—or maybe snooping around on the chance they can pick up something to eat.”

“It makes me nervous,” said Sandra.

“All of our nerves are a bit on edge,” Mary told her. “The cube…”

“Let’s all forget about the cube right now,” Lansing suggested. “With morning light we’ll have a better look at it.”

“I, for one, will have no better look at it,” said the Parson. “It is a thing of evil.”

The Brigadier came into the edge of the firelight, one arm around the lurching Jurgens.

“What’s this I hear about a thing of evil?” he asked, his voice booming.

The Parson said nothing. The Brigadier eased Jurgens to the ground between Mary and the Parson.

“He can barely get along,” said the Brigadier. “That leg is almost worthless. There’s no way to fix it better?”

Mary shook her head. “There is a broken component in the knee and no replacement for it. Some of the hip arrangement is twisted out of shape. I was able to restore some function to the leg, but that was all. Edward’s crutch will help him get around.”

The Brigadier lowered himself to a place next to Lansing.

“I could swear,” he said, “that when I was coming in I heard someone mention evil.”

“Leave it be,” Lansing curtly told him. “Let it lie.”

“No need, worthy pedagogue,” said the Parson, “to attempt to impose yourself between the man of cloth and the man at arms. We might as well have it out.”

“All right, if you insist,” said Lansing, “but be gentlemen while you’re about it.”

“I’m always a gentleman,” said the Brigadier. “It is instinctive with me. An officer and a gentleman. That’s the way it goes, the two of them together. This clownish friend of ours—”

The Parson interrupted. “I simply said the cube was a thing of evil. Perhaps my opinion only, but I am trained to make such observations and the Brigadier is not.”

“How do you make it evil?” asked the Brigadier.

“Why, the very look of it to start with. And the warning strip of sand around it. Men of good will put in that warning strip and we should have honored it. The one of us who did not paid very dearly for it.”

“A warning strip it may be,” said the Brigadier, “planted with booby traps, one of which our metal friend encountered. But if my interpretation is correct, men of good will had nothing to do with it. If your men had been really of a deep good will, they would have built a fence around it. What you are trying to do, Parson, is to scare us off. If something holds a threat you label it evil, and that gives you the excuse to turn your back and walk away-from it. My way would be to invade the strip, being very cautious, using poles or prods or whatever other means I could to unmask and disarm the booby traps. There is something about the cube that I am certain someone does not wish us to learn. Perhaps some fact of great value, and I, for one, do not propose to turn my back upon it.”

“That is quite in keeping with your basic character,” said the Parson, “and I’ll not go a step out of my way to dissuade you. But I do feel it my solemn duty to warn you that evil forces are best left alone.”

“There you go again with this talk of evil. What is evil, may I ask? How would you define an evil?”

“If you have to ask,” the Parson told him, “it would be a waste of breath to attempt to tell you.”

“Did anyone see exactly what happened out there when Jurgens was hurt?” asked Mary. “He himself saw nothing. He says he was hit, that something struck him a blow. But he did not see it strike.”

“I saw not a thing,” the Parson said, “and I was standing where I should have seen. The fact that I saw nothing convinces me more than ever that it was an evil force.”

“I saw something,” said Lansing, “or thought I saw something. I didn’t mention it because I could not be certain. I saw, strange as it may sound, a motion. A flicker. A flicker that was gone so fast I could not be sure I’d seen it. I’m not certain even now.”

“I cannot understand this talk of evil,” Sandra said. “The cube is beautiful. It makes the breath catch in my throat. I sense no evil in it.”

“Yet it attacked Jurgens,” Mary said.

“Yes, I know. But even knowing that, I still see the beauty in it; to me there is no evil there.”

“Well spoken,” said the Brigadier. “There speaks our poetess—what did you call yourself, a certified poetess?”

“You are correct,” Sandra said, speaking softly. “You cannot know what that means to me. Only in my world could you know the honor—almost the glory—of being certified a poetess. There are many poets, very many of them, all skilled in their profession, but very few who are certified as poets.”

“I cannot imagine such a world,” the Parson said. “It must be a faerie place. Many good words, perhaps, but no good works.”

“You are right in saying you cannot imagine it,” said Sandra. “You’d feel out of place there.”

“And that,” the Brigadier told the Parson, “should hold you for a while.”

All of them sat in silence for a time, then Sandra said, “There it is again. There’s something prowling this campfire. I hear the sniffling again.”

“I hear nothing,” said the Brigadier. “My dear, it’s your imagination. There is nothing out there.”

Another silence, then the Parson asked, “What do we do come morning?”

“We look over the cube,” said the Brigadier. “We look it over well, being very careful. Then, if we find nothing that throws light on the situation, we continue on our way. Up ahead of us, if the shabby innkeeper was telling us the truth, there is a city, and it seems to me that in a city we may find more of interest than we are finding here. If we wish and it seems reasonable, we always have the option of returning to the cube and having a go at it again.”

The Parson pointed to Jurgens and spoke to Lansing. “Will he be able to travel?”

Lansing held up the crutch he was working on. “It will take him awhile to get accustomed to this. It’s a fairly bad job. I wish I could have done better, but there are no other materials at hand. He’ll be able to travel, but he’ll be slow. We’ll have to match our pace to his. As I see it, there isn’t any hurry.”

“There might be,” said the Brigadier. “We have no indication of the parameters of this expedition. There may be time limits of which we are not aware.”

“Before we can begin to operate effectively,” said Mary, “we must gain some clues as to why we’re here. We should not pass up anything that might give us such clues. I think we should spend time with the cube until we are convinced it has nothing to offer us.”

“It has been my feeling,” said the Brigadier, “that in a city we might gather more information than we can out here in this barren land. In a city we’ll find people we can talk with.”

“If we can understand them,” said Mary. “If they’ll talk to us. If they don’t chase us out or clap us into jail.”

“Yes, there are those considerations,” agreed the Brigadier.

“It’s time, I think, that we should turn in,” said the Parson. “We’ve had a long, hard day and we’ll need our rest for yet another.”

“I’ll stand the first watch,” offered the Brigadier. “After that Lansing and you, Parson, will split the remainder of the watch. You can make your own arrangements.”

“There is no need of anyone standing watch,” said Jurgens. “That particular chore is mine. I never sleep. I have no need of sleep. I promise that I will stay alert. You can place your trust in me.”