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He had tried moving toward the decompression lock, stopping when the robot
advanced and letting it settle back, then moving again, a little nearer. But
the idea died with his first movement. His ribs were too painful. The pain was
terrible. He was locked in one position, an uncomfortable, twisted position,
and he would be there till the stalemate ended, one way or the other.
He was suddenly alert again. The reliving of his last three days brought back
reality sharply.
He was twelve feet away from the communications panel, twelve feet away from
the beacon that would guide his rescuers to him. Before he died of his wounds,
before he starved to death, before the robot crushed him. It could have been
twelve light-years, for all the nearer he could get to it.
What had gone wrong with the robot? Time to think was cheap. The robot could
detect movement, but thinking was still possible. Not that it could help, but
it was possible.
The companies that supplied the life hutch s needs were all government
contracted. Somewhere along the line someone had thrown in impure steel or
calibrated the circuit-cutting machines for a less expensive job. Somewhere
along the line someone had not run the robot through its paces correctly.
Somewhere along the line someone had committed murder.
He opened his eyes again. Only the barest fraction of opening. Any more and
the robot would
sense the movement of his eyelids. That would be fatal.
He looked at the machine.
It was not, strictly speaking, a robot. It was merely a remote-controlled hunk
of jointed steel, invaluable for making beds, stacking steel plating, watching
culture dishes, unloading spaceships and sucking dirt from rugs. The robot
body, roughly humanoid, but without what would have been a head on a human,
was merely an appendage.
The real brain, a complex maze of plastic screens and printed circuits, was
behind the wall. It would have been too dangerous to install those delicate
parts in a heavy-duty mechanism. It was all too easy for the robot to drop
itself from a loading shaft, or be hit by a meteorite, or get caught under a
wrecked spaceship. So there were sensitive units in the robot appendage that
saw and heard what was going on, and relayed them to the brain-behind the
wall.
And somewhere along the line that brain had worn grooves too deeply into its
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circuits. It was now mad. Not mad in any way a human being might go mad, for
there were an infinite number of ways a machine could go insane. Just mad
enough to kill Terrence.
Even if I
could hit the robot with something, it wouldn t stop the thing.
He could perhaps throw something at the machine before it could get to him,
but it would do no good. The robot brain would still be intact, and the
appendage would continue to function. It was hopeless.
He stared at the massive, blocky hands of the robot. It seemed he could see
his own blood on the jointed work-tool fingers of one hand. He knew it must be
his imagination, but the idea persisted. He flexed the fingers of his hidden
hand.
Three days had left him weak and dizzy from hunger. His head was light and his
eyes burned steadily. He had been lying in his own filth, till he no longer
noticed the discomfort. His side ached and throbbed, and the pain of a blast
furnace roared through him every time he breathed.
He thanked God his spacesuit was still on, lest the movement of his breathing
bring the robot down on him. There was only one solution, and that solution
was his death. He was almost delirious.
Several times during the past day-as well as he could gauge night and day
without a clock or a sunrise-he had heard the roar of the fleet landing
outside. Then he had realized there was no sound in dead space. Then he had
realized they were all inside the relay machines, coming through subspace
right into the life hutch. Then he had realized that such a thing was not
possible. Then he had come to his senses and realized all that had gone before
was hallucination.
Then he had awakened and known it was real. He was trapped, and there was no
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