IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT Read online

  I had never been to the ruins before, but I knew that the building would remain safe for as long as our luck held. In the ruins, as elsewhere, men and women preferred a few, well-beaten trails. Nine-tenths of the buildings remained unoccupied simply because they were too bleak and forbidding to appeal to the human herd instinct for proximity in danger.

  I turned, and spoke to Agnes. “We’ll never find a safer building that this. We were lucky to have found it so soon.”

  I tightened my hold on Claire’s hand, and we passed into a dark interior; we climbed a flight of narrow stairs to a double row of rooms which ran along both sides of a dismal, refuse-littered corridor.

  With the two women at my side I went into one of the rooms and shut the door.

  It was huge and completely furnished, with cracked walls and a high, sagging ceiling festooned with cobwebs. Through the two dust-smudged windows we could see a patch of sunset sky.

  There was an empty crate standing in one corner, still bearing a faded label: California Figs.

  Claire sat down on it and looked at me. “Is this our new home?”

  It was the most intelligent question she had ever asked.

  I took her hand and pressed it gently. “Yes, Claire.”

  “She’s taking too much for granted,” Agnes said. “But we should be here long enough to get acquainted and reach a real understanding. There are a good many things I’d like to ask Claire.”

  She turned to me with a mocking look in her eyes again. “You won’t mind, will you, if I share this room with Claire? You can sleep in one of the rooms across the corridor.”

  The request took me by complete surprise. It was a direct frontal attack which I hadn’t anticipated — more against Claire than against me.

  I was tempted to put up a furious argument, then thought better of it.

  Sleep across the corridor! In the ruins, that sort of thing was ridiculous on the face of it. If a woman couldn’t trust a man that far, under circumstances so desperate, her presence in the ruins at all was a mockery and a sham.

  But what could I say? How could I tell her that Claire needed looking after? Could I say: I don’t want you to give Claire any ideas she can’t assimilate without advice from me! I don’t want you to confuse and frighten Claire with jealous woman talk. She’s just a sweet, innocent child, and if you’re going to start being callously inquisitive and prying you may inflict a grievous mental wound on her.

  How could I tell Agnes that? If I encouraged her to start think­ing of Claire as a rival, how could I know where it would end? How much would she find out about Claire if I left them alone together? Could she be trusted to look after Claire? The thought that the night might end in a violent quarrel, with Claire distraught and abandoned, was appalling to me.

  But I decided that I’d be risking too much to make an issue of it then and there.

  Could she be trusted not to harm Claire in any way? I decided to take the risk. I’d go across the corridor and leave the door of my room ajar. I was a light sleeper, and if anyone came into the building during the night I’d surely know, and wake up in time.

  It was better than risking a jealousy flare-up immediately. I needed sleep if only as a safety precaution, to keep my nerves alert.

  *****

  I pressed Claire’s hand again, looking defiantly at Agnes.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Claire,” I promised. “I’ll be very near you. Do you understand? Agnes will see that no harm comes to you.”

  I whispered it, so that Agnes wouldn’t hear. Then I turned back to Agnes. “There are a good many things I’d like to discuss with you,” I said. “But they can wait until morning.”

  She smiled, and put both her hands on my shoulder. Before I could stop her she kissed me, so hard her teeth bruised my lips.

  She stood back abruptly, triumphant mockery in her eyes. “Good night, John,” she whispered.

  Claire was staring at us both, her face strangely flushed. For the first time a curious, pained look had come into her eyes.

  I went up to her again, and patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t be disturbed, Claire. That was just Agnes’s way of say­ing ‘Good night!’ ”

  I turned then, and walked out of the room, Agnes’s lips still burning mine. She had deliberately hurt Claire, derided me, and I hated myself for allowing it to pass.

  The room across the corridor was as big, empty and dismal as the room I had left. It contained a broken-down chair, a small table, and a chest of drawers dark with mildew. The windows were shut tight; and the ventilation was so bad that it hardly seemed a fit habitation for rats which I could hear scurrying through the walls.

  I tried to open one of the windows, and gave it up as a bad job. I was too tired to care. I lay down on the floor, and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  How long I slept I had no way of knowing. A vision of Venus Base was before me. I had my arm about the slim waist of a girl, and she was pressing close to me, and I could hear her excited breathing.

  “Look down there, John,” she whispered. “Kiss me first — then look.”

  A vision of Venus Base, and a woman’s lips on mine. “Look down there, John. The men have courage, I’ll grant you that; and the women are very beautiful. But they are traitors to society, and must be punished.”

  I saw her arm go out, white and slim. She was pointing downward, but I had eyes only for the whiteness of her flesh. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, and I was angry because she kept insisting that I concern myself with other matters.

  “John, look down,” she pleaded. “There are at least five thousand conspirators. Each must be identified and brought to justice. Tell me. Do you recognize any of the men below? Any of the women?”

  I lowered my eyes at last to her bidding. Eight or ten couples were threading a narrow bridge at the base of a cliff. The men wore Venus Base uniforms; the women were slender and very beautiful, with gleaming white shoulders and lustrous dark hair whipped by the wind.

  They were heading for a rock cavern on the far side of the lake, and one man and a girl had run on ahead and were almost at the entrance.

  Close to my ear a soft voice was whispering. “They are defying society, John, setting up a new society of their own where men will be free to choose their own mates in completely primitive fashion. Surely there is no greater crime against future generations!” The voice grew tender and cajoling. “We must fight them, John — you and I together. It was arranged that we should meet in the Computation Vault, and you have been watched ever since.

  “Listen carefully, John. You were denied the right to marry so that you might become desperate enough to help Society fight this conspiracy. The raid on the illusion therapy shop was arranged so that you would bring Claire here and I could talk to you as I am doing now. There is a thought bond between us, John. It is a gentle thing and not compulsive. But you must hear me out, and I have come to you between sleeping and waking, and brought your mind close to mine so that there will be no barriers of mistrust between us.”

  I groaned and turned on my side, fighting the voice as a be­guiling false thing that made no sense. But it did not pause. “You are under the hypnosis of love, John. Your need for me will make you forget Claire. When I kissed you just now I knew, I could tell. You will be permitted to marry, but I will be the woman you select. We will go to Venus Base together and fight this conspiracy. We will fight it with the aid of your extrasensory faculties. Society needs telepaths desperately.”

  I could feel her hands on my face, and the yielding pressure of her body against mine became startlingly real again.

  Quite suddenly I was fully awake. The feeling of trancelike unreality and the agonizing helplessness was gone and I could see her face distinctly. I could remember kissing her in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. I could recall every word she had said to me.

  She had asked me to kiss her and my only thought had been to tell h
er how beautiful she was and to lift her up and carry her to a secret place and unfasten her dress and make violent love to her as her breasts slipped free.

  But she had refused to let me do that. She had held out a promise of complete fulfillment, but first I must promise to do something which was unthinkable, which did violence to everything I believed in. She had asked me to help Society expose and destroy a conspiracy I knew very little about. I only knew I was in complete sympathy with the men and women I had seen in the pass. I would have gladly joined them and fought to the death to defend that kind of revolt, if what she had told me about it was true.

  What did it mean? Had she attempted to implant in my mind a post-hypnotic suggestion which I would be powerless to resist on awakening? Can a man be made to fight for what he hates, to defend a way of life that has become intolerable to him? Perhaps … if the rewards for an integrity-destroying betrayal are great enough. But I did not think I was that kind of man.

  There was something else she did not know about me. To a telepath, a post-hypnotic suggestion has no meaning. Words whispered to him when he is in a trancelike state will be recalled when he awakes, with complete accuracy by his conscious mind.

  That was just one of many things she did not know about me. But what did I know about her? Perhaps she had lied to me deliberately to test me, to find out just how deep-seated my rebellious impulses were. If I seemed to waver, to give even the slightest heed to a plea that should have made me turn upon her in rage, she would know that I was not what I pretended to be.

  In the vault she had shared my anger, had spoken out fearlessly, had not attempted to hide how she felt about a computation that denied her the right to marry. What if every word she had just whispered to me had been a lie and she was wholly in sympathy with the rebels in the pass? What if she were not just a fighter in the ranks, but a key figure in the revolt, an organizer? It was a possibility that could not be dismissed out of hand.

  There was a startled look in her eyes, as if she had not expected me to wake up so soon. It vanished in an instant but the look that replaced it was just as much of a giveaway. I could see that she was disappointed. Frustrated and angry as well, although she did her best to hide it when she saw I was staring at her so intently I could hardly have failed to suspect what was passing through her mind.

  She was wearing a sleeping garment which she must have put on under her dress before coming to the ruins, for she had carried no garment-bag with her. It was jet black, completely opaque, and even more abbreviated than the dress she’d taken off. It would have given her an almost death-harlequin look if her warmth and beauty had not completely dispelled such an illusion.

  I wasn’t sure what excuse she’d give for going to sleep in another room and waking up right beside me. I only knew that it would have to be a good one, for she would be forced to do a lot of explaining. Why had she abandoned a girl as young and fearful as Claire on her first night in the ruins, after promising me that she would look after her? And how could she explain away what she’d whispered to me in my sleep if I let her know, by word or look, that I remembered every word of that conversation?

  I decided not to make it too difficult for her, to pretend that I remembered nothing and was just as surprised as she to find ourselves side by side on a floor thick with dust and cobwebs, with rats scurrying back and forth through the walls and the rafters overhead.

  I pretended that I was still a little drowsy, and covered up for the steady way I’d been staring at her by pretending to blink sleep from my eyelids and muttering an apology.

  “I thought for a moment you were Claire. That sleeping garment —”

  She cut me off abruptly, her voice tremulous with anger.

  “She wears sleeping garments like this, does she? I was pretty sure you were lying to me about her. There’s very little that girl doesn’t know — about men and sleeping garments. I’m sure of that. I’m convinced she’s considerably older than she looks — perhaps twenty-three or four.”

  “You’ve talked to her about it, I suppose? And just why did you leave her? You should never have done that. She’s just a frightened child. Why did you come here, when you know how terrified she’ll be if she wakes up and finds herself completely alone?”

  “She isn’t alone,” she said. “She’s with another man.”

  She had gotten to her feet and was nodding toward the door.

  I stared at her in stunned horror. For an instant it was too monstrous to grasp. It slipped away from me, went shrieking away into a nightmare world where cruel shapes with iron talons glared down at me out of a yawning gulf filled with nothing but darkness. She made no attempt to spare me.

  “He was coming up the stairs, creeping up like a thief in the night when I went out into the hall to find out where the sound that had awakened me was coming from. I don’t think he saw me, because there was only a faint glimmer of light and I flattened myself against the wall. He went right past me into the room, and shut the door. That was ten minutes ago. If she hadn’t found him acceptable she’d have screamed by now.

  “Oh, he could have clamped his hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out, I suppose,” she went on quickly. “But no matter how brutal the men who come here are, there is usually enough decency left in them to give a woman a chance to accept their lovemaking without resorting to violence. They seldom meet with resistance from the kind of women who come here, and vanity enters into it —”

  In a nightmare when taloned shapes pluck and tear at your vitals the torment is often delayed, put off until you wake up scream­ing.

  But I woke up quickly enough. I gripped her by the shoulders, swung her about and slapped her across the face, hard. I don’t know why I didn’t kill her. There is a rage you can’t control, that backlashes in your brain like a whipcord — in so terrible, lacerating a way that the pain alone makes you want to kill.

  “Why did you leave her?” I demanded, shaking her, coming close to slapping her again. “He couldn’t have prevented both of you from screaming. You could have fought him off until I got to you.”

  She didn’t seem to care about the slap. Her voice rose in sud­den, desperate appeal. “John, listen to me. That girl is a freedom-ruin strumpet to her fingertips. It’s written all over her. I know the type. Hard, calculating, not really needing a man the way most of the girls who come here do. It’s an easy way of not working at all, if you’re coarse-fibered enough. Women of that type even like brutality, seek it out. She gave herself away, because a woman like that knows that when she goes about with a wide-eyed, helpless look she’ll appeal to the kind of man who is brutally sadistic. John, no woman could be that innocent. Surely you must realize it’s nothing but a pretense to cover up what she really is.”

  I didn’t let her go. Whatever she may have thought about brutality, I gave her another sampling of it. It wasn’t sadistic by any yardstick. It was just something she’d brought upon herself by what she’d let happen to Claire. I gripped her by the shoulders and sent her spinning back against the wall.

  It threw her off-balance and forced her to sit down on the floor. The rage I’d felt was gone now. She no longer mattered to me, one way or the other. She’d jumped to a conclusion about Claire that was wholly cruel and unjustified, and had deserved the slap. But the only reason I’d sent her reeling back against the wall was to make it plain to her that I wouldn’t tolerate her getting in my way when I crossed the hallway to the other room.

  CHAPTER 8

  I knew it might be too late. What chance would Claire have of defending herself against a man who didn’t even suspect that she was a child-woman who had never been made love to in an abrupt, brutally demanding way? How could she know what would happen to her if, in her innocence, she was more bewildered than angered and made him think that she would accept him as a lover if he abandoned all restraint?

  The instant he turned brutal, if he thought she was the kind of woman Agnes had been talking about. But I had no intention of condon
ing him even that much. If he’d harmed her in any way he wasn’t just going to end up dead. Unless he killed me first there’d be an ugly mess for the next tenant to clean up. A man with a bashed-in skull —

  I was just starting to cross the hall when the door opposite was flung open and he came out of the room with Claire in his arms. She was beating with her fists on his chest and her eyes were wild with fright. But he had clamped one hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out.

  He didn’t stop when he saw me, just increased the length of his stride and was a third of the way down the stairs before I could reach the top, the blind rage making me stagger. I moved just as fast as he had, but I had six feet of hallway to cross, and lost a second or two getting a firm grip on the stair rail.

  I had to do that to size him up physically. When you hurl yourself at a giant with the sole purpose of crippling and killing him it’s vital to know just how big he is and if there’s a look of flabbiness about him.

  If he looks flabby you hit him first in the stomach, putting all of your strength into the blow to jolt the breath out of him. Then you really set to work on him, pounding away at his kidneys and fielding right hooks to his jaw until he topples.

  The trouble was … he didn’t look flabby. He had the firmly knit build of a very large man who keeps himself in trim by exercise and doesn’t allow any excess weight to widen his waistline and make him short-winded.

  I’d caught only a brief glimpse of his face. But it didn’t seem like a face that would change its expression and take on a scared look if the first few rounds of a fight went against him. He wasn’t quite as ugly looking as the muscular six-footer who had come at me with a knife the night before, but only because his features weren’t battered out of shape and defaced still further by a scar two inches in length. All in all, he was ugly looking enough.

  But I didn’t let his ugliness or the way he was built interfere with what I was going to do to him — unless he had a knife and managed to stop me by burying it up to the hilt in my chest before I could reach out and grab him.