“No, you must take it pretty seriously,” his grandfather agreed sarcastically. “Asking a hundred thousand to help you run off and—and become a citizen of the galaxy or rescue a fair maiden from a man-eating tree or something equally absurd. But you can’t expect anyone else to take it seriously.”
“Well, hell, make it fifty thousand, enough for a one-way trip instead of a round one! Or—no, forget I asked for anything! I still have practically all my carnival allowance, and there must be a cheaper way of getting off Earth than shipping in a luxury liner!” Horn started for the door.
“Dad,” said his father, plucking at the old man’s sleeve. “Dad, I think he really means it.”
“Yes, of course he does. Right this minute he means every word of it. But you know the next we’ll hear of him if he does walk out, don’t you? There’ll be a signal from some benighted mudball out in the wide black yonder saying to send him his fare and he’ll come home and be a good little boy again!”
“Come home? To what? A life as rigidly programmed as one of your robots’—only they’re lucky. They aren’t designed with the capacity to resent it.” Horn had to clench his fists to stop his hands from trembling.
A dangerous glint showed in his grandfather’s eyes; he had never allowed anyone to voice criticism of his robots within the four walls of his home. Still he remained relatively calm, and spoke in a reasonable tone.
“Now, boy, think it through again, just to please me. I can well understand how the idea of all this romantic knight-errantry must appeal to you, but do look at it in perspective. Remember you were told all this by an android—weren’t you? And it’s notorious that when they’re under exceptional strain androids sometimes come up with the wildest notions, isn’t it?”
“I’m beginning to wonder whether androids aren’t better off than I am! At least when they’re trained they’re given a useful job of work to do, and that’s more than I can ever look forward to if I stay here!”
There was an awful icy silence, during which Horn knew sickly that he had overstepped the limits of his grandfather’s already tenuous patience. It was like waiting for the skies to fall.
“Very well,” the old man said at last. “Very well. If that’s how you feel about the advantages I’ve provided for you, I guess you had better leave Earth. And the sooner the better. Rowl! Have a heli brought out and program it for Faraway Field! Since you think androids do more useful work than I or your father, you young devil, I’m going to let you do an android’s work for a while! There’s a ship loading a consignment of robots on the field this minute—it’s from Newholme and its crew don’t observe carnival. I was intending to ship an android as supercargo. I’ll send you instead. Don’t interrupt!” he thundered at his son, who was feebly protesting. “If you’d raised the kid better it would never have come to this! He’s going to have to learn the hard way what decent folk think of fools who prefer androids to their own kith and kin!”
So angry he could barely speak, he pointed a quivering arm towards the door.
“Out!” he said thickly. “And stay out!”
CHAPTER IX
“HERE’S WHERE the supercargo bunks,” said Dize, the brawny first mate of the interstellar freighter. He pointed through a door so narrow it was barely more than a hatchway. “Stow your duffle and get back to number one hold to check the cargo manifest. You got twenty-five minutes.”
Obediently, struggling with the one large bag his grandfather had permitted him to bring and finding it almost too large to squeeze through the opening, Horn complied. His face fell as he saw the cramped cabin he had been assigned.
“Don’t look so sour!” Dize grunted. “Android quarters—what do you expect? And you got more room than on some ships I could name. We’ve had ’em in there head and shoulders taller than you, and glad of so much space to stretch out in! Okay—number one hold in twenty-five minutes from now.”
His footsteps receded down the corridor. Horn dumped his bag on the bunk, sat down beside it and buried his face in his hands.
Well, that was that. For better or worse, he was on his own. At least he’d got what he’d asked for, and that was something of an achievement in itself. Few people could boast of having got something out of Grandfather Horn which he’d not at first been willing to concede. He clung to that slender consolation, lowered his hands and surveyed the cabin. It held the bunk he was sitting on—nearly as hard as the bench in Berl’s heli; a locker containing a standard android poncho of coarse burlap and a pair of issue sandals much too small for him; a washbowl with a pressure tap aimed squarely at the open drain. And nothing.
Realizing with a start that five of his precious minutes had been lost in mooning, he set about stowing his gear as best he could. The locker was full almost at once, and he had to leave the bulk of what he’d brought in the case, which he contrived to slide underneath the bunk. He was still wearing a gaudy carnival rig because he’d taken nothing else away from home with him; he stripped it off and changed into more practical garb.
Over the washbowl there were a few square inches of mirror. Catching sight of himself, he noted that he ought to have a shave; black stubble was disfiguring his cheeks and chin. But in his haste he had picked up a jar of depilatory with only a smear left at the bottom, instead of the full one next to it. Annoyed at his mistake, he took a second look at himself and wondered whether he might try letting his beard grow. Sure, why not? He tossed the jar into the disposal chute.
Abruptly he remembered that he still had to find his way to the hold where Dize was expecting him, and had no idea even which end of the ship it was. He scrambled out of the cabin, stared both ways along the corridor, and set off at random down a maze of passages in which he shortly became hopelessly lost. It was more by luck than judgment that he ultimately reached the right place and found Dize fuming with impatience.
“Where the hell have you been, Horn? I can see this trip’s going to be a rough one! Shipping with a human supercargo—whoever heard of anything so stupid? Androids at least do as they’re told!”
Cheeks burning, Horn accepted the cargo manifest Dize thrust at him and began laboriously to check it.
Crate after crate of robots, lying passive in their plastic coffins, awaiting their personal dawn on Newholme. Incomprehensible identity codes which he had to ask to have explained to him; even when he’d got the hang of the markings he had trouble, because some of the crates had been stowed upside-down to make the most of the hold-space, and he had to clamber and crane and peer down gaps to find their codes. At the end he seemed to have several crates left over. With wordless contempt Dize showed where he had turned over two pages of the manifest at once.
“All right,” he said at long last. “Back to quarters with you. Chow’s in a quarter-hour, and we lift two hours after that Don’t know what we’re doing about feeding you—guess we can’t fill you up with android staple, seeing you’re human. Anyway, I suppose you ought to show at the mess, be introduced to Captain Larrow. Think you can find your way?”
But when Horn diffidently slid back the door of the mess to discover Larrow already at table, he was met with a frosty glare and a bellow.
“Are you Horn? Well then, what in hell are you doing here?”
“I told him to come, captain,” Dize said from the opposite end of the dining-table.
“Then you damned well shouldn’t have. Old man Horn gave strict explicit orders that the boy was to be treated exactly like the regular kind of supercargo. In my book that means he eats android food—and I’ve half a mind to have him put on an android poncho, too, but I guess that rig he’s in will be a bit more practical.” He was a red-faced man with bristling eyebrows like a battery of miniature guns, and they waggled up and down as he spoke, raking Horn from head to foot. “Mr. Arglewain!”
“Sir?”—from another crewman sitting next to Dize.
“Go and issue him a measure of android staple. And get this, Horn! Mr. Arglewain’s the steward. You’re to report
to him five minutes before every chow-time from now on and collect your rations, understood? If you’re not prompt you don’t eat. You probably won’t care for the staple after your fancy diet on Earth, but it’s what you’ll be getting so you’d best learn to appreciate it. I’ve lived on it for days together myself, and it never did me any harm.”
The android staple was a mushy grey-green goo—some kind of algae emulsified and fortified, Horn guessed. Experimentally, although he was not in fact hungry, he choked a little of it down in the seclusion of his cabin. It came right back up again twenty minutes after the ship had lifted.
“You’ll get over it,” said Dize unsympathetically when he looked in an hour or so later. “In fact, you’ll damned well have to get over it, and inside eight hours, at that. A supercargo is kept pretty busy aboard a tub like this. Well, catch some sleep if you can, and I’ll rout you out at the beginning of your watch.”
He turned to leave. Horn called feebly after him. “Say—just a moment, Mr. Dize!”
“What is it?”
“You’re from Newholme, aren’t you?”
“Of course. This is a Newholmer ship you’re flying with.”
“What’s it like on Newholme? I mean, what’s it really like? What makes it a different kind of place to live from Earth?” Horn was struggling to sit up, his face almost the color of the undigested android staple he had thrown up.
“That’s kind of a funny question,” Dize said slowly. “Don’t they teach galactography in Earthside schools?”
Horn made a vague gesture. “That’s not what I want to know, the kind of thing they teach in schools. You can’t find out about what interests me—whatever it is that marks off the people of one world from those of another. I don’t mean the clothes they wear or the food they like to eat. I don’t mean anything you can make lists or take solidos of. That’s why I told my grandfather I wanted to get off Earth, because I suddenly needed to know things which no one could tell me back there.”
“Is that the truth you’re telling me—that you wanted to come off Earth? It wasn’t just what I heard talk of, a row with your grandfather?” Dize cocked his head suspiciously.
“My asking for the money to leave Earth with was what started the row.”
“Ah-hah,” Dize nodded. “I get. Might have guessed, come to that. I never met your grandfather, but we specialize in shipping his robots out for him, and I always pictured him as the kind of guy who thinks Earth is the whole of the universe.”
“I promise you I’m not,” Horn said weakly.
“All right, I believe you. But you look pretty sick right now. You stretch out and catch some sleep like I told you. Later on you’ll have all the time in the galaxy to answer that question of yours.”
After that, things weren’t nearly as bad as he’d expected; Dize’s affectation of gruffness gradually gave way to a sort of rough, rather patronizing, friendliness, and the process accelerated as he discovered that Horn was genuinely anxious not to be a nuisance and to do his best. Every now and then a trace of weary contempt for soft-handed Earthmen who were used to having everything done for them by machinery did still climax in a bout of vivid cursing, but this was invariably followed by a quick, economical and easily understood lesson in whatever technique Horn was finding troublesome, so that there was never a second recurrence of the same problem.
“Well, I can say this for you, Horn,” he admitted grudgingly three days out from Earth. “You’re not stupid. Just ignorant is all. And I guess you can’t help that, can you?”
Horn felt himself flushing. Under Dize’s guidance he was carrying out a check of the hull plates to make sure they were screening free-space radiation properly; heavy cosmics could play merry hell with the delicate electronic balance in a robot brain. He said, “Well—ah—this sort of job doesn’t turn up too much on Earth these days.”
“You mean you’d turn the whole thing over to automatics and just monitor them from a central instrument board?” Dize suggested.
“Yes, I guess that’s what I’d have expected,” Horn nodded.
“It’s exactly what they do do aboard Earth’s luxury liners. And we could certainly do the same—after all, we build our own ships, and automatic radiation detectors are kid stuff compared to interstellar engines. But I wouldn’t like it. And there’s the start of an answer to that question you put to me just after we lifted.”
Horn looked briefly blank, then caught himself. “Oh! I was asking how Newholmers differed from—from Earth-siders, wasn’t I?”
“Right.” Dize perched on a handy crate and began to stuff a large foul-smelling pipe with some herbal mixture whose scent Horn had at first found pungent and irritating, but was growing adjusted to. “Why wouldn’t we like it? Well, what would we do with our time during the trip?”
Horn recalled Dordy’s sour remark about sitting in an android barracks and reading the classics of literature. He nodded slowly.
“It’s different aboard a liner,” Dize said. “You can rely on any given bunch of passengers to keep the crew continually on the hop between takeoff and touchdown. A cargo of unactivated robots you’d just sit and stare at. You’d get bored. You’d get irritable. Me especially—I was born with a quick temper, as you’ve probably noticed.”
Horn gave a wry grin.
“And what would you be doing right now? I mean if I wasn’t chasing you to do hull-checks and air-monitoring and the rest of it? You’d be sitting on your backside in your cabin wondering if you’d been a complete idiot and what your chances were of signaling your grandfather to have the ship turned around and take you home. True?”
“You’re damned right,” Horn said. “It certainly stops me brooding.”
“So there you are.” Dize checked his watch. “Ah, almost chow-time. You can break off now.”
And, ten minutes later, he reappeared at the door of Horn’s cabin to find him spooning the drab staple into his mouth. “Come on!” he said, beckoning, and hurried him down the corridor to the mess. Astonished, Horn hesitated in the entrance as Larrow looked up frostily.
But his next response was to gesture at an unoccupied place between Dize’s and Arglewain’s. “Join us, Mr. Horn,” he invited. “Mr. Dize tells me he thinks you would be an asset to our company.”
Three days further out they took the Big Step around the intervening light-years—the step which, for some reason no one understood, one ship in a million flights never completed—and began their braking run into the Newholme system. But Horn’s own personal Big Step had already taken place.
When they had put down and cleared their holds, and he had had his first glmpse of another world (a disappointing one, for spaceports on every planet were much the same), he went back to his cabin and gathered his belongings prior to signing off the complement. Dize found him there testing a comb on the beard he had sprouted during the twelve days in space, which was already nearly long enough to look neat.
“Got something for you, Horn,” he said. “Here!”
He held out a small envelope which Horn, puzzled, took and opened. Inside was a wad of what he instantly recognized as currency notes, though the design and color were unfamiliar and the bold lettering on each bill identified the issuing authority as the Planetary Republic of Newholme.
‘What’s this for?” he demanded.
“It’s the going rate for the number of hours’ work you put in,” Dize grunted, seeming oddly embarrassed. “You see, we thought we ought to draw the line somewhere—about treating you like an android—and since your grandfather sort of kicked you off Earth without the polite goodbyes, well …”
“Oh, I’m not broke!” Horn exclaimed. “I still have the allowance he gave me for carnival week, and I guess Earthside currency can be changed easily enough.”
He made to give it back, but Dize waved it aside, sitting down on the bunk and lighting his pipe again.
“No, you earned it—you keep it. Larrow’s a martinet, but he’s dogmatic about his men having wh
at they deserve. And—ah—speaking for myself, at least, any time you decide you want to work your passage back home, you just hang around this port until we show up, and you’ll have got yourself the job you need.”
Feeling absurdly flattered, Horn shrugged and slipped the Newholme money into his billfold. “By the way,” he said, “I just realized! I never asked what you ship the other way—to Earth. You don’t go back empty, presumably.”
“No, of course not. We carry androids.”
“What!” Horn was so startled he dropped his comb into the washbowl. “In the same holds as the robots?”
“Sure. Except the one we pick for supercargo. He gets to use this cabin. We fix up sort of collapsible bunks instead of the crate-racks, and they make out pretty well.”
Horn stared at him for a long moment, then gave a forced laugh. “Remind me not to take up your offer of a working trip home, then,” he said. “Crated robots sound a lot easier to handle.”
“Oh, androids aren’t troublesome. Can’t be! They’re conditioned out of it.” Dize sucked on his pipe and emitted dense clouds of aromatic smoke.
Horn pondered for a while. “Hmmm! I guess you can fit a good few androids into those holds of yours, then. Funny! I always had this impression that most of the androids on Earth were made right there.”
“Well, probably a good few of them are, but not by any means all. We ship eight hundred at a time, every thirty days or so. They don’t come from Newholme, of course—they just transship ’em here. They’re made further out. Lygos way, I believe, or Creew ’n Dith.”
So the cachet of owning Rowl, an imported android, was all illusory! Horn almost laughed, then realized that perhaps thirty years ago this hadn’t been the case. After all, it would make sense in view of the extremely high cost of employing trained Earthside technicians to set up android factories on less expensive planets. The raw materials could be had cheaply on any Earth-like world.
There was a pause. Dize broke the silence with a cough. “Well, if you’re planning to stay on Newholme for a while, I guess it’s up to us to show you around. Like to ride into town with me and let me acquaint you with a few people?”