IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT Read online

  The man on the screen seemed carried away for an instant by an impulse to turn the screen into a confessional and bare all of his wounds to the public gaze, by disclosing every closely guarded secret that had tormented him across the years. He quite obviously had what the ancient Freudians would have called a Casanova complex. For when a man is willing to confess that he had often met with defeat in his lovemaking, he is hoping to convince everyone that his victories have been so numerous that he can afford to be completely honest in that respect.

  For an instant I felt a twinge of pity for him, for there is a little of that egotistical absurdity in all of us.

  He saved himself by what was clearly an effort of will that he found difficult to maintain, for he had to lower his eyes for an instant to pretend to himself that there were no spectators watching him and a confession would have been wasted on long rows of empty stone seats. A shudder passed over him and the half-smile vanished from his lips.

  When he spoke again he was once more in command of himself and talked as a rule-upholder should, in a precise, matter-of-fact tone.

  “When you enter the contest you’ll have enough freedom of movement if you just strip off your outer garments. Some riders may prefer to strip to the skin and the rules permit it. But it is the opposite of wise. An inner garment protects you when a glancing blow might otherwise lacerate the skin over a wide area. It’s just as well to take every reasonable precaution.”

  I wondered why he cared until I remembered what I’d said on the bus in reply to the Big Brain when I’d seemed to hear the humming computers mocking me. Something had prevented the passengers from hurling a fatally wounded man from the bus to die alone and in torment on the pavement. They had insisted on mak­ing sure that he was dead first.

  The man on the screen was not wholly without pity. It had dwindled to a single glowing ember, perhaps, but it was still there.

  “Don’t keep too close to the edge of the track,” he went on in the same matter-of-fact voice. “If two riders come abreast of you at the same time, raise your voice in protest, and wave toward the tiers. They will be forced to abandon their cycles and will be subject to the death penalty.

  “Remember that your prime objective is to mesh the wheels of your opponent’s cycle with your lance. He has the right to try to unseat you by striking you on the body — but not on the head — with the flat of his lance, below the spiked tip. He must not deliberately aim the lance at your head, throat, chest or any part that could fatally injure you. And when your own wheels are meshed you must observe the same rules of combat.

  “But if you should be unseated, if your cycle is overturning, you may deal blows of a more dangerous nature. This is your right as a last-resort defensive measure. You may even hurl the metal ball. But even in so desperate an extremity you must not aim at the head or try to kill him. The justification for such a rule of combat may seem strange to you. But it is not without a basis in logic.

  “The risk of receiving a mortal injury at your opponent’s hands must be present. That risk alone makes the contest what it is. Without the constant risk, the certain knowledge that you may be killed at any time by a blow aimed too high or too low — not deliberately, but with miscalculation — there would be no glory in victory. A contest such as this must test a man’s courage and steadiness of nerve to the utmost or it becomes a hollow mockery.”

  “But what if they’re not killed, just seriously injured,” a voice said, so close to me that I thought for a moment it was Claire who had spoken. Then I realized that no woman could have had a voice so deep and resonant, even if she had been a virago. It was a man’s voice, with nothing womanly about it.

  Before I could turn and look at the speaker he went on quickly: “What fools they are. What incredibly blind fools. A crippling injury is a high price to pay for a moment of punch-drunk recklessness. If you have to drag yourself back to the tiers with a fractured spine you’ll no longer be thinking what a privilege it is to have your pick of a dozen or more women. There are injuries that can make a man wish that he had been killed. He said nothing about what happens when a cycle’s wheels are meshed and the rider is hurled to the track, or back against the walls of the stadium.”

  I turned then and looked at him. He was big, with the boyish look about him that often goes with a bear-like massiveness in a man even when he’s over forty. He had deep-set blue eyes and tousled light hair that straggled down over the right side of his face as if he’d been facing a windstorm and hadn’t had time to brush it back with his hand.

  He brushed it back abruptly, and I saw that he had a very high brow.

  “You’re new to the ruins, aren’t you?” he asked. “Is this the first race you’ve let them sell you on?”

  I stared at him, hoping he wouldn’t suspect how much the question had startled and alarmed me. What had made him so sure I was new to the ruins?

  “What makes you think I haven’t been here a month — or two or three years, for that matter?” I demanded.

  He grinned then, just as abruptly as he’d brushed back his hair and I saw that he was looking at Claire.

  “All that time — with a woman like that? And no one killed you and made off with her?”

  “How do you know I didn’t take her away from another man an hour ago?” I countered, my temper rising. “Two can play at that game. You can fight for and claim a woman again four times a week. And you don’t always end up dead.”

  I hated myself for being forced to answer him in that way, because I didn’t want to think of Claire as a woman I’d just fought for and could lose again, even if it wasn’t true. I had fought for her against the man who had tried to take her from me, even if it hadn’t been with a knife. But it went against the grain just to lie about any part of it, because I couldn’t endure picturing myself taking Claire away from a man who had been her lover before me. Fitting her into that kind of mind picture was hateful to me. In a way, it was an insult to Claire.

  But I was just angry enough to want to hurl the statement he’d made back into his teeth, to prove to him how wrong he could be, and how stupid it was to jump to a conclusion about me with so little to base it on. And it was important to find out, too, if he was lying and really did have something more solid to base the conclusion on.

  There was no way I could find out, for he dropped the argument I’d started as if it had suddenly ceased to interest him, and apologized in the friendliest imaginable way.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I like to think I’m pretty good at character analysis. Most people have some one thing that’s a little special or different about them, and you can usually tell a great deal about them just by observing them closely. But not always. It’s a kind of game with me. But it’s quite unlike the game that is being played down there.”

  “There are no other games like that one,” I said. “In the ruins or on Venus Base — or anywhere.”

  He looked at me steadily for a moment. “Have you been to Venus Base?” he asked.

  I saw no particular reason for keeping it a secret. If he was good at character analysis he probably knew anyway, for you can’t disguise the way Venus Base construction workers pronounce certain words. There’s a slight accent change, and the words have a distinctly different ring to them, as if the wind and sun and the rain had made the speaker want to sing or waltz about and shout at the top of his lungs. It’s a change you adopt unconsciously when you’ve been on Venus Base for as long as two years.

  “I wish I were there now,” I said. “If you’ve never been to Venus Base you don’t know the meaning of freedom. There is no real freedom in the ruins. A man is not free when Death is pacing him at twenty feet or breathing down his neck, and he must kill to stay alive.”

  I’d picked a strange time to speak my mind that openly to a total stranger, when men were dying right before our eyes, and the tier arched above us was a swaying sea of spectators with sharks weav­ing in and out in the shallows. But somehow he no longer seemed a tota
l stranger. I had suddenly found myself liking him.

  It was a strange time to bare my inmost thoughts to anyone. But if I’d picked a different time I wouldn’t have been thinking of Death with quite such an intensity of loathing and staring straight down at the tracks, and I would have failed to see them before it was too late. Not just two or three Security Police officers, but thirty!

  They were advancing along the high stone wall at the base of the stadium a few yards from where the tracks ended, and two of them were already climbing the stairs which ascended to the lower tier.

  The pair on the stairs saw me before I could turn and move further back into the crowd. I was sure of it from the way they stiffened and their hands darted to the gleaming metal holsters at their hips.

  My first thought was of Claire and whether she’d realize how fast we’d have to move to lose ourselves in the crowd before they got to us. Just the fact that they’d recognized me so quickly convinced me we’d have to move very fast, because they would feel outrageously cheated if they were unable to clinch that advantage like hunting dogs within sight of a quarry they’d spent hours in tracking down.

  I’d forgotten all about the big man at my side I’d suddenly found myself liking. But he hadn’t forgotten me.

  His hand shot out and fastened on my wrist. “We’d better drop the play acting,” he said. “I know who you are and why the Security Police are after you. I’m telling you that because you’re going to have to trust me.”

  He must have known what two such jolts in the space of half a minute could do to a man who had to think fast and clearly, because he went right on talking with a blockbuster kind of urgency. “They’ll blast you apart if you don’t get moving. Head for the stairs on your left, and descend to the track. There are ten discarded cycles down there now, and that’s close enough to the number you’re supposed to see lying overturned before you start down.”

  His fingers bit into my wrist. “If you just cross the tracks and leap on a cycle as if you had every right to enter the race they’ll be afraid of angering the spectators by blasting you down. If you wait for the rush to start you won’t have a chance. But if you head the rush your boldness in taking such a risk will encourage the others to follow your lead. I’m absolutely sure they’d never open fire on that many participants, when there are ten cycles lying overturned. But you’ll have to be the first to put it to the test.”

  He was blueprinting it for me, all right — even if he didn’t fully realize just what a setback the Security Police would get if I mounted a discarded cycle and stayed on it until the end of the third race. I was sure for a moment my thoughts had gone racing on ahead of him by that much at least. But it was just a mistaken idea I had.

  “If you can unseat ten or twelve riders and stay in the race you’ll be lifted up when you get back to the tiers and carried on the shoulders of the spectators all the way to the top of the stadium. It happens about fifteen times in every race, and if the Security Police tried to break in on that kind of celebration and take you out of the stadium under guard they’d be massacred to a man. They’re risking their lives just by coming here.”

  If I’d been alone on the tier what he was urging me to do would have made sense. But with Claire to consider there was a fatal flaw in it. The Security Police wanted both of us, and entering the race without knowing whether she’d manage to disappear in the crowd would have been just another way of dying.

  He had a solution for that too. “She’ll be safe enough, I promise you. I told you I know who you are. It shouldn’t take a telepath to find out just how much trust he can place in a promise.”

  I turned and looked steadily into his eyes. There was a moment of torturing uncertainty when I felt I couldn’t be sure, and then — I was sure. Completely, with every doubt swept away.

  The promise he’d given me he’d keep — unless the odds against him became overwhelming and he could save neither Claire nor himself. For some reason I could not fathom he felt honor-bound to help me, even at the risk of his life. But I still might have hesitated if he hadn’t said, “You spent last night in the ruins, on the second floor of a four-story building. There was another woman with you. Her name is Agnes. She has a tiny transmitting instrument concealed in her clothing. The message wasn’t intended for us, but we intercepted it. Can you find your way back to that building?”

  There were a dozen Security Police officers on the stairs now and the first two had reached the tier and were elbowing their way toward us, slowed down a little by the shouting spectators at the top of the stairs.

  “I can find it,” I said, knowing I’d just have to keep in mind how closely it had resembled a funeral vault when I’d left it.

  “All right, that’s where you’ll find us,” he said. “Now get going!”

  I drew Claire close and whispered, “We’ll be together again soon. I want you to trust this man and do exactly as he says. Do you understand? You must trust him.”

  “I will … trust this man,” she said.

  I turned then and headed for the stairs on my left, not daring to look back, fearing that just the thought of parting with her would become unendurable and I’d jeopardize the only chance we had of staying alive and going to Venus Base together.

  He’d guessed right about everything. I had to resort to some close to brutal elbowing to get to the stairs on my left and five enraged spectators awaiting their turn in line made a grab for me. But I fought my way past them and was halfway down the stairs before the Security Officers on the other stairway saw me.

  I had a bad moment as one of them leveled his handgun and then seemed to change his mind about blasting. He would have been asking for trouble if he’d opened fire on me across sixty feet of intervening space, and blasted down three or four spectators. Just getting me would have put him in about as much jeopardy, because of the way it would have looked from the tiers.

  A moment later I was at the foot of the stairway and the armed upholder of the rules standing there could have shot me down without running the slightest risk of killing a spectator. I was within ten feet of him. But there was a shouting right behind me. His eyes were on the stairs and he must have realized that the rush had started. He was so torn by indecision that he couldn’t move at all.

  Then I was past him and heading straight out across the tracks toward the nearest discarded cycle, stripping off my outer garments as I ran.

  CHAPTER 14

  The cycle was lying at the edge of the track fifteen or twenty yards from the high stone wall of the stadium. The Security Police officers might still have been thinking of throwing caution to the winds and blasting me down before I could start pedaling. But it was a possibility I refused to let unnerve me.

  I covered the distance fast, running in a steady natural way without straining to increase my speed.

  I reached the cycle before I came to the only discarded metal ball that was not chained to a dismounted rider’s wrist. I grasped the cycle by its handlebars and raised it from the track, and the instant it was vertical I ran on with it, letting the wheels spin without attempting to mount. When I came to the metal ball I swooped, attached the dangling chain to my wrist and headed for the nearest discarded lance.

  I was fully armed when I mounted and rested my feet on the pedals, casting a swift glance behind me. A spectator who had been the first to follow me out across the tracks was not in undisputed possession of another cycle which had been lying a little beyond the one I had headed for. But it had taken him longer to arm himself and mount, and the cycle he was on was now the nearest one to the tiers and about forty feet behind me.

  The spectator-turned-contestant was lean and muscular, with unusually long legs and a rugged, craggy-featured face. He ap­peared to be about thirty years of age.

  I did not like the way his muscles rippled and the firm set of his jaw. There was no particular reason for the sudden mistrust I experienced when my eyes swept over him — only a vague premonition that I was looking at a for
midable adversary who would come after me fast and give — and expect — no quarter.

  I did not wait for him to start pedaling. I swung out into the middle of the track and entered the race as a fully armed and forewarned contestant, keeping firmly in mind the rules which the man on the screen had stressed.

  The cycle was easy to manage — a remarkable vehicle which seemed almost to propel itself. The slightest touch on the steering apparatus was sufficient to keep it on a circular course around the track, which was several hundred feet in circumference.

  The chain on my left wrist in no way interfered with my riding and permitted me to move my steering arm freely. It was an ex­tremely light chain, but undoubtedly it possessed sufficient tensile strength to make the metal ball the deadliest kind of weapon. The ball itself, which was far heavier, rested by my side on the seat. In my other hand I held the spiked lance, half-poised and in instant readiness.

  I tried not to worry too much, to put out of my mind the thought of a pursuit and engagement which was certain to be quickly forthcoming. I resisted an impulse to look back and concentrated on the pedaling, casting only the briefest of glances at the riders immediately ahead of me.

  I knew that with luck I might outdistance Long Legs until he himself was overtaken by another rider and his vehicle overturned before he could come abreast of me. I had seen that happen. In fact, one of the contestants had been in the race from the beginning and had been a steady, continuous victor whom no one could unseat.

  That solitary, victorious rider had been overtaken eight or ten times, but each time he had put on a superb performance, meshing the wheels of the pursuing vehicles with an agile twisting of his lance. Twice he had hurled the metal ball just as his own cycle was overturning and managed to bring the vehicle swiftly back into equilibrium again.