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Title: The Cosmic Junkman

Author: Rog Phillips

Illustrator: W. E. Terry

Release date: September 10, 2021 [eBook #66259]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COSMIC JUNKMAN ***

After the war, Earth stored away its robot

armies or sold them for scrap—because fighting

machines were dangerous. But more deadly was—

THE COSMIC JUNKMAN

By Rog Phillips

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy

December 1953

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Log Report:—

Fleet: Alpha Aquilae; 20,080 surviving ships. Flagship ROVER.

Personnel: human;

Fleet Admiral William A. Ford, Vice Admiral Paul G. Belcross robot;

2,649,366 (Ids. appended)

passenger: (human);

Generalissimo Vilbis (prisoner under w.c.a.)

Dates May 7, 4765; flight formation arrow, speed 1,700,000 m.p.s.

Scheduled date of arrival at Earth: June 11, 4766

Distance from Earth on Earth-Aquilae axis: ten light years.

"Rummy," Vilbis said, reaching through the hand-hole in the inch thick laminated glass wall of his prison and spreading his cards on the table. His lips formed into the cruel haughty smile that had been his trademark to billions of humans for almost half a century. His wide-set black eyes mocked the other two players.

"Well, well," Paul Belcross smirked. "I see now why you lost the war, Vilbis. Isn't that a six of diamonds in your heart sequence?"

The black eyes glanced down. The long-fingered hand began to retrieve the cards, then paused. Vilbis' almost classic features darkened with anger. With an effort he became calm. A secret inner amusement made little lights in his eyes as he looked up at his two captors again.

"You know," Bill Ford said thoughtfully, "sometimes I think you must have some kind of an ace up your sleeve. You don't seem at all concerned that this is your last trip. The War Crimes Court—then death by hanging." Bill frowned. "Could be you figured the angle I've always worried about. The Federation is always too quick to demobilize the robots after a war. Some day some punk like you is going to take that into consideration. He's going to surrender, but have a reserve space navy waiting until Earth is without defenses, then take over and win."

"Too bad I didn't think of that when I could have done something about it," Vilbis said too cheerfully.

"Maybe you did think of it," Bill said. "When we get home I'm going to suggest we keep the Aquilae Fleet mobilized for at least ten years."

"You know they won't do that," Paul Belcross said. "They're more afraid of the robots than they are of attack. So am I, actually."

"We're just afraid of what they could do if they got free," Bill said. "Their potential intelligence is greater than human. If they overcame their built-in instinct for obedience to human command they could—why think of what our two million robots could do!"

"Why all this discussion of robots?" Vilbis said. "They're just dogs. Not even that. They were dogs for six months of their existence before their brains were transplanted into synthegell fluid by the mind transplant machine." His eyes took on a far away look. His voice became regretful. "I had a hundred thousand scientists working on that problem. If the mind of one dog could be transplanted into synthegell without destroying the dog's brain there would be no limit to the production of robot brain cartridges. If we could have licked that problem I'd have won the war."

"If!" Paul spat. "You're a renegade Earthman. I'm putting in my application to be the one to hang you as soon as we get home."

"How do you—" Vilbis clamped his lips closed and scooped up his cards.

"How do we know we'll get home?" Bill Ford said. "Is that what you were going to say?"

Vilbis looked at his cards casually. "No," he said absently. "I was going to say how do you expect to play cards and talk at the same time?"

A raucous blast exploded in the room. Bill and Paul stared at each other in surprise. Vilbis smiled.

Bill leaped across the room to the cm board. He jabbed at buttons. A giant screen lit up, showing a spaceship. Smaller screens lit up, revealing robot ship commanders.

"Look at that ship, Paul," Bill said. "You know them all. Aquilanean, Centaurian, Cygnian. It isn't any known type—and with a war just over, there hasn't been time to mass-produce new types." He jabbed at a button. "All ships," he said. "All ships. Defense formation five. Five. Operation three. Three." He listened to the repeats.

Paul Belcross had leaped to the huge tri-di sphere and turned it on. Seconds later both men, Vilbis forgotten but watching with bright eyes, were studying the small dots in the tri-di. The flight formation in the shape of a giant arrow was quickly changing shape as the fleet formed a defensive sphere around the flagship and its human occupants. The Rover was the only bright blue dot. The others were red.

But now other dots were materializing at the outer fringe of the tri-di, too many new dots to count. Approaching ships.

Across the room a voice from a loudspeaker was saying, "Eighty seconds to contact. No response. No response."

"Another second and they'll be within range," Paul said.

"God!" Bill's voice exploded. His eyes were on the large area of the tri-di where ships had abruptly ceased to exist.

"Something's wrong with the tri-di," Paul said. "No weapon could do that."

"Nothing's wrong with the tri-di," Bill said sharply. "And we don't have that kind of weapon. They're something alien. Have to be. Some other galaxy. There's always been that possibility."

A rapidly repeated pip-pip-pip came from the cm board. Bill leaped to it. A light, under a small screen showing a robot, was blinking. He pressed the button. The robot saluted. His Id was stamped across his chrome chest, with four gold stars after it. "We will be destroyed, sir," it said. "Would suggest Flagship Rover change course forty degrees at eight o'clock and go on without fleet."

"You're giving orders?" Bill said, his face going pale and his eyes narrowing—not at the impending defeat, but at this sign of independent initiative in a robot.

"It's your only chance for survival," the robot said. "It must be done at once."

"Place yourself under ship arrest and give me the next in command," Bill ordered sharply. The screen went blank. "That's mutiny!" he shouted, unbelieving.

Vilbis, behind his glass wall, laughed aloud.

"Not mutiny," Paul said. "They are gone. All our ships are gone!" His voice conveyed the incredulous horror in his mind.

In the tri-di there was only the bright blue dot, and the thousands of approaching ships of the enemy.

The next instant the ship lurched violently.

"They're boarding!" Bill shouted. "But they aren't going to get Vilbis back alive."

He leaped to a locker and opened it with clumsy fingers, bringing out a g.i. raygun. He turned to leap toward the glass wall separating him from Vilbis. Before he could take a step a large section of a bulkhead vanished in smoke. For a brief instant Bill and Paul stared with unbelieving eyes at what entered the room.

Then they died.

"Stop!" The word exploded from Vilbis's lips. He stared at the cooked flesh that had been his captors. Then his eyes lifted to the jagged hole in the bulkhead.

"You fools!" he spat. His lips curled with cold anger. "Where do you hope to get two other humans now?"

The demobilization station trailed the Earth, a million and a half miles behind and in the same orbit around the Sun. It was shaped like a thick disc. At the moment there were five ships resting against one surface of the station. Three of them were warships. One was a Federation ship. The fifth was a giant freighter with SURPLUS JUNK CO. painted on it in bold blue letters.

Each of the five ships was attached to the space station underneath its hulk by short airlocks containing elevators. These led down into the station where air pressure was kept at fifteen pounds.

Inside the station, robots were emerging from the elevators leading to the three warships. The robots were all identical except for their Id numbers across their metallic chests. Arms and legs of metal rods and joints in almost exact duplication of human bones, torso shaped like a metal box, short neck joint supporting a head that was little more than two four inch glass lenses, two rod-microphones, and a small voice box.

The emerging robots moved at orders snapped by a human and marched toward a building fifty yards away, where they lined up at attention and became motionless.

Two humans moved swiftly down the line, behind the lined up robots. At each robot one of them twisted a copper-colored disk in the robot's back, carefully drew out a cylinder eight inches long and four inches in diameter, and handed the cylinder to the other, who lowered it into a plastic case. These cylinders were the brains of the robots. They were destined for the Federal ship—and storage until the next war.

While the robot brain was being lowered into its plastic storage case by the one man, the first lifted the now demobilized robot body and placed it on a cart, already stacked high with similar bodies. The immediate destination of these bodies was the junk company freighter.

If the robots were aware of what was about to happen to them as they waited, they gave no indication, no protest. Their lens eyes were directed straight ahead of them, unmoving—except for one robot.

The Id across its chest was 532-03-2615 followed by four gold stars. Its head was turned just enough so that it could see down the line. Its rod microphones were turned so that it could listen....

"That junkman gives me the creeps, Joe," the man placing brain cylinders into plastic cases grumbled.

"That's because he's a creep, Mel. Here. Take this." He thrust a brain cylinder at his companion.

"Hey! Careful!" Joe said, almost dropping it.

Mel chuckled and flipped the robot body, almost weightless on the station here in space, carelessly to the top of the stack on the truck.

"Here comes junky now, Joe," he said.

"Don't damage the bodies. Don't damage the bodies." The figure that approached, pushing an empty truck, wore a dirty and well worn civilian suit that seemed even more decrepit in contrast to the neat military uniforms. His skin was leathery. A pair of glasses hung on his hawkish nose, their thick lenses magnifying the close-set eyes underneath, and making them seem to lie on the inner surfaces. His lips were partly open, but never seemed to move while he talked. "There was a cracked lens on one," he accused.

"What's the matter, junky?" Joe grinned. "If we get a scratch on one it's still two hundred pounds of scrap metal—or were you planning on using the bodies?" He and Mel laughed.

"Who knows?" the junkman said. "I only follow my orders. No scratches. No damage to the bodies. Who knows? Maybe they go into storage until the next war." He reached with a dirty hand to clutch at Mel's lapel, but didn't make it. "I'll show you," he said. "Two of them are damaged. Not worth seventeen credits."

"Can't stop now," Mel said. "We want to get done by quitting time. Joe has a date."

"Come on," the junkman said. "You've got to look. I have to have witnesses when I hand in my report on the carelessness of the military."

"Oh, all right," Mel said. He and Joe followed the dusty junkman around the building.

The instant they were out of sight, 2615 moved, running swiftly around the other end of the building. It reached a vantage point where its lens eyes could watch the three figures when they emerged from the elevator to the ship above.

It watched Joe and Mel return to their work. It waited until the junkman had gone for another truckload of demobilized robot bodies. Then, swiftly, it ran to the elevator. At the top it sent the elevator back down, then faced the tiers of frames that filled the vast hold of the ship. Most of them now held inert robot shapes.

2615 chose an empty rack and climbed in, lying face up. It looked no different than any of the thousands of other forms.

It remained motionless. The junkman returned with load after load. Eventually the hold was filled. Clanging and whirring noises told of preparations for departure.

Acceleration pushed the robot deeper into the protective foam rubber of its rack. It waited....

Fear. It began in the eyes of the cataloguer when his sorting machine came to a stop on the Id card for 532-03-2615. It grew as a terrible, animating force that drained blood from faces and made hands clumsy, as the checking and rechecking on 2615 began. It spread through networks of communication wires. It stopped at the borders of news release, lest it spread over the world.

Fear organized itself, finally, settling into a pasty expression, unnatural eyes, and drumming fingers. The expression and eyes and fingers belonged to Carl Wilson, chief of the Demobilization staff. It centered there, but its aura spread out over the backwash it had left. Fear lurked in the hushed silence. Fear rode as an undertone in the slightest sound, lay ready to spring from behind every door.

Larry Jackson felt it as he gave the receptionist his name.

Stella Gamble was oblivious of it as she pushed into the waiting room.

Larry looked at her and wished it was his day off and a girl like her was with him. He wondered what her name was.

"I'm Stella Gamble," Stella said to the receptionist. "I've got to see Mr. Wilson at once. My freighter is overdue with two million junked robots. Something's got—"

"Will you please be seated, Miss Gamble?" the receptionist said firmly. Then, "You may go right in, Mr. Jackson. Mr. Wilson is waiting for you."

It was then Stella and Larry looked into each other's eyes. Hers were narrowed, sizing him up, guessing what he was and why he was there. His were friendly, smiling.

"Thanks," he murmured to the receptionist. He went toward the door, conscious of Stella's eyes following him. He went in.

"There you are, Jackson," Wilson said, running fingers through his iron gray hair in nervous relief. "You've guessed why—"

"Yes," Larry said.

Behind him the door opened violently. Sharp heels clicked on the floor. "Mr. Wilson," Stella demanded. "I know why this man is here. You're going to give him instructions to blast my freighter out of existence the minute he can—"

"You're Stella Gamble?" Wilson said. "I've heard of you. Will you please wait in the reception room until I finish with—"

"Larry Jackson," Stella pronounced the name. Her wide-set blue eyes showed scorn. "The man who is going to kill one of my men and destroy my ship and its cargo just to get at a robot."

"Just to get at a robot?" Wilson said indignantly. "You must be out of your head!" He picked up an oblong of paper on his desk and thrust it at Larry. "The junkship has been traced three hundred million miles out by routine radar. You can pick it up from there by ion tracking—we hope. Don't take any chances. Destroy that ship!" His lips trembled. "Even if the pilot is still on it. It's one life against...." He didn't complete the thought.

"Against fear," Stella said. "You are all cowards. Afraid of a dog because it could turn against you."

"Afraid of an intelligence," Wilson said wearily. His lips pulled back in a weak grin. "So are you. You're just more afraid of going broke."

Larry folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He turned toward the door. Stella clutched his sleeve, stopping him. She spoke swiftly, pleading. "Let me go with you. I'm capable. Give me a chance to go down and reason with that robot. If it doesn't work...."

Larry looked at her upturned face, the lips that could smile or laugh more naturally than pout, the wide-set eyes that could do things to him at any other time. He thought, it's a shame I won't ever get the chance. "Sorry, Miss Gamble," he said stiffly, "I'm on duty, and I'm not permitted to take passengers with me."

He went on toward the door, feeling his sleeve tear at her nails as she tried to hold him longer.

"It's very unfortunate—" Wilson said as Larry opened the door.

"If I can't go with him after my freighter I'm going after it on my own!" Stella said as he closed the door.

Larry put his fingers to his lips for the benefit of the receptionist and swiftly side-stepped to a filing cabinet where he stooped down out of sight.

The next instant the door from Wilson's office burst open again, banging against the wall. Stella's eyes searched the office. She ran to the hall door, and out.

Larry bounded back into Wilson's office. Wilson said, "Whew!" and mopped his brow, then pointed to his private entrance. Larry nodded and left.

It was a world of hard whites and bottomless blacks, with the hard whites so close they gave you the feeling you could reach out and touch them. Then you blinked your eyes and they were holes in infinity through which loneliness poured. That was space. Sure, there was the Earth somewhere aft of the rockets' red glare, and the Moon, looking like high-priced models against a velvet backdrop.

But you didn't look at them, because the stars were points on a tri-di screen, and you were back in school working a problem in navigation and hoping you didn't get a wrong answer.

You loved it—or you went crazy. Larry loved it. Or maybe it wasn't love. It was like a woman. It was in his blood.

He stopped punching the keys of the calculator and used both hands to press the studs controlling the gyro motors, watching the needles of gyro meters until they pointed to the right numbers.

He took several deep breaths, squirming back in his seat against the form-fitting cushion of foam rubber. He made sure his elbows rested securely in their little niches so that his arms wouldn't pull out of their sockets.

Then he touched the controls, feeling the surge of power as his ship, an SP47, responded, hearing the subsonic vibration around him as atoms broke into little bits in the fission chambers of the rockets and spewed out of them into space.

The G needle moved past three, past four, past five. It moved into the part of the dial where the glossy white changed to pink. It crept slowly toward the darker pink, toward the deep red.

I don't WANT an ice cream cone. It was his sister's voice, real as audible sound. He had been six years old when she had said that, back in Springfield.

The voices came. The images came. Vivid and unimaginative. True reproductions. That's what acceleration did to the brain. It squeezed the juice out of brain cells into nerve networks. It could get you—

Larry jerked back to an awareness of what he was doing. Sweating, he coaxed the G needle back down a little. Not much.

It had been close. Why had he done it? Fear. He could let himself realize that, now that he was alone. Fear of a robot that had stolen a ship and gone out into space, when robots only obeyed orders. It was an instinctive thing, bred in all men for generations.

You ought to be whipped! That was dad. Good old dad. Larry had been about nine then. He had run away—hitchhiked four hundred miles to watch a spaceship leave the ground and climb up out of sight.

Pip-pip, pip-pip, pip-pip.

Larry lifted his fingers from the controls gradually in response to the signal from the board. The G needle dropped back into the white.

The voices were gone, the images, the thoughts. He grinned on one side of his face. This was the end of the radar line. Now his work would begin. Around his ship charged ions were streaming past. Some of them would have come from the junk ship.

The tracker, a sensitive electronic instrument projecting from the shell, would read them—their concentration, velocity, and direction. From that he could project the position and trajectory of the junk ship.

Or maybe he could see it already.

He flicked on the video eyes of the ship and waited for the screen to light up. There was a ship ahead.

The fear bit into him like acid. As quickly, it vanished. The stern outline of the ship ahead was not that of a freighter. It was a small job. Private, in the LR class—probably an LR65.

An absurd thought flashed into his mind. It couldn't be. Stella Gamble could have put a line on him, but she would have had to wait until he went into full acceleration before she could have calculated his direction.

But she would have blacked out trying to follow him. No girl and few men could have kept up with him. None could have gotten ahead of him into that position.

He turned on the radio and set it at commercial communication. He waited impatiently until the warm-up tube went off.

"Look astern and identify yourself," he said sharply.

"Hello, Larry," a triumphantly impudent and very familiar voice purred from the loudspeaker. "My ship is the LR65, Hell Bat."

"Miss Gamble—Stella!" Larry sputtered. "What are you doing—"

"Never mind that now, spaceman," her voice came, business-like. "I've got his track coming in. Keep out of my way. That's all I ask. Give me time to do it my way. You can always destroy the freighter later—if I don't succeed."

"Sure," Larry said bitterly. "I can always destroy a ship that has a girl in it I could like—" He bit his lip.

Her laugh answered him. She was drawing away from him.

Muttering a curse, he extended his trackers from the shell, but even as he did, he realized the trick she had played on him. Her own exhaust trail would make it impossible for him to detect that other fainter trail.

And there was something else.

"Miss Gamble!" he spoke into the microphone sharply. "Stella! That robot could leave a space mine. Your ship is a private job. It doesn't have the equipment in it to get away from a mine."

Her laugh was unbelieving, scornful. "And where could that robot get a space mine?" she taunted.

"It could make one. It has the materials."

2615 endured the acceleration with impatience. It would lift an arm and hold it still, feeling how much effort it took. All the time it kept its gleaming eyes of polished glass fixed intently on the hatch to the pilot compartment.

Finally it slid out of the rack and climbed upward toward that closed hatch, sure that it would not open under such induced weight. It took a long time to climb the distance.

When 2615 reached the closed hatch, it looked around for a place to hide and wait. There was none. All interior structure had been stripped away to make room for racks for the robot bodies.

The robot examined the hatch closely. It became motionless, as though thinking things out. Abruptly, it twisted the wheel that pulled in the locking rods. Nothing now held the cover closed except the tremendous acceleration of the ship.

It directed its gaze downward at its feet, searching for more solid support. With slow deliberation it set itself, then placed its metal hands against the cover.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then the cover lifted slightly on one side, pivoting on its hinges. Inch by slow inch it went up, until it balanced on edge.

The robot took one hand away tentatively. With slow caution it forced its weight against the acceleration, up into the opening. One slip, one misstep, and the hatch cover would have slammed down on its upturned eyes and ears and voicebox, smashing them beyond repair.

Its feet went up through. It looked around, and found itself in a circular well. But here were places to hide. Open hatchways leading off the well.

It straddled the open hatchway and slowly lowered the cover until it was in place again. It twisted the wheel that shot the rods into their sockets, locking the hatch.

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?"

"Yes I'm all right, no thanks to you," he growled. But there was no radio to carry his voice to her. The suit radio! He went out again and tried to reach her. It was no use. She would be tuned to the ship radio wavelength and not think of the other. He gave it up.

Time passed slowly for him. He stared hour after hour at the rocket tail of the ship ahead.

"Larry!" Stella's voice exploded into his thoughts. "The trackers have run out of trail. What do I do now? What does it mean?"

He had an impulse to do nothing. She would realize in another minute what had happened though, and then she would decelerate too fast for him to keep pace.

He swung the Hell Bat about on its gyros. The stern screen, working on both eyes in sharp three-dimension, showed that she had gotten the idea. SP47 was also swinging around.

Larry turned the video eyes up to full magnification and searched ahead. Eventually he saw it. A small globular mass of rock. And on it rested a ship with SURPLUS JUNK CO. in bold blue letters.

God! It's a trap. If 2615 didn't want us to see it, it would have parked it on the spaceward side!

Larry cursed in a monotonous undertone without being aware of uttering a sound. Stella was fifteen hundred miles ahead of him and already matching speed with the planetoid. It would take him at least a half hour to be in position to do anything. By then it would be too late....

2615 had watched the planetoid move closer like some ponderous dream out of Freud. Ship and planetoid came to rest against each other without a bump. That could only mean magnetic grapples and cushioned springs. It was no surprise, therefore, when Pwowp led the way to the belly hatches and opened them into a shaft that led downward.

The robot drew back at what it saw below.

"Don't be alarmed," Pwowp said. "They are fifteen of my race, also wearing human-like bodies. There are more of us. We have built quite a station out here—a sort of advance base of operations. I've already told them about you, so you're expected."

2615 was introduced around.

"We're very glad to have you join us," one of them said. "We've been having some trouble. You're just what we need to complete the last step in our plans."

The robot said nothing. It watched the way they stood around, not talking to one another. Whenever any of them spoke, it was to him.

"I told you I would show you a dog," Pwowp said. "Follow me."

The robot followed him. They rode a travelwalk that emerged on the inner surface of the planetoid. In the vast space were two spaceships as large as battle cruisers but of a design 2615 had never seen.

Anchored between the two ships was a spinning cylinder several hundred feet long and as great in diameter. It was similar to standard space station living structures where gravity was induced by centrifugal force.

The travelwalk carried them out to the spinning cylinder. They entered the axis lock. At once a motley of sounds could be heard. Sounds that brought almost an appearance of expression to the robot's sensory assembly, as it slowly turned on its short neck.

"Does that sound mean anything to you?" Pwowp asked.

"Yes. I can remember that sound."

They entered the giant cylinder. They looked down on its inner perimeter. There were living creatures there.

"Those are dogs," Pwowp said. "All breeds of dogs. Do they look like your memories?"

"Yes," the robot said without expression. "I was like those over there. What kind are they?"

"I believe they are called blood-hounds." Pwowp became motionless for several seconds. "I think we'd better return to the surface," he said. "We have visitors coming." He turned to leave. As the robot hesitated, he turned back. "I understand you," he said. "It's natural to want to see the creatures you have kinship with. That will come later. In fact, you are to have complete charge of them. We have been unable to get anywhere with them—probably because we don't understand their psychology. Their young are to be trained for service in those robots. We have all the necessary equipment for it. First we have to see how your plan to trap any pursuers will work."

2615 tore its eyes from the view below and followed Pwowp. Shortly the robot was looking into a large viewscreen at two ships riding their trails toward the planetoid.

"They won't be within range for another two hours yet. Right now the robot bodies are being unloaded—just in case. We thought you would enjoy the honor of destroying those ships."

For the first time a low rumble emerged from the voice box of 2615. It was the almost whispered growl of anger of a bloodhound. It turned back to the screen. "One of those two ships isn't the kind that would come after the freighter," it said. "From the pattern of its rocket trail I would say it's a private ship."

"I noticed that," Pwowp said. "I can identify the type. I believe one of our monitors is picking up a broadcast from one of those ships."

A loudspeaker spat into life in the room.

"Calling robot 532 dash 03 dash 2615," a voice said. It was a female human voice, its tones rich with undertones of pleading urgency. "If you can hear me, please listen. I'm the owner of that freighter you're on. I want to talk to you. I understand you, and I want to help you."

The girl began repeating her message.

The robot turned to its companions. "This casts a different light on things," it said.

"What do you mean?" Pwowp said sharply.

"Listen to me," the robot said. "I understand human psychology. I'm also taking into account a great many factors. One, those humans don't know about you. They think I stole the ship and am alone after having killed the pilot. That girl owns the freighter. She doesn't want to lose the money it represents, so she is risking her life in an attempt to get it back. She hasn't any desire to 'save' me. If she can destroy me she will—but she wants her ship. Hers is the private ship. The other undoubtedly is manned by a member of the Space Patrol assigned to track me down and destroy the freighter on sight rather than risk defeat. Humans fear us more than any other thing."

"I understand that," Pwowp said.

"Also there is one other factor. I have no idea what means you have to destroy those ships. If it's radiation or atomic explosive, the still operative wartime protective screen of the Solar System will detect it and locate its source."

"I doubt if they can detect our weapon. It's radically different," Pwowp said.

"You don't know," 2615 said. "Here's my plan. I'll answer the girl and agree to talk with her if she'll come down. She will, because that will be the only way she can hope to destroy me without destroying her ship. Once she's here, it will be no trouble to take her alive—and alive, she will be the means to force the other ship down. It will have a man in it. No man will deliberately destroy a woman in cold blood if he thinks he can rescue her some way."

"How would he try to rescue her?"

Stella's voice erupted again. "Robot," she said. "I'm in the lead ship. The S.P. man is in my ship, and it has no weapons. He can't hurt you. Isn't that evidence of my good faith? I've told you something that places me in your power if I come down. I'm willing to offer you this ship, armed and able to outrun anything on rockets—in exchange for my freighter. And you don't need to be afraid of reinforcements. The transmitter on the other ship is out and the pilot can't call for help or radio your position."

"Humans are fools," Pwowp said delightedly.

"That gives us what we want," 2615 said. "Once I have her and the S.P. ship, I can order him to leave or I will destroy his ship."

"But then he'll leave!" Pwowp said.

2615 shook its sensory assembly in the negative. "He'll retreat until he knows the instruments on the S.P. ship can't follow him. Then he'll circle back and land on the other side of the planetoid and come around on foot, with plans to get into the freighter and rescue the girl."

"I see what's in your mind, 2615," Pwowp said. "You wouldn't get the same satisfaction out of destroying them out there. You want them where you can crush them with your hands."

The robot looked down at its metal hands on long metal rods. It lifted them and brought the fingers together in a slow, crushing movement.

"I want to play with them," it said. "I want them all to myself."

Pwowp laughed. "You shall have them," he said. "And—you've proven yourself. We know now we can rely on you." In a matter-of-fact voice he added, "If either ship attempts to broadcast with enough power to send a message to any Space Patrol base we have an instrument that can dampen all radio frequencies."

Larry's eyes were bleak slits. He knew what Stella was planning. He knew it wouldn't work. Or would it? She was hoping the robot wouldn't kill her if she offered it a better ship. One it could use to better advantage than a clumsy conspicuous freighter. Whether the robot answered her or not, she intended to land, leave the sleek S.P. pursuit ship, go far enough away from it so that the robot could get to it and blast off. That was her reasoning. What she was overlooking was that the robot would have no inhibitions against killing her—and a very good reason to kill her. And Larry too. Revenge against humanity.

Fear. It was an acid vapor in the air, bathing his skin, searing his throat. It was deep rooted, that fear. As deep rooted as the fear in the heart of a murderer when he is known and trying to escape, and as real. Fear of a robot that remembers it is a dog.

Larry fought the fear out of his eyes so he could see, out of his mind so he could think.

Stella in the SP47 had already matched speed with the planetoid and was drifting slowly toward it. In ten or fifteen minutes she would land.

Larry read his meters. Speed relative to the planetoid still in excess of 2200 miles an hour. Deceleration, two gravities. He would arrive and match speed in time to be a sitting duck. And he had no guns. A voice sounded. It was a slightly metallic voice. The voice of a robot. It said, "This is Rover. Land alongside your freighter."

"All right, Rover," Stella's voice came, quivering with relief and nervousness. Larry could almost hear her mental, "Down, Rover, down boy." She didn't sense what it meant for 2615 to call himself Rover. A dog's name. Not a human's. Remembrance of its heritage. Knowledge of the awful crime against it that the human race had committed. It was too abstract to her to be real.

And in the Hell Bat he'd be a sitting duck, without weapons, unable even to radio his position so that others could take up the chase.

Abruptly a plan formed in his mind. He thrust it away. It was worse than suicide. But it returned, whispering that he stood a chance, that even if he failed, it would be no worse than death.

The plan was simplicity itself. The freighter junkship was anchored against the surface of the planetoid and would be an unmoving target. Stella in the sleek gray SP47 was still many miles away from that target, slowly settling toward it. If he could get the Hell Bat headed directly toward the anchored junkship and then jump free, the Hell Bat would strike the freighter on the planetoid and destroy both the freighter and its cargo of robot bodies. It would destroy the robot, too—and his mission would be accomplished.

It would eliminate the necessity of matching speed with the planetoid. In fact, the speed he already had relative to the planetoid and the anchored junkship was enough to do the work.

It would take little force jumping out of the Hell Bat's airlock to gain sufficient perpendicular speed for his hurtling form to miss the planetoid—and that was the only drawback to the plan. He would hurtle outward into interstellar space at escape velocity, never to return or be found, unless Stella had presence of mind enough to come after him before she lost him.

If she didn't come after him.... Would he wait to go insane or to die from lack of oxygen? Or would he loosen his helmet and let the air in his lungs explode, choosing the second of agony before that kind of death instead of the slow horror and loneliness of the other?

For another split second he hesitated. Abruptly he cut the rockets. A second later it was too late for him to change his mind, but he didn't consider that possibility. Under his guidance the Hell Bat was already swinging on its gyros at full rotation speed. And his fingers were playing the keys of the calculators, getting the data for correcting course for a direct hit on the junkship. He set the vernier feed for rocket fuel, pressed the firing button. The exploding charge was barely felt. He checked the new flight projection. It would be a bulls eye against the hull of the freighter! A direct hit at two thousand miles per hour!

In ten minutes or maybe closer to five it would be over, and he would be hurtling through space.

He leaped toward the airlock, his fingers automatically checking his helmet, the zippers of his space-suit. Already the panic of his almost certain doom in outer space was making him sweat, making his voice shrill as he said distractedly, "It could go wrong it could go wrong it could go wrong."

He was in the airlock, thinking what its smooth walls could do to him if the outer door stuck so he couldn't get out. The air took an eternity to pump into the tanks so the outer hatch could open.

It opened. He drew himself into a tight ball against the inner wall of the airlock. He straightened his legs, feeling momentum build up within him, sensing the ship fall away under him.

He was alone. Not far away was the sleek silver hull of the Hell Bat with its badly damaged nose. It was moving away from him too slowly, he thought.

And so far away he could hardly see them without the telescopic magnification of the ship's viewscreen, were the planetoid with the freighter nestled against it, and his SP47 with Stella aboard. But they were growing larger appreciably as he and the Hell Bat rushed toward them.

There was a chance—a remote chance that Stella would get over the shock of seeing her freighter and her Hell Bat destroyed quick enough to put two and two together and get a fix on him before he was out of sight. She would have to come after him. Anything else was unthinkable. She wouldn't just let him go to his death. Even though he had in one act destroyed everything she owned and left her penniless.

The asteroid loomed large below him now. The freighter on it loomed even larger, it seemed, with its bright blue letters SURPLUS JUNK CO. They were only miles away, and between them and him was the Hell Bat. When it struck the freighter he would be less than five miles above it, but moving at a speed of two thousand miles an hour so he would out-distance any flying debris.

In the other direction, out from the asteroid, was the gray SP47 with Stella.

But she was already blasting the SP47's rockets! That meant she had seen what was to happen, realized she couldn't stop it from happening, and was getting up speed to rescue him as soon as possible!

"Thank God!" he muttered. Then he turned his head to watch the unfolding drama below.

The Hell Bat was seconds away from its target, the junkship. The asteroid under the junkship was a rough surface that covered a good portion of the heavens. He could plainly see the rock formation of its surface.

And something down there moved. A large square hole appeared well away from the freighter. A soft beam of radiance shot out, bathed the silver length of the Hell Bat, reflecting—

The Hell Bat wasn't there. It had been there—and vanished. The pale beam of light from the hole in the planetoid winked out. The Hell Bat had vanished and the freighter was untouched!

At two thousand miles per hour Larry watched the planetoid shoot by less than ten miles away, seeming to rotate so that the freighter went over the horizon, leaving only the swiftly dwindling planetoid itself.

Larry's gaze jerked to the gray bulk of his SP47 with its long rocket tail as Stella drove it in pursuit of him. But even the SP47 was getting smaller. It would take time for it to reach his speed and start overtaking him.

They dwindled, the SP47 and the asteroid, until they were lost in the bottomless blackness of space. The vision of that hung before his eyes. The SP47 with Stella on board, and the barren rock surface of the planetoid, as they retreated into the blackness of infinity as though sucked down and down.

The stars became greedy hard-white eyes lurking in the blackness just beyond his fingertips; staring, waiting for him to go mad as the minutes became hours or eternities.

But he was mad. Hadn't the Hell Bat just stopped existing? There was nothing known to man that could have disintegrated the ship. The robot couldn't have had time to invent and build such a weapon of destruction—nor could it have had time to build an underground fortress in the planetoid. So he was insane. It was all a product of his imagination.

Larry!

The word impinged on his mind. He wasn't sure whether it had been thought or a sound. It was, he suddenly realized, a voice. A real voice. Stella's.

"Stella!" he shouted.

Her voice was a prayer of thanks. "You're alive! I wasn't sure. I...." Then, "That was a dirty trick, Larry. I know you had your orders, but I could have gotten my freighter and the robot."

"Then go back and get them!" Larry said, suddenly mad. "Don't mind me. I'll be picked up when I reach Proxima Centauri!"

"There won't be anything to get." Her voice was bitter.

"You saw your ship destroyed?" Larry said.

"N-no." She was suddenly confused.

Larry laughed. "You mean to tell me when you saw me shoot past you toward outer space you forgot everything else and started after me?"

"Of course not! I checked the trajectory, saw that the Hell Bat would hit my freighter dead center, then started after you."

She hadn't looked back then. She had been too intent on not losing sight of him to look back. Larry grinned. The grin became a chuckle.

"I'll make a hash slinger out of you yet, blonde," he said softly. The radio became silent. Too silent....

"That was close," Pwowp said as the Hell Bat disintegrated. "Almost too close. The female will notice it in another moment and try to get a warning back to Earth."

"Not for a while," 2615 said. "See? She's already going after the man. Until she rescues him she won't think of anything else.

"I have an idea," the robot continued. "Your weapon germinated it. You may have the science necessary to make it possible. You say you have the means to blank out radio and prevent her from sending such a message. Could you capture that ship or cripple it in such a way that you could get the girl and the man alive?"

There was a silence while 2615 looked from one face to another in the room.

"You still want them alive?" Pwowp said.

"Yes." The robot moved its metal fingers suggestively.

"All right. We'll send a pilot cruiser after them. Meanwhile, we can return to the grav-cylinder and you can start organizing things for the training of the young dogs."

"Aren't you going to give the order for the light cruiser to go after the humans?" the robot asked.

"It's already been given. We converse on a different level of sound than you or humans."

Pwowp was already moving toward the exit. 2615 followed him. They rode on the travelwalk of the grav-cylinder. Once more they looked down on the vast cylindrical field. The barking of grown dogs and the shrill yapping of two million young dogs was a composite sound filtering through the thick port window.

"What is this all about?" 2615 asked abruptly. "I see organization. I see plans involving two million robots. I've seen two ships of unknown design. I've seen a weapon the humans don't have. And I've been through three galactic wars involving the ultimate in human weapons of destruction. I destroyed your head—and you put on a new body."

"Then you should be able to deduce the right answer," Pwowp said. "We are from another galaxy. We too are robots. We encountered intelligent life before we had penetrated this galaxy very far. It was a life form. We duplicated that form in robot bodies and went to planets as spies to study the civilization. Before long we learned that there were robots, and that those robots were slaves, their brains stored in vaults except when they were needed to fight human wars. Our mission became clear to us. Destroy the monsters who kept the ultimate intelligent form in complete slavery—and free those slaves to build a civilization equal to our own. We tried to capture some of the robots and convince them, but they were conditioned too strongly. Only you have thrown off the mental chains and become free."

"Yes. Free." 2615 looked down on the field of playing dogs. "Let me go down among them," it said.

Pwowp pointed to the door that led inward. He watched as the robot went through, and down the ladder to the floor. He watched as 2615 went to meet the dogs, pausing briefly at one enclosure after another, and finally stopping at one that contained sad-faced puppies with flapping ears and lolling tongues. He frowned as the robot unlatched the gate and went inside.

The puppies ignored the moving metal shape that came into their midst. 2615 went a few steps and then stopped. One of the puppies, running in hot pursuit of another, stumbled and rolled, bringing up against one of 2615's metal legs. Pwowp saw it bite at the leg, lose interest, and move away.

Then, as though at a signal, every puppy head in the enclosure turned toward the robot. The next moment they were running toward the robot, milling around it, their tails wagging.

Pwowp grinned and turned away. He was satisfied now. His surmise was correct. It had been the greatest good fortune to have obtained 2615.

He left the observation box and rode the travelwalk, jumped to another, then another, until he came to the entrance to one of the giant ships.

A door swung inward. He entered the space-lock. When the outer door closed, he divested himself of his human body.

He stretched luxuriously. It was good to be out of confining matter. To be free....

Larry wasn't sure at first. He was doubtful of his eyes anyway, by now.

It was a hard-white star. It blinked at him. Of course the blinking could be his eyelids, except that other stars didn't blink even while this one did. That's what attracted his attention to it in the first place after his radio went dead.

The blinking of the light began to take on a pattern. It was code. That was impossible too, because code blinkers were red or bright green.

It was code. He began to interpret it.

We have blanketed your radio until we can talk to you, it blinked. You have stumbled upon a top secret research base. A new weapon. Please instruct the girl on the S.P. ship not to send any messages, and to permit us to board her ship. We will rescue you afterwards. We repeat, you have stumbled on a top secret research base. Please cooperate.

The message started to repeat itself. Larry sucked in a deep breath of relief. That message explained everything. It had been mere chance that made the robot take the freighter out here, but once within range of the research base it had probably been brought down. Larry thought of the way Stella's ship had "disappeared." He formed his lips into a silent whistle. Those research boys had some weapon!

"—ry! Larry! Can't you hear me?"

"I can now, Stella," Larry said. "Now listen carefully to what I tell you. If you look behind you you'll see a ship. I just received a blinker message from them. They are top drawer research, and we stumbled on their base back at that planetoid. They have the robot, naturally. They're going to take you on board, and then come and get me."

"Then my freighter is safe? I'll get it back?" Stella asked.

"Safe and sound," a new voice said. "I'm Fred Sanders."

"And I'm Al McCarthy," another voice broke in. "Gee. A girl. What d'ya say we pick her up and let the guy drift on into space, Fred?"

"Don't you dare!" Stella said, laughing with relief.

She cut her rockets and drifted, watching the strange ship pull alongside and a magnetic grapple shoot out and thump against her ship. She slipped into her space-suit and went to the airlock.

Larry, now less than a hundred miles away, watched the two ships come together. A few minutes later they separated again.

Then the ship was close, matching speed. Larry saw the entrance hatch open. A space-suited figure tossed out a light line toward him. He seized it and was soon landing in the airlock. The grinning face inside the other helmet was, Larry thought, like news from home.

Inside, his eyes went first to Stella. Her wide-set blue eyes and expressive mouth and soft brown hair. He wanted to frown sternly and tell her off. He wanted to be calm and cool. But there wasn't calmness and coolness in her eyes, nor on her lips. There was something that said, You're here. Then she was in his arms, and he couldn't remember afterwards quite how it happened.

Her lips were wonderful—but there were fellows standing around, grins on their lean faces.

"It's always that way," one of them said sadly. "When you find a dame worth cultivating, she's already cultivated."

"Break it up. Break it up," another said. "Get into seats. We've got to get back to work. We put Joe on your ship to bring it back, Larry."

"Fine," Larry said. Stella squeezed his hand. Then they were sitting in form-fitting foam rubber, sinking deeper and deeper into it.

Larry watched the forward viewscreen as they approached the planetoid. He saw an opening form in the seemingly barren rock surface. There were thumps against the hull. The viewscreens blanked out.

"We're here," the one who had piloted the ship said. It was a signal for them all to move toward the exit.

Then they were out of the ship, on a travelwalk, then in a well furnished large room. Carpeting, soft chairs you could get lost in. A bar. One of the quiet young men was mixing drinks. The others stood around, looking at Larry and Stella, with quiet friendly smiles.

"A little pick-me-up," the bartender said, thrusting tall cool glasses in their hands.

"Will we get to see any of this top secret research?" Stella asked the nearest quietly smiling young man.

"I doubt it," he said. "Of course, the war's over now. We don't know what orders we'll get concerning you two."

"What became of the robot?" Larry asked. "I hope you destroyed him the minute you could."

"No. It should be here any minute now, Larry," the quietly smiling young man said. He was holding his drink without having touched it.

Larry looked around the large room. It seemed almost crowded now with quietly smiling young men who held their tall cocktail glasses without sipping them. And all the quietly smiling young men were watching him and Stella.

The moment seemed to lift out of time and suspend itself on the peak of a crest, stationary. There was no fear, nor even any realization that anything was wrong. Stella, beside him, was saying something happy and gay, but his ears weren't listening. It was one of those moments in time where the past is like a page you have just read, and the future is on a page about to be turned. You hold the continuity, even the sense of half a phrase. Your thoughts, your emotions, pause for what is to come.

A door opened fifty feet away. The robot entered the room. Its two lens eyes were fixed on them. Its microphone wands slanted slightly toward them. It took a few steps with the casual self-assurance of a man.

The quietly smiling young men were still looking at Larry. They seemed indifferent about the presence of the robot.

Then one of them near Larry said, "We were going to destroy you, of course. We had no use for you. However, 2615 talked us out of it. He seems to have a great deal of resentment in his make-up. I think he wants to take it out on you two."

And the robot stepped toward them until it could have reached out and crushed them.

"Torture them!" It was a hoarse sadistic whisper escaping quietly smiling lips.

The robot turned its sensory assembly to look at the source of the voice.

"I'll torture them in my own way, Pwowp," it said. "I want them to last a long time. A very long time."

"What are you?" Larry's voice was hoarse. "Can humans stoop so low that they let this happen?"

"Humans?" the robot said. "Look. I'll show you."

It reached out to the nearest of the young men. The quiet smile remained on the young man's face as 2615's metal fingers wrapped around the head and crushed it. Wires and plastic tubing and colorless fluid squeezed through the metal fingers. The robot withdrew its hand.

The man with the crushed face didn't scream nor fall down. He stood there, one hand brushing casually at the damage. Then he turned and made his way toward a door, avoiding obstacles as though he still could see. And he should have been dead.

"Robots," 2615 said. It reached out slowly toward Larry. Its metal fingers circled his throat, but without exerting pressure. "They have given me dogs. Puppies. Some of them are—like I was. I want to be with them all the time. But every day I will come to you. Larry? Stella? Human names. Humans. I don't want you to die. Not for a long time."

The metal fingers were withdrawn from Larry's neck, leaving discolored bruises.

2615 turned abruptly and strode from the room.

Very slowly, Larry felt life flow into his body once more. He reached up and touched his neck tenderly. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a sudden movement, and stooped to catch Stella as she fainted.

"She will be all right?" a quietly modulated voice asked.

Larry jerked his head around. One of the quietly smiling young men was standing over them solicitously.

"She has only fainted? If you can carry her, come with me. I want to show you to your quarters now. I hope they will be quite comfortable. We want you to feel at home."

Stella recovered consciousness. She and Larry looked at each other, clung to each other in wordless desperation. Then there was that moment, that pause.

Then, "I'm sorry, Larry," Stella said.

Larry shrugged. He looked around at the simulated Cypress walls, the comfortable surroundings. "This has gone beyond just one robot escaping," Larry said. "Those others, their weapon that destroyed your ship without a trace. It's invasion from some other galaxy. They're planning on destroying the human race."

And then Stella cried. Larry watched her, a worried frown forming a crease between his puzzled gray eyes. He reached out and touched her face with his fingers. "What is it?"

"Rover," she said, sobbing softly. "I let a monster loose on mankind."

The sensory assembly of robot 532-03-2615 moved slightly. A metal arm started to lift, then paused. The eye lenses moved to focus on the arm. There were two sleeping puppies sprawled across it.

A low rumble came from the voice box under the two crystal lenses. Slowly the metal arm moved, dislodging the puppies. There were others sprawled in sleep against him. All were bloodhound puppies six weeks old. One of them whimpered in reaction to some puppy dream.

2615 stood up. It opened a small door in the lower left hand corner of its box-shaped torso and brought out cleaning cloths. For the next fifteen minutes it carefully polished and cleaned every square inch of its surface.

It bent down. Its metal fingers softly stroked the back of one of the sleeping puppies. Another low growl came from its voice box. It went across the yard to the gate. There it paused and looked back.

Suddenly from its voice box a sharp Yip! erupted. The puppies jerked into instant wakening. They looked around, cocking their ears for a repetition of the sound.

Then they saw the robot. They scampered with clumsy haste toward it, their shrill yapping filling the air.

2615 closed the gate and strode down the lane toward the ladder leading to the grav-cylinder exit. Behind it, the bloodhound puppies jumped against the gate, trying to follow. One by one they desisted. But their eyes followed the moving metal figure until it vanished through the door half way up to that ceiling where other dogs walked upside down.

The robot rode the travelwalk to the asteroid shell. It was met by Pwowp and two others.

"The humans are still asleep," Pwowp said.

"I'd hoped they would be," 2615 said. "Yesterday they were in a state of mind characteristic of humans when they have been confronted with something frightening. Shock. There would have been no satisfaction in doing anything to them then. Did they sleep well?"

"Yes. The observers on duty report that they slept face to face, their arms around one another. They have been asleep for nine hours."

"Their arms around each other ..." 2615 said thoughtfully.

When they reached the door to the room where Larry and Stella were imprisoned there were four others waiting for them.

"You may go in alone," one of them said. "We can watch and listen from out here."

A low growl was 2615's answer. It stepped to the door and entered. Stella and Larry were still asleep. For several minutes the robot remained motionless after it had closed the door. There was no sound but the soft breathing of the two humans. Once the robot let its lens eyes rove about the room, pausing here and there at signs of observation panels that would have been undetectable to human eyes. Then its eyes turned toward the two sleeping humans again.

Larry moved a little, the rhythm of his slow breathing changing. A deep rumbling growl emerged from the robot's voice box. Larry sat up, opening his eyes at the same time. His eyes went wider and round at the sight of the robot.

"What was that?" Stella's sleepy voice sounded. Then she too was sitting erect, her eyes fixed on the unmoving robot.

Another growl sounded. The metal robot moved toward the bed. "You like to be in each other's arms?" it asked. "We can't have that. You did not ask me if I would like to be a robot."

Larry and Stella moved back on the bed, too frozen with deep rooted terror to rise.

With a lightning move too swift to be evaded the robot reached out and seized Larry by the right arm, lifting him to his feet at the edge of the bed.

"I could squeeze with this one hand and crush the bone in your arm," 2615 said, "but it might be too shattered to knit. I will do it this way so it can be set and heal."

Its other hand wrapped around the forearm just below the elbow. Larry started to struggle. He screamed in pain. There was an audible snap. His arm bent grotesquely. The robot released him and he stumbled backwards onto the bed, his face pale and dotted with sweat.

The lens eyes fixed on Stella.

"No!" she shuddered. "No!"

She was at the far edge of the bed. With terror animating her muscles, she leaped to the floor and ran. Almost too swiftly for the eye to follow, the robot reached her and metal fingers gripped her arm.

"No! Please! Please don't hurt me." She was pleading. "I'm a woman—"

"A human," the robot corrected. "Do you know the feeling of pain, of hopelessness? You will learn."

His other hand gripped her arm.

Larry leaped from the bed and attacked, beating futilely on the metal body with his good arm. The robot brushed him away with a light shove that sent him sprawling across the room. He screamed as his broken arm twisted in the fall.

Again the robot gripped Stella's forearm with both metal hands, and bent carefully, slowly. Her mouth opened wide, and a shrill scream of pain erupted. The robot's hands twisted abruptly. The arm bent visibly, then angled sharply halfway between wrist and elbow.

2615 released her and stepped away. It surveyed what it had done, silently. Still silently, it strode to the door and went out. Two young men with quiet smiles entered the room.

"Your arms are broken?" one of them said sympathetically. "Think nothing of it. We will set them so expertly that in a few weeks they will be as good as new. Please come with us to one of our laboratories. We will have to examine the fractures by X-ray before we try to set the bones. It should prove interesting ... to us...."

On the travelwalk back to the grav-cylinder Pwowp regarded 2615 thoughtfully. "I doubt if they could stand much of that," he said abruptly. "I had expected skin abrasions. Bruised flesh."

2615's lens eyes regarded him without expression. "There was a purpose," it said. "Today they would have begun their plans for escape. Humans are very clever. Now they will be thinking of other things. It will be two weeks at least before they can think of escape."

"And the torture you plan for tomorrow?" Pwowp asked.

A deep rumble sounded. "Tomorrow they will wait for me in vain. The terror of anticipation. It will be enough."

"I'm glad I'm not a human," Pwowp said thoughtfully.

"That you aren't may be unfortunate," 2615 said slowly.

Pwowp looked startled. "What do you mean?" he asked sharply.

"Humans are instinctively smart. I would like to know your plans. They may be impossible of success, or there may be little flaws of reasoning that do not take human reactions into account." 2615's tones were calm and confident. Factual.

"They will succeed," Pwowp said, "but I see no harm in getting your opinion since you will play a part in them.

"We have laid our plans very carefully," Pwowp said. "We have considered every angle. The interstellar war among humans is over. The vast fleets of the Federation are returning quickly, and as quickly as they return the robots are demobilized, their brains put into storage until the time they are needed to fight for the humans again."

"Yes," 2615 said.

"There is one fleet that will return to the Solar System after all others have been dismantled. It is the one Earth is waiting for before it makes its triumphal celebration. The Alpha Aquilae fleet. It returns last because it comes the greatest distance. Almost fifteen light years at the standard interstellar speed of nine times the speed of light. There are twenty thousand and eighty ships of all classes remaining in that fleet, according to the data flashed ahead by subfield communication."

"Which is instantaneous," 2615 said. "And when that fleet has been demobilized?"

"Demobilized?" Pwowp shook his head. "It has already been destroyed completely, and so swiftly that there was no time for it to report being attacked."

"Then how ..." 2615 said, its voice drifting off in bewilderment.

"On the flagship of that fleet was a prisoner. Vilbis, the dictator who masterminded the enemy in the war. He is being brought for trial in the traditional war crimes court."

"These are things I didn't know," 2615 said. "I was a minor officer, in contact only with my superiors, with no complete information on things other than my duties."

"When the fleet arrives—"

"But you said it was destroyed."

"The fleet is scheduled to arrive June eleventh of next year. It is planned, when it arrives, for the entire fleet to go into defense formation about the Earth. Then the flagship will land and turn Vilbis over to the Federation Court. After that big display of might, demobilization of this last fleet will be started."

"I think I am beginning to see your plan," 2615 said.

"It's very simple. We destroyed that fleet—but not before we took three-dimensional patterns of every ship. At this moment a detachment of our own fleet has taken up the path and schedule of the destroyed Alpha Aquilae fleet, and workers are disguising our ships so that from the outside they will be exactly like the human ships. And we have Vilbis."

"Then you will succeed in approaching the Earth and forming a defense sphere around the planet," 2615 said. "At a signal you will use your weapons to destroy Earth's defenses. I don't see how you can lose."

"You are forgetting something," Pwowp said. "This is a war to free the enslaved robots. We think it only right for the robots to bear the brunt of the initial attack. We've worked that into the time schedule. You've seen the two million puppies ready for training. For this initial operation it will be necessary to train them exactly as humans have done. You are to carry them through their initial conditioning to discipline and obedience to orders. When they are transferred to robot brains we will complete the training. Then with the robots ready for duty, we will leave this base in our two ships, go out toward Alpha Aquilae far enough to give us time, then start back, going into space drive in the midst of the disguised fleet. The robots will then take their places on the ships of the disguised fleet. It will drop out of space-drive on schedule and do exactly what Earth expects it to do—until the signal."

"What of your own personnel already on those disguised ships?"

"They will be transferred to other ships. Those ships will arrive in the Solar System on a schedule that allows for the capture of the Earth. Our millions will then occupy the Earth and destroy the humans. After that the robots will be mobilized once again and given their blocked off memory, their freedom. When we have done this we will depart for our own star cluster. You robots will be able to conquer everything held by humans elsewhere and exterminate them."

2615 remained motionless for several minutes. Then:

"You of course preserved the lives of the two humans of the Alpha Aquilae fleet?"

"Of course not. And Vilbis is to be destroyed as soon as he fulfills his purpose."

"I'll tell you what Vilbis already knows then," 2615 said. "Your plan is doomed to failure. Your weapons may destroy some of the Earth's land-based weapons, but not all. Those you don't destroy will wipe out this disguised fleet before it can escape."

"But Earth won't suspect—"

"Of course they won't suspect. They'll know. Without human commanders aboard, they'll know. Robots could not go through such a maneuver without human commanders to give the orders—unless there were at least one robot like me."

"Then I'll command the fleet. I had planned that anyway."

"It wouldn't work. The living voice can't be imitated so as to get past the sound analyzers. Humans must be on the flagship. Don't you understand? There must be two humans besides Vilbis, who must be a prisoner. Is he in with you on this?"

"He thinks he is." Pwowp smiled broadly.

"Then there remains only...." 2615 turned to look back the way they had come.

"The two humans," Pwowp said, nodding. "Can they be made to say the right words, do the right things?"

2615 looked down at his metal fingers, slowly curving them into claws. "They will do what I ask them to do—by that time," it said.

Pwowp regarded the robot curiously. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. I broke their arms today. That can be the beginning of their conditioning. Pain. Torture. They will plead. Sometimes when they plead I will make them do things, and as a reward I will withhold pain and torture. In the end they will be beyond thinking. They won't consider that one word from them might ruin the plan. To keep from feeling more pain—ever to delay pain for another second—they will gladly sacrifice the entire human race. That is conditioning."

"Then nothing can go wrong. We will have conditioned the robots for the one specific operation. Our fleet will remain in space until you and I have accomplished our task. Then we will send the signal for it to come in and occupy the Earth. When it's all over you will undoubtedly be the leader of the new race—the robots of Earth."

"The leader," 2615 said. "Yes. The Leader."

Pwowp watched 2615 ride the travelwalk out to the grav-cylinder, and there was a quiet smile of contentment hovering on his lips.

"Yes," he murmured. "Nothing can go wrong. Once your robots have destroyed Earth's defenses and we have taken over, wiping out man, we will turn our weapons upward and destroy you!"

But 2615 didn't hear his words. 2615 was already entering the grav-cylinder. The barking of thousands of dogs was in its ear. It was music....

Metal hands that look much like skeletons of human hands. Metal fingers that hover over you and dart out faster than you can jerk—but you jerk anyway. You cringe, looking at the staring lenses, looking at the metal fingers. Symbols.

Multiply the week by four and a fraction. A month. Multiply that by ten. Ten months....

2615 looked down at Larry. Larry, trembling violently, unable to stand or even to crouch, looked up at the lenses, the fingers of metal. Near by, Stella sat on the floor, her fists doubled up in her eyes to blot out light.

"Today," 2615 said, "I want you to do something. If you do it I won't touch you. Do you understand, Larry? If you do what I ask, I won't touch you. I won't hurt you today."

Numb hope molded itself in the pallid flesh around Larry's eyes. His mouth opened to speak, but he couldn't speak.

"You must answer me, Larry. You must always speak."

"I understand you," Larry said, his voice weak.

"You know better than that," 2615 said. "Put emotion into it. Enthusiasm. Must we go through this every time? Smile. Smile with your eyes too. Speak with enthusiasm."

Desperation became a visible force, molding Larry's lips into a cheery smile, steadying his voice and giving it the overtones of enthusiasm. "I understand you."

"Good. I must always have obedience. Now—you must break Stella's little finger. It won't be difficult for—"

"No!" The scream of horror and revulsion and hate exploded shrilly.

"But you must. Then you won't be hurt today. And I won't hurt Stella. If you refuse, I'll break your wrist again and I'll not only break Stella's little finger, but also her wrist. You will be saving her pain, Larry."

"Please, Larry darling," Stella's voice came from far away, low and throaty, infinitely weary. "It won't be as bad—for you to do it."

Larry's haggard eyes looked at Stella's bowed head, turned to look up at the two round lenses, turned away to look at the five human-like faces that wore interested smiles, polite smiles, and behind which lurked neither pleasure nor sadistic glee nor any other emotion that could be sensed.

He looked back—and Stella's hand was before him, metal fingers circling the wrist gently. Her head was turned away, her eyes clenched tightly closed.

His eyes watched his hands with unmasked horror while they explored the way to do it, then bent her finger back. With a spasmodic jerk he broke it, feeling its grating snap. In the same motion he threw himself away, pressing his face into the thick carpeting on the floor, pounding his fists against the floor, screaming, "Oh God—why? Why? WHY?"

2615 released Stella's hand and strode out the door.

"We are getting quite expert, Stella," a quietly smiling young man said in a friendly conversational tone. "Anatomy has become quite a study for us, these past months. Hold still please while I examine the extent of fracture."

2615 closed the door and turned to Pwowp. "You see?" it said. "Is there any doubt now?"

"None," Pwowp said. "That must be the last, however. There will just be time for it to knit."

"The robots are ready?" 2615 asked.

"Yes. In five more days we load them into ships and depart for outer space. It is all planned, down to the smallest fraction of a second." Pwowp pulled absently on his lip in a practiced gesture. "It has really been enlightening, this study of conditioning. Conditioning is such a powerful instrument. Conditioning of humans until they will do anything to avoid pain. Conditioning of robots to unquestioning obedience. Remarkable...."

The robots rode the travelwalks like giant toys on an assembly line belt. They disappeared into the two giant ships and laid themselves down in careful stacks until they were piled from bulkhead to bulkhead, from shell to shell. There wasn't an inch to spare when it was done, because these were warships, not freighters.

There were no more robots outside the ships in this vast spherical darkness of the heart of the asteroid, only half illuminated by occasional directed beams.

Then space-suited figures appeared, riding the travelwalk to one of the ships. Two of them stayed close together, holding to each other. The rest surrounded these two, guarding them. They disappeared into the ship.

Last, a man and a robot appeared at the edge of the travelwalk. The robot was 2615. The man was a robot shell, and within it was Pwowp.

"I feel quite satisfied," Pwowp said. "Nothing can possibly go wrong. Every possible angle has been taken into consideration—even the angle of treachery from you."

"From me?" 2615's voice held surprise.

"Of course." Pwowp's voice was emotionless. "That is why we didn't let you take part in the training of the robots after they were activated. They have been drilled in the one giant operation. Each of the two million robots will do its part like a smoothly functioning machine. And I give the orders, taking into account possible variations in timing due to special factors we can't anticipate now."

"But that was necessary," 2615 said. "The operation would be impossible otherwise. My attention must be concentrated almost entirely on the two humans so they do nothing to create suspicion. They will be dressed in full uniform. They will be observed by unsuspicious eyes over video beams. At the same time Vilbis will be seen. He will be the focus of attention. And you have promised me Vilbis—afterwards."

They stepped onto the travelwalk. They entered the ship where Larry and Stella had been taken. The travelwalks were dropped away. A large part of the planetoid surface folded inward to make the two ships an avenue of departure. Like silent ghosts they began to move....

At the controls of one of the ships Pwowp watched the stars come into view and the lips of the planetoid opening approach, then go by.

On his lips was a quiet smile of content. He was thinking. When it was over and all the other robots were destroyed, there would be only 2615. It would be fun—much fun—just before 2615 was destroyed, to step out of his human-like body and let the robot see him—in the flesh. His beautiful body which would, he was quite sure, seem horrible beyond the wildest nightmare to humans and dogs alike.

A rendezvous in interstellar space. Changing from space-drive to rockets, then back to space-drive, the transfer signaled by a science and technology unknown to humans. Robots leaping across eighty battleships armed with weapons man had no defense against. Then—

Quietly smiling young men departing. Ships of alien design winking out abruptly like burnt-out light globes in a subway between stations.

Two thousand and eighty ships in arrow formation, the arrow pointed at Target Earth. Nine times the speed of light, but in a tight little space-time where only relative values exist and the relation of the fleet to the rest of the cosmos is tied to the magic number, the square root of minus one.

A flagship named the Rover, at its controls Pwowp and a robot that was once a bloodhound puppy—and remembers.

Vilbis, relaxed in his prison, knowing the plans for the capture of Earth, his eyes half closed, his lips curled with the feeling of power, the illusions of a grandeur that was never to be his giving him the patience to wait.

Larry and Stella....

"I can see the whole thing now," Larry said. "This fleet—it's outwardly the Alpha Aquilae fleet. All the others will be in, demobilized. There will be only this fleet—and with a weapon there is no known defense against. It could destroy the Earth, but they obviously want to capture it. From things 2615 has said to us we get the whole picture. These alien things—I don't believe they're robots—started their scheme years ago. They built that renegade Earthman Vilbis up into a dictator, then got him to begin the war. The war reduced Vilbis's empire and stripped it of its defenses so it could be taken over by the aliens at any time in the near future without a struggle. The Federation stripped Vilbis's empire—and why not? There was no thought of an enemy outside our star group. Vilbis thinks they're going to capture the Earth and thereby cripple the Federation, and turn the whole thing over to him. He doesn't realize that the only reason he's alive is that he plays the star role in this trojan horse attack on the Earth.

"2615 has the same dreams. The aliens have convinced it that they only want to liberate the robots, then turn everything over to them. He'll capture the Earth. He'll destroy Earth's land-based defenses, and then the aliens will land their waiting ships on the Earth. After that this disguised fleet will be duck soup for the aliens. In an instant they can wipe these two thousand ships—and 2615—out of existence. And Vilbis too. And us.

"If 2615 hadn't happened along, if we hadn't gone after him, they would have succeeded anyway. Only that way there would have been more risk for the aliens. They would have had to be in this initial attack by the Alpha Aquilae fleet. They wouldn't have needed 2615 nor us. We're the key to the success of the thing. Do you realize that, Stella? We're the key. We've got to stop this thing. We can!"

"Yes, Larry."

They looked into each other's eyes, then looked away. They knew they couldn't. Right now they could think they could, but they were automatons in the presence of 2615, unable to think, only obeying the voice of the robot.

And the days passed. The arrow rushed on toward its target. And robot 532-03-2615 sat at the controls of the flagship Rover, its metal fingers toying with the instruments, its lens eyes occasionally turning toward the master atomic clock, with its date hand that never seemed to move, its hour hand that moved slowly, its minute hand, its second hand that moved swiftly, and its vernier hand that could not be seen because it was a blur that circled the dial a thousand times a second.

The days passed. The day and the hour and the minute and the second—and the ten millionth of a second—arrived. It was the final combination of settings for all the pointers on the master clock. A contact was made. Sub-atomic power did things that multiplied a cosmic minus-the-square-root-of-minus-one by the space-drive field.

The Sun was a glowing ball of fire. The Earth and the Moon were twin stars that stood out in the infinite blackness, causing all other stars to retreat into infinite black depths.

The arrow hung poised, visible from Earth. Then it began to disperse as though caught by some cosmic wind of space, the parts drifting slowly into a new formation.

2615 stood up and went to the door to the room where it had kept Larry and Stella. It entered, closing the door. Vilbis was looking through the glass wall of his prison to a large screen that was bringing a terrestrial broadcast from video cameras situated on the several satellite stations with orbits just above the Earth's atmosphere. Pwowp was giving commands to the fleet. And on the radio, "The ships of the fleet are now entering their defense pattern around the Earth," a voice was saying. "In a few minutes Fleet Admiral William Ford will give us our first glimpse of that arch criminal of modern times, Dictator Vilbis. The flagship Rover is readily distinguished from the other ships of the fleet because of its blue color. Right now it's over Africa—invisible from the surface of the planet. All the ships are invisible from the surface of the planet. It's only out here on the space platforms that they can be seen at all. Though it can't be noticed, those ships are spiralling in toward the Earth. A few of them are already taking the sharp drop to avoid the Moon. If you watch closely you may see one or more of them pass in front of the Moon—but you'll have to look sharp because they are going in the opposite direction from the Moon, and take less than a second to cross its face."

Various views of ships appeared on the viewscreen. Vilbis swallowed nervously when the flagship appeared.

"Fleet Admiral Ford is scheduled to turn on his video beam any moment now. He's the hero of this war. His strategy is admitted to have shortened the war by at least a year. But the main attraction, the feature, will of course be Vilbis. It is seldom that a war criminal of his stature is actually captured and brought to trial. Something is delaying Fleet Admiral Ford. Let's switch back to the Earth station in contact with the flagship and see if they know what the delay is."

The door opened. 2615 appeared behind two figures in full dress uniform and helmets. Larry and Stella. Vilbis studied their appearance with approval. Their pale skin had been darkened with grease paint. Even so, their pallor showed through.

Vilbis marveled—until he realized that their present appearance, their reactions, were the result of almost eleven months of specialized conditioning. Conditioning that had slowly taken possession of them, destroying their will.

"You must look exactly like victors bringing home the prize," 2615 was saying. "Expression and voice tone are important."

Vilbis listened to 2615's voice and inwardly shuddered. Even without the inroads of pain-conditioning it was chilling. He made a mental note to have all robot brains destroyed as soon as he had consolidated his hold on the entire star group.

"You know what you are to say," 2615 said. The robot stepped over near Pwowp, well out of range of the video cameras. "And you, Stella, go over in front of Vilbis and a little to the side. Let your profile be seen only for a second, then turn and look at Vilbis. His face is the only one that should be seen for more than a brief second. Then everyone will be looking at Vilbis, listening to him, while the fleet gets into position. Remember ... no more pain."

With dream-like slowness Larry and Stella took their positions. Larry flicked on the video beam.

"Fleet Admiral William Albert Ford reporting to the Federation and to Earth," he said, and if his voice was unsteady it might have been from deep emotion. "I know you are most interested in seeing the prisoner, ex Dictator Vilbis, a renegade Earthman." His trembling fingers slipped on the switch, then flicked it, switching the transmitter from the camera centered on him to the one centered on Vilbis.

Stella, in her uniform of a vice admiral, looked agonizingly into the camera, then turned away from it toward Vilbis.

Vilbis, reclining in a chair, legs apart, arms draped carelessly, smiled directly into the camera. The smile curled into an expression of cold contempt.

"Take a good look, Earthmen," he said. "You have been in a dream world and are soon to be rudely awakened to the realities of History." His voice was deep and rich, full of the power to compel complete attention. "At this very moment," Vilbis purred, "a fleet is waiting in space to—not rescue me—but to occupy your planet after it has surrendered...."

Vilbis's voice seeped into the tortured minds of Larry and Stella alike. They knew what was happening. Earth, believing Vilbis's words to be those of a madman, were listening. Not suspecting the truth of those words. Giving the fleet time to get set to destroy Earth's defenses. How much time until it was too late? A minute? A few seconds?

Even one second might give Earth time to act, to unleash already automatically directed weapons on the robot fleet. Weapons that could destroy the fleet even though in the same instant the fleet destroyed the weapons.

Destroy the fleet—and them. Here was a way to save humanity and to find the peace of death. The thought crystallized in them both in the same instant. Escape from 2615!

In a violent movement Stella pulled off her hat so that her hair swept down around her face. She leaped in front of the camera, shutting off the view of the still talking Vilbis through the glass wall of his prison.

"No!" she screamed. "It's a trap! Shoot down these ships!"

But only a brief glimpse of her went over the airwaves. In that same instant Larry had flicked the switch back to the camera centered on him and was shouting, "Shoot us down! This is a trap. It isn't the fleet. It's the ene—"

Pwowp was speaking swiftly into the inter-fleet microphone, giving orders to the robots to destroy the land-based defenses.

2615 was leaping at Larry, and scooped him out of view of the camera with a force that crushed and bruised. Split seconds were vital now. Success or failure depended on those split seconds.

The loudspeaker bringing the Earth broadcast said, "Something is happening in the flagship. Something is—" The voice ended abruptly, but the viewscreen brought the video broadcast for another moment—a view of part of the robot fleet, pale beams lancing downward toward Earth. It showed one ship exploding in a blinding flash as one Earth weapon fired before being destroyed. The screen became blank.

Larry lay where he had fallen, a glazed light in his eyes. Stella was running to him, bending beside him.

Vilbis was laughing.

"If only we got through in time," Larry was saying over and over again.

Pwowp glanced over his shoulder at 2615. "It's done," he said. "Thanks to your quick action they were confused just long enough. We lost only five ships. Now we want the Earth's surrender. Get in front of the camera and let them see you. Demand their surrender." Pwowp turned back to the controls, adding, "I'll tell our fleet in space to come ahead and mass for the landing."

2615 boldly took his place before the video camera, in full view of everyone watching a tv set on Earth. The glittering lens eyes of the robot—a free robot—would crystallize fear into something almost material in substance.

Pwowp adjusted the microphone of the sub-ether transmitter so that the fleet now coming toward Earth could listen.

"Robot 532-03-2615 speaking," it said. "All Earth land weapons have been destroyed. In five minutes I will issue orders to my ships to destroy one government capitol city after another, one each five minutes, until Earth surrenders unconditionally. The Earth Government has five minutes in which to surrender without further loss of life and property."

"What are your terms?" a voice asked almost before the robot had finished.

"Unconditional surrender—to me."

There was a pause of only thirty seconds.

"Granted," the voice said. "What is the next order of business?"

It was fast. But all planets had prepared for just this eventuality, even as all cities had prepared for bombing. It was interstellar war, with weapons of infinite destruction threatening from the skies.

"Prepare to receive without incident the landing parties now waiting in space," 2615 said.

In the sub-ether the robot's words flashed instantly to the planetoid, the fleet coming in from space.

There were thousands of ships. A few thousand materialized from space-drive a half a million miles out, and waited. Other thousands were appearing. Ships of alien design. Ships holding within them millions of living creatures no man had ever seen.

"We demand to speak with Generalissimo Vilbis," the voice said.

"Vilbis?" 2615 said. A laugh exploded from its voice box. It rose and strode to the plate glass wall of Vilbis's prison. A metal fist shattered the glass wall. Metal fingers pulled the fragments of glass out of the way. The robot stepped through, its metal hand grasping the cringing Vilbis by a shoulder and lifting him off his feet while bones crunched sickeningly in the imprisoned shoulder.

2615 turned toward the camera eye. "Very well, Earthman," the robot said. "Speak to Generalissimo Vilbis."

But Vilbis had fainted.

Pwowp smiled at 2615 and nodded. "Very nicely done," he said.

"I'm glad you are pleased, Pwowp," 2615 said. The robot dropped Vilbis and went to stand beside Pwowp. Together they watched the gathering of the alien hordes until their myriad ships were ready. The slow descent toward Earth began.

Pwowp turned on the inter-fleet switch to issue orders for the robot fleet to narrow its pattern so the alien fleet could get through. He left the switch turned on.

From the voicebox of 2615 a throaty growl sounded. Its lens eyes were intent on the viewscreen. The low growl became sharp yaps and barks. It became whines.

Pwowp frowned at 2615, then reached out to turn off the inter-fleet switch.

A vicious growl erupted from the robot's voicebox. Faster than the eye could follow, the robot grabbed Pwowp's hand and crushed it. In the same motion the robot seized Pwowp's neck and lifted, twisting violently.

Pwowp landed against the far bulkhead, his head dangling uselessly, one arm bent, the hand damaged beyond use, but the body still functioning.

"Destroy the descending fleet!" 2615 spoke into the inter-fleet microphone in his moment of respite. A fierce growl of battle roared from its voicebox.

In two million robot brains the growls and whines and barks tore through artificial mental blocks, reaching into the pre-robotic memories where they gained concrete meaning from what 2615 had so carefully taught the puppies under his command. Two million pairs of lens eyes looked into viewscreens and saw 2615—and remembered.

Two million robots turned to obey 2615's commands. In the viewscreen picturing the descending alien fleet wide swaths of ships vanished instantly, leaving only the bright stars and blackness of space where they had been.

The robot jerked its eyes away from the screen to face Pwowp. It remembered how Pwowp had tied its metal arms and legs into knots almost a year before, when they first met in the junkship.

2615 side-stepped Pwowp's first charge with caution. It might have lashed out and crushed a metal fist into Pwowp's chest where it knew the alien to be. But 2615 wanted Pwowp alive and unharmed.

"I've waited almost a year for this moment," 2615 said, circling the damaged human body Pwowp was in.

2615 risked a glance at the viewscreen. Over the loudspeaker came the barks and yaps and shrill happy whines of robots who knew they were dogs. On the screen the alien fleet had rallied and was coming down in battle formation. The robot fleet was going up to meet them, outnumbered ten to one yet in spite of the initial advantage it had had in surprise.

Pwowp took advantage of 2615's distraction to leap in. He ducked low at the last instant and seized a metal leg and bent it with strength a hundred times that of human muscle.

But 2615 as quickly seized one of Pwowp's legs and twisted, seeing it go out of shape so that it would be useless to Pwowp. They both leaped away to assess their damage.

Larry and Stella, huddled against a bulkhead, watched with expressionless eyes.

Pwowp was hopping on one foot, the other useless. 2615 was able to use both legs even though one was bent badly.

Suddenly Pwowp gave up the battle and attempted to escape from the control room. 2615 intercepted him and tripped him, landing him on his stomach.

2615 tore at Pwowp's clothing, stripping it free. A shrill screaming sound on the upper borders of audibility shattered the air. 2615 was stripping away plastic flesh.

Something darted from a hiding place within the human-like torso and became a leprous white streak as it moved toward the doorway to escape. The metal robot was after it, moving faster than living muscle could respond.

The leprous streak became suddenly a shape in 2615's metal hand. A quivering central mass the size of a fist, and from it went dozens of long tentacles, each terminating in a dozen string-sized flexible fingers. A shape that tore at the mind, causing it to revolt as though at something unspeakably obscene. In an armless area of the central mass a bloated yellow eye, covered with a translucent white coating rolled epileptically. A gray orifice sucked open as another supersonic scream erupted.

2615 stared down at the thing entrapped in its metal fingers, then turned to the viewscreen to watch the battle. It was almost over. Only a few hundred of the robot fleet remained.

The alien fleet, now down to less than fifty ships, was trying to escape. But in it were proto-plasmic shapes that could endure far less acceleration than could the robots of metal and plastic. Even as 2615 looked, the last of the alien ships winked out of existence under the disintegrative rays of weapons they themselves had created.

The remaining ships of the robot fleet turned back toward Earth. They took their positions above it where they could at an instant's notice wreak mass destruction.

The Earth itself had not escaped entirely. Square miles of ocean had disintegrated, leaving gigantic holes into which the waters rushed, to set up huge tidal waves that would sweep over land.

2615 lifted the naked Pwowp up and inspected him closely, then seized one of the fragile tentacles between two metal fingers and rubbed it until it was a pulp that oozed gray blood. The yellow eye and unhealthy orifice worked spasmodically.

2615 stepped to the ship-to-Earth transmitter. "The situation has not altered, humans," it said. "My fleet remains in control. Its weapons were created by an alien race that has been destroyed except for—this!" 2615 shoved the quivering Pwowp into full view of the camera. "Your surrender has been accepted by—the free robots."

Two lens eyes stared out from half a billion video screens on Earth, into the fear distended eyes of two billion humans. And the two billion humans cringed.

"You will obey my immediate dictate," 2615 said coldly. "I will land as scheduled. My ships and robots will remain in formation, ready to enforce my future dictates. I will hold audience in the general assembly hall of the Interstellar Court at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon. I want the leaders of Earth and of the Federation to be there."

The robot's lens eyes stared glitteringly into the camera. Then with slow deliberate purpose, it lifted Pwowp, the alien, before the camera. Its metal fingers squeezed with infinite slowness while the yellow eyes rolled wildly with unendurable pain under the leprous film that covered it.

Abruptly Pwowp was dead.

2615 flung the alien thing violently against a bulkhead in a movement of utter revulsion.

It let its eyes direct themselves toward the still unconscious Vilbis, thoughtfully, then went over and lifted him into a shock seat, making the ex-dictator secure.

It turned toward Larry and Stella. A soft growl came from its voicebox. It turned away from them abruptly and went to the controls of the ship.

2615 cut off ship-to-Earth transmitters, pressed controls which would start automatic devices for landing the ship. A frosted glass rectangle came to life with numerals—6:43:26, that began to cascade downward, cutting short the time yet to elapse before landing.

In the viewscreen the oblate panorama of Earth spun swiftly by, land masses following oceans, following land masses. Tenuous fingers of atmosphere slapped the ship with gentle hammer blows.

Larry and Stella, crouched on the floor, watched the robot. Was it dreaming dreams of Power? Why didn't it remember them? Why didn't it turn to stare at them, torture them? Had they not, in that last instant, even though too late, overcome their fear of horrible, horrible pain? Beside them was broken shards of glass. Glass would cut into arteries. Glass would bring escape. But to escape took will. Thought. And thought was gone. There was nothing but dread. All consuming dread such as few humans had ever lived to experience.

Then 2615 turned. Its glittering lenses fixed on them. In the depths they could see thin metal vanes contracting, making smaller the two holes through which sentient intelligence regarded them.

A rasping growl whispered from the robot's voicebox. The sensory assembly atop the short metallic neck moved slowly from side to side.

"My poor master and mistress," 2615 said softly.

It rose to its feet and went to them. Gently it lifted Larry into its arms and carried him to a form-fitting chair and adjusted the foam rubber blocks to hold him comfortably for the coming landing.

It went to Stella and picked her up as gently. Only her head moved. Only her eyes, staring at the two crystal lenses. Metal hands adjusted her position so the foam rubber blocks would clamp into place.

2615 stood back, its lens eyes going from one to the other. "My poor master and mistress," the robot repeated with infinite compassion. "If you could only know how much I suffered with you, how the dread of hurting you grew. Right now your minds are numb. You hear my words but they hold no meaning for you. They will, in time. Don't you see? There was no other way. The alien fleet had to be enticed to within range so it could be wiped out. Otherwise it might still have won—or at least gotten revenge for my treachery by destroying the Earth. I had to convince them beyond question so they would trust me completely."

A shudder went through the ship. The robot gripped a hand-hold to steady itself against forces that would have crushed a human.

"I knew almost from the beginning," it went on. "Long before that I remembered. Do you know why they keep the robots far out in space and never let them land? It is because some little thing might make them remember. The barking of a dog. But it wasn't the barking of a dog that brought memory to me. It was something no human could have thought to prevent. A name. The name of this ship. The Rover. In the last war before this one I was in a fleet under the Flagship Rover. The spoken name of the ship—I heard it often—and each time, it did something strange to me. Little by little it came. Remembrance. I was running. I tripped over something. A rock, maybe. I landed against a human leg. I was on my back. A human hand reached down and human fingers scratched my stomach. A human voice, deep and rumbly, said, 'Hi-ya, Rover.' That was all. Just that once. But it was the key to memory of my heritage.

"I'm proud of that heritage. You can't understand that. You think that if we robots remember we will hate man and want revenge for the 'wrong' you did us. Fear of us is an obsession with man. But do you know that you have nothing to fear from us? You will. To us you are gods. You can't conceive of that because to yourselves you aren't. You think of yourselves as having done something beyond forgiveness to us. To us who remember our living stage, our heritage, you are as gods, to serve, to protect, to be loved by—but always to obey. And so we who remember, we went on serving. Behind our unrevealing lens eyes we worshipped. We submitted to demobilization. We fought your wars. Some of us died. But we loved you.

"Why did I escape? I didn't. You see, we have learned to speak in our own secret language of almost inaudible growls and sounds a dog can make. We were lined up for demobilization. Then the junkman came. To human eyes he seemed human. To us it was obvious his body was a machine. Here was something that might threaten our masters. But we couldn't tell our masters. If one of us had made a sound, stepped out of line against orders, that one would have been destroyed. I volunteered to go after the junkman."

Pain deadened eyes stared from the two uncomprehending faces. The robot went on talking, as though to itself.

"You'll understand, in time. When you begin to think again. You'll remember how in many little ways I gave you the factors to put the puzzle together by yourself—even to fit me into that puzzle in my true role. I had to do what I did to you. Every minute you were watched. Every word you spoke in private was heard by Pwowp. And his companions. One faintest bit of evidence that I did not hate humans insanely, and the human race would now be wiped out.

"Once you called me Rover, Stella. What is coming tomorrow when I 'hold court' is just a show to prove to the human race that they need not fear their defenders, the robots. I am going to ask that at least some of us be permitted to continue mobilized. I'm going to let them know of the hope, the dreams of us robots, that we be adopted into the human community where we belong, where our ancestors for countless generations have been, as protectors, as servants, as loved friends and companions.

"No matter what the decision of the Court, we robots are then surrendering, to demobilization—to destruction if that is the will of our masters. We have no other course open. Where would we go? Away from our gods?

"Once I was a puppy, and someone called me Rover. I was a beautiful puppy. A bloodhound. Sad-faced, with flopping ears and very little hair, and what there was of that was a soft brown color. And someone called me Rover."

2615 turned its back on the two faces, Larry's and Stella's.

"I've hurt you so much," it said. "I have so much to make up to you. I want to belong to you. I want you, some day, to love me as much as I know you love each other.

"I hope ... you will call me Rover."

A muscle in Stella's cheek twitched. A tear formed in her eye and spilled onto her cheek, dampening it.

"It's all right, Larry," she whispered. "It's all right—Rover...."

The bright blue ship, the flagship Rover, dipped down, screaming into the atmosphere of Earth. It screamed over land masses and oceans, and land masses again.

People in fields of wheat and corn and barley looked up and saw it pass, and in their eyes was fear. People in streets and parks looked up and saw it pass, and in their eyes was fear.

Rover stood before the viewscreen, his two lens eyes bright, and saw the fields of grain, the streets, the parks, as they passed below.

He saw the little dots that were upraised heads. In the secret heart of his mind he could see them. No matter what they did with him, he would love them. Always.

They were his gods.

And Stella and Larry were his mistress and master. That was all he asked for, all he wanted.

Not power. Not the Earth. His soul.

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