“They got a package out of a locker after that and took it back to the ship. Slezak put it inside somewhere.”

  “There!” Janet said triumphantly.

  Larry looked up in innocence. “There—what?”

  “They put something in the ship.”

  “So? They’re going with us, aren’t they? Maybe it was an extra pair of socks or something.”

  All Janet could do was look exasperated, and say, “Well, I don’t trust them.”

  “You’re too suspicious,” he said casually and went back to his work.

  After a while it was time for bed, and Larry approached me and reached toward my control box to shut me off.

  Janet said, “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  She was very cross. She said, “How would you like to have somebody turn a switch inside you and knock you out every night?”

  “I knock myself out when I go to sleep.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Janet! You talk like Barney was a person or something. He’s only a robot. And it’s economical to turn robots off when they’re not in use. His batteries won’t drain so fast.”

  “Well, if they drain we’ll fill them up again. It—it seems cruel somehow.”

  Larry shrugged, knowing that the mood Janet was in, he could never win the argument. He went into another room to bed and Janet began making hers on the lounge. Then she went into the bathroom and I was alone.

  She was wrong, of course, and Larry was right. Robots aren’t humans and should be turned off at night. I didn’t react negatively to Larry for being sensible. He was a person to have confidence in.

  But somehow, I had strong, positive reactions to Janet for being impractical and having her own idea of how to treat a robot.

  When she came back and turned out the light and got into bed, she said, “Barney, what do you think of Larch and Slezak?”

  Of course there was only one answer I could give her. “I do not have enough data to form an opinion.”

  “Nobody seems to be on my side,” she said. “Maybe Larry was right. Maybe you ought to be turned off.”

  “Yes.”

  But she didn’t do it. She went to sleep instead …

  That gave me time to think, because of course a robot never sleeps, and there in the quiet, with no noises except Granddad’s snoring pounding on my diaphragms, a little piece of information came out.

  I knew where I was. In the St. Louis Complex, a very big city with three levels on most of its area. Knowing that, it wasn’t hard to figure the location of the Ravencrafts’ converted theater-home. It was in the poorer section of town, where no improvements had been made. Cities do not sit still. I heard a human say that once, and I think it is true. A city travels as it grows, and the St. Louis Complex had moved in the other direction.

  Another thing I was now sure of. The trouble with my memory bank wasn’t accidental. Somebody had done it on purpose. There could be only one reason. That somebody had wanted to block out a memory. It followed also that they weren’t experts, because they’d done a bad job. If they had been experts, I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong—or cared… .

  5.

  Long Hop

  The big space liners travel pretty fast these days and they’re getting faster all the time. But with a wallowing old ore tub like the Gallant Lady, it was a little different. Her speed was limited.

  Even though we were on an inner planet hop, Earth to Mars, there would be a lot of time to kill enroute. Something like two months.

  The supplies were taken aboard, and there was no hitch in the clearance, so we jetted off on schedule after the Space Authority men gave our safety system a final check.

  That was very important. The automatic pilot took care of the jet-off, the course, and the setting-down operation, but there is a lot more to a safe hop than that.

  The safety complex of any certified spacer consists of nine different pieces of equipment, all integrated to a hair’s breadth, each piece doing its job and watching all the other units to see to it that they do theirs. The safety complex of a spaceship is about the smartest robot in existence. Of course, it doesn’t have arms and legs and can’t move around, but in the patterned job it’s built to do, it can beat me, and I am a very advanced robot.

  The safety complex does two basic things. It sees to it that people can go in and out of space safely, and it makes it possible for people who don’t know anything about spaceships to own them and run up and down the spaceways as though they were all experts.

  The Space Authority Safety Patrol is a part of the safety complex on every ship, because they are the ones who will come and get you if your safety governor decides there is nothing left to do but turn your ship off completely and put it into drift. That is when the patrol answers your signal and comes after you. But that very seldom happens.

  So we had two months to spend while the Gallant Lady waddled grimly along toward Mars.

  Granddad helped Larry and Janet spend some of it. He set up regular dramatic classes, where they memorized lines and acted out scenes from Shakespeare. This was boring to them, and they didn’t like it, but I enjoyed watching them.

  One of Granddad’s favorites was from Julius Caesar—Act Five, Scene Five—Antony’s speech saying how great he thought Brutus was after Brutus killed himself. Granddad made Larry do it, over and over again.

  Janet would sit and listen with a look of great admiration on her face. She would sit facing Larry with her back to Granddad, who couldn’t hear what she was saying. But I could hear her whisper, and so could Larry. Once when I was watching, it went like this: Larry: “ ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’ ” Janet, whispering: “You’re sure about that?”

  Larry: “ ‘All the conspirators save only he,/Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;/He, only in a general honest thought/And common good to all, made one of them.’ ”

  Janet: “Sounds pretty fishy to me. Maybe Big Chief Antony speak with forked tongue.”

  Larry: “Shut—up!!His life was gentle’—”

  Janet: “Your ears wiggle when you talk.”

  Then Granddad got suspicious. “Janet, are you whispering?”

  She turned her big innocent eyes on him and said, “Why, Granddad. Why would I do that? You know I’m one of Larry’s greatest admirers.”

  Janet was a pretty good actress herself. When she did the scene from Macbeth when Lady Macbeth took the knives for her husband to put them back into Duncan’s room, she was as bloodthirsty as they come.

  I had many jobs on the Gallant Lady. I did the cooking, probably the toughest job of all, because Larch and Slezak were very particular about their food. Slezak liked special French dishes, and Larch always wanted the sort of food Mexicans eat.

  It was lucky that I knew a lot about cooking or I would not have been able to keep them happy.

  Besides that, I kept the ship clean and spent a lot of time entertaining Larch and Slezak, who got bored very easily.

  Slezak liked history, and he asked me, “Barney, have you got anything in your memory bank about Napoleon?”

  “Yes. I read several books about his wars.”

  “He was a great general.”

  “He won a lot of battles, but he lost the big ones.”

  “What about Alexander the Great?”

  “He was Alexander the Third. He was born in 356 and died in 3 2 3 B.C. He was the son of Philip the Second of Macedonia and was a very great leader of other men. After he conquered the world they say he cried because there was no one else to fight with, but that may not have been true.”

  Slezak would lie in his bunk while we talked, his eyes on the ceiling, but you could tell that his mind was never still.

  He said, “Barney, suppose Alexander the Great had had a ray gun? Just one ray gun?”

  “He wouldn’t have needed it. He got everything he wanted with knives and spears.”

  “You don’t get the point,” Slezak said irritably.

  “Rephrase.”

  Larch was easier to entertain. He complained a lot that the Gallant Lady was not equipped with television like the big passenger liners. There were plenty of books, but he was too lazy to read. He liked Western stories, and I’d read or heard some of them somewhere, and they were in my memory bank, so I would recite them to him.

  Usually, though, when I got to the parts where the hero asked the villain, “You didn’t think you’d get away with it, did you?”—the hero asks the villain that question sometime or other in practically every Western—Larch would be asleep.

  Granddad Ravencraft didn’t pay much attention to me. Not that he didn’t like me. He didn’t pay much attention to anybody. He was too wrapped up in the project, always planning and projecting and rehearsing.

  I liked being with Larry and Janet more than the others. Larry was interested in—as he put it—what made me tick. He was always looking inside of me and inspecting my joints and trying to figure out how I was put together.

  Janet was interested too, but not so much in my mechanical aspects. She asked me, “Barney, do you hurt?”

  “I cannot relate to the question in that form.”

  “I mean—well, like me—if I cut my finger or bang my knee, it hurts. What about you?”

  “It is hard to answer intelligently because I don’t know how human hurt feels. When my batteries run down, I get a feeling that is different, but I don’t know whether I hurt or not.”

  She was very impatient and once she said, “I think I’ll go mad if we don’t get there pretty soon.”

  “The time grows shorter.”

  She also had an imaginative side. “Barney, what if we would miss Mars? Then we would orbit out into space and go on and on. Our fuel would run out very soon and we would just drift forever. There is something very romantic about that.”

  I said, “We would not be in any trouble. We have enough fuel to take us to the far outer planets, so we wouldn’t be in any danger.”

  She frowned. “Why should we have that much fuel? How do you know?”

  “One of the ore bins was made over into a fuel tank—an extra one.”

  “You mean we have fuel that doesn’t appear on the loading manifest?”

  “I don’t know, but it is extra.”

  “Barney, none of those bins was changed earlier. I mean, could the tank have been installed during the last two days?”

  “It is possible.”

  “Let’s get Larry and then talk to Slezak. I want to find out about it.”

  I thought it was significant that she planned to go to Slezak rather than her grandfather. It was not that she would deliberately bypass the old gentleman. It only proved that she saw herself and Larry as being responsible for things.

  Slezak only shrugged and smiled. “I guess I forgot to mention that. But it seemed to me the extra fuel would be an added safety factor. You see, I don’t really know much about spaceships.”

  I thought Slezak knew a lot more about many things than he was telling us.

  But he did not act guilty or anything like that, and Janet and Larry had to be satisfied with his explanation.

  Larry wasn’t curious, but Janet asked me, “Barney, what do you really think of Slezak and Larch?”

  The extra fuel tank was additional data. I said, “I think they have something else in mind other than taking culture to the planets.”

  “There is an awful dot I’ve let slip by,” she said thoughtfully. “Like, for instance—you belong to them. You’re their robot. Tell me something about them.”

  “I do not think I am their robot. I belonged to someone else. A man named Professor Dixon, I think. But there is something wrong with my memory bank.”

  “You should have told us this before.”

  “You did not ask me.”

  Janet went and got Larry and told him what I’d said. “You’re such an expert on robots. Fix Barney’s memory bank and we’ll find out a few things.”

  Larry’s eyes lit up. “Why, certainly. It shouldn’t be very hard.”

  He got some tools and opened the panel on my chest and looked into my torso.

  “There it is. That grid with all the platinum-alloy filaments.”

  I said, “Be careful you don’t get a shock. My batteries are still on.”

  “We’ll leave them on. The tools are insulated.”

  “Don’t blow any of his fuses,” Janet said.

  Larry ignored this. He was frowning into me. “I think some of the filaments have been crossed. The pattern is irregular. I don’t think they should be that way.”

  “You don’t think?” Janet said. “With all your big talk about robots, you ought to know.”

  Larry replied coldly, “Common sense tells us a great deal.”

  “Well, fix him.”

  Larry changed one of the connections. I said, “Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.”

  Larry said, “Oops!” and made another change.

  “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927. Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii!”

  “You idiot!” Janet cried. “You’re messing him all up.”

  Larry looked confused. He moved another filament.

  “Sink the Bismarck!” I cried.

  “Barney! What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Larry was frightened now. “I need time. Turn him off. One of his circuits might blow out.”

  “A fine time to think of that,” Janet said.

  And that was the last I knew about for a while. When I was reactivated, everything was as it had been before Larry started repairing me. He was wiping perspiration from his face.

  “Well,” he told Janet. “That’s the way it was when I started.”

  “And we’ll leave it that way. How do you feel, Barney?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “But your memory isn’t any better?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any improvement.”

  “Well, thank goodness it’s only the inactive section that’s affected. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to remember what you did two minutes ago.”

  “There is one thing I remember.”

  Larry looked at me eagerly, hoping his efforts hadn’t been wasted. “What is it?”

  “About the Space Museum. I’ve known all along that Professor Dixon, who owned me, worked there. But now I know a robot was stolen.”

  “You mean you were stolen from the museum by Larch and Slezak?”

  “No. Not me. In one of the exhibits they had a killer robot. It was a reconstruction of a Venusian outpost, where the killer robots are made, and the museum had one that was captured by the Space Patrol.”

  “What about it?” Janet asked.

  “That’s all.”

  “You mean you don’t remember anything else? Just that a killer robot was stolen?”

  “I know Roger Gardner, the curator, offered a big reward. Then he went to Mars. The robot was never recovered.”

  Larry was disappointed. “Just a loose piece of information that got jolted out. I guess I don’t know as much about robots as I thought.”

  Janet said, “You do too. You know a lot, Larry.”

  Which is another odd thing about humans. Or at least about Larry and Janet. When he boasted about his knowledge, she laughed at him. But when he admitted a lack of it, she did exactly the opposite. It was difficult to understand.

  “Well,” Larry said, “what do we do now?”

  “I guess we’ll have to tell Granddad what we found out.”

  “About the fuel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure, we’ll have to tell him, but I wonder who stole the killer robot.”

  Janet frowned. “That isn’t important to us.”

  It had been important to the people at the museum, though. A killer robot in the hands of a criminal, or even running around loose, is a dangerous thing. One of the most important laws made by the Space Counsel is about killer robots. They are manufactured on Venus and are sold at high prices by criminals with antisocial plans and ambitions.

  Venus is the most lawless of all the planets. The government there is not coordinated. It is divided up among a lot of tribal chieftains. Some of them have joined the Space Counsel and are good citizens of the System. But others raid the space lanes and the asteroid belt when they think they can get away with it, and deal in illegal merchandise like dangerous drugs that are forbidden. Some of these chieftains have the equipment and the technicians to make killer robots and carry on a trade in them.

  These chieftains and their people are safe as long as they stay on Venus, because the Space Counsel has a law against invading a sovereign planet. A lot of humans think that law should be changed, and maybe someday it will be. What the counsel is afraid of is that some leader or chieftain with enough money might build an army of killer robots. With an army big enough and the ships to carry it, he could menace the System.

  Larry asked, “Did you ever see a killer robot, Barney?”

  “I saw one captured once in Colony City. It had been sent to assassinate an important man who was arriving on a spaceship.”

  “How could it do that? How could it get close enough without being identified as a killer robot?”

  “It was wearing a repair robot’s apron with tools in it and it carried a lot of cable to cover its arms.”

  “Did it kill the man?”

  “No. Some of the cable dropped off and a policeman saw what it really was.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They cleared the whole area of humans. The robot was made of impervium, and they didn’t have a cutter ray strong enough to melt it. They couldn’t short its electronic system with radio signals either. So they sent ten robots against it.”

  “Did that work?”

  “Yes, but eight of the robots were melted down by the killer’s cutter ray before they knocked it over on its back.”

  Janet had been looking at me thoughtfully. She said, “Barney, do you realize what you’re doing?”

  “Telling you about a killer robot.”

  “I mean, you have been remembering. Things are coming back.”