With a mechanical shudder he turned from the girl and clanked away. With each step his steel fingers plucked at clothes and plastic flesh until they came away in shards and pieces. Fragments of cloth marked his trail away from the woman and within a hundred paces he was as steel naked as the day he was built. Through the garden and down to the street he went, the thoughts in his head going in ever tighter circles.
It was uncontrolled feedback and soon his body followed his brain. His legs went faster, his motors whirled more rapidly, and the central lubrication pump in his thorax churned like a mad thing.
Then, with a single metallic screech, he raised both arms and plunged forward. His head hit a corner of a stair and the granite point thrust into the thin casing. Metal ground to metal and all the complex circuits that made up his head were instantly discharged.
Robot Filer 13B-445-K was quite dead.
That was what the report read, that the mechanic sent in the fol-lowingjday. Not dead, but permanently impaired and to be disposed of. Yet, strangely enough, that wasn't what this same man said when he examined the metallic corpse.
A second mechanic had helped in the examination. It was he who had spun off the bolts and pulled out the damaged lubrication pump.
''Here's the trouble," he had announced. "Malfunction in the pump. Piston broke, jammed the pump, the knees locked from lack of oil — then the robot fell and shorted out its brains."
The first mechanic wiped grease off his hands and examined the faulty pump. Then looked from it to the gaping hole in the chest.
"You could almost say he died of a broken heart."
They both laughed and he threw the pump into the corner with all the other cracked, dirty, broken and discarded machinery.
I am a robot. When I say that, I say everything. And I say nothing. For they built me well on Earth, silver wired, chromed steel, machine turned. They turned out a machine, I, machine, without a soul, of course, which is why I am nothing. I am a machine and I have my duties and my duty is to take care of these three men. Who are now dead.
Just because they are dead does not mean that I can now shirk my duty, no indeed. I am a very high-class and expensive machine, so I may consider the absurdity of what I do even as I do it. But I do it. Like a switched-on lathe I keep turning whether there is metal in the chuck or no, or a turned-on printing press inking and slamming shut my jaws, knowing not nor caring neither whether there is paper there before me.
I am a robot. Cunningly crafted, turned out uniquely, one of a kind, equipped and dispatched on this, the very first starship, to tend it and care for the heroes of mankind. This is their trip and their glory, and I am, as the human expression goes, just along for the ride. A metal servitor serving and continuing to serve. Although. They. Are. Dead.
I will now tell myself once more what happened. Men are not designed to live in the no-space between the stars. Robots are.
Now I will set the table. I set the table. The first one to look out through the thick glass at the nothing that fills the no-space was Hardesty. I set his place at the table. He looked out, then went to his room and killed himself. I found him too late dead with all of the blood from his large body run out through his severed wrists and onto the cabin floor.
Now I knock on Hardesty's door and open it. He lies on his bunk and does not move. He is very pale. I close his door and go to the table and turn his plate over. He will not be eating this meal.
There are two more places to be set at the table, and as my metal fingers clatter against the plates I, through a very obvious process of association, think of the advantages of having metal fingers. Larson had human fingers of flesh, and he locked them onto Neal's throat after he had looked at no-space, and he kept them there, very securely clamped they must have been, remaining so even after Neal had slipped a dinner knife, this knife in fact, between Larson's fourth and fifth ribs on the left-hand side. Neal never did see no-space, not that that rr^ade any difference. He did not move even after I removed, one by one, the fingers of Larson from his throat. He is in his cabin now and "dinner is ready, sir.” I say, knocking, but there is no answer. I open the door and Neal is on the bunk with his eyes closed so I close the door. My electronic olfactory organs have told me that there is something very strong in the cabin.
One. Turn Neal's plate facedown in its place.
Two. Knock on Larson's cabin door.
Three. . Four. .
Five. Turn Larson's plate facedown in its place. I now clear off the table and I think about it. The ship functions and it has looked at no-space. I function and I have looked at no-space. The men do not function and they have looked at no-space.
