There was no way out. He was licked—and he knew it. He couldn’t keep it from her. Desperately he stalled, praying for time. If he could only distract her, get her mind on something else. If she would only let up, even for a second. He could invent something—a better story. Time—he needed more time. “Ruth, you’ve got to—”
Suddenly there was a sound: the bark of a dog, echoing through the dark house.
Ruth let go, cocking her head alertly. “That was Dobbie. I think somebody’s coming.”
The doorbell rang.
“You stay here. I’ll be right back.” Ruth ran out of the room, to the front door. “Darn it.” She pulled the front door open.
“Good evening!” The young man stepped quickly inside, loaded down with objects, grinning broadly at Ruth. “I’m from the Sweep-Rite Vacuum Cleaner Company.”
Ruth scowled impatiently. “Really, we’re about to sit down at the table.”
“Oh, this will only take a moment.” The young man set down the vacuum cleaner and its attachments with a metallic crash. Rapidly, he unrolled a long illustrated banner, showing the vacuum cleaner in action. “Now, if you’ll just hold this while I plug in the cleaner—”
He bustled happily about, unplugging the TV set, plugging in the cleaner, pushing the chairs out of his way.
“I’ll show you the drape scraper first.” He attached a hose and nozzle to the big gleaming tank. “Now, if you’ll just sit down I’ll demonstrate each of these easy-to-use attachments.” His happy voice rose over the roar of the cleaner. “You’ll notice—”
* * * *
Ed Fletcher sat down on the bed. He groped in his pocket until he found his cigarettes. Shakily he lit one and leaned back against the wall, weak with relief.
He gazed up, a look of gratitude on his face. “Thanks,” he said softly. “I think we’ll make it—after all. Thanks a lot.”
ROBOTS DON’T CRY, by Mike Resnick
They call us graverobbers, but we’re not.
What we do is plunder the past and offer it to the present. We hit old worlds, deserted worlds, worlds that nobody wants any longer, and we pick up anything we think we can sell to the vast collectibles market. You want a 700-year-old timepiece? A thousand-year old bed? An actual printed book? Just put in your order, and sooner or later we’ll fill it.
Every now and then we strike it rich. Usually we make a profit. Once in a while we just break even. There’s only been one world where we actually lost money; I still remember it—Greenwillow. Except that it wasn’t green, and there wasn’t a willow on the whole damned planet.
There was a robot, though. We found him, me and the Baroni, in a barn, half-hidden under a pile of ancient computer parts and self-feeders for mutated cattle. We were picking through the stuff, wondering if there was any market for it, tossing most of it aside, when the sun peeked in through the doorway and glinted off a prismatic eye.
“Hey, take a look at what we’ve got here,” I said. “Give me a hand digging it out.”
The junk had been stored a few feet above where he’d been standing and the rack broke, practically burying him. One of his legs was bent at an impossible angle, and his expressionless face was covered with cobwebs. The Baroni lumbered over—when you’ve got three legs you don’t glide gracefully—and studied the robot.
“Interesting,” he said. He never used whole sentences when he could annoy me with a single word that could mean almost anything.
“He should pay our expenses, once we fix him up and get him running,” I said.
“A human configuration,” noted the Baroni.
“Yeah, we still made ’em in our own image until a couple of hundred years ago.”
“Impractical.”
“Spare me your practicalities,” I said. “Let’s dig him out.”
“Why bother?”
Trust a Baroni to miss the obvious. “Because he’s got a memory cube,” I answered. “Who the hell knows what he’s seen? Maybe we’ll find out what happened here.”
“Greenwillow has been abandoned since long before you were born and I was hatched,” replied the Baroni, finally stringing some words together. “Who cares what happened?”
“I know it makes your head hurt, but try to use your brain,” I said, grunting as I pulled at the robot’s arm. It came off in my hands. “Maybe whoever he worked for hid some valuables.” I dropped the arm onto the floor. “Maybe he knows where. We don’t just have to sell junk, you know; there’s a market for the good stuff too.”
The Baroni shrugged and began helping me uncover the robot. “I hear a lot of ifs and maybes,” he muttered.
“Fine,” I said. “Just sit on what passes for your ass, and I’ll do it myself.”
“And let you keep what we find without sharing it?” he demanded, suddenly throwing himself into the task of moving the awkward feeders. After a moment he stopped and studied one. “Big cows,” he noted.
“Maybe ten or twelve feet at the shoulder, judging from the size of the stalls and the height of the feeders,” I agreed. “But there weren’t enough to fill the barn. Some of those stalls were never used.”
Finally we got the robot uncovered, and I checked the code on the back of his neck.
“How about that?” I said. “The son of a bitch must be 500 years old. That makes him an antique by anyone’s definition. I wonder what we can get for him?”
The Baroni peered at the code. “What does AB stand for?”
“Aldebaran. Alabama. Abrams’ Planet. Or maybe just the model number. Who the hell knows? We’ll get him running and maybe he can tell us.” I tried to set him on his feet. No luck. “Give me a hand.”
“To the ship?” asked the Baroni, using sentence fragments again as he helped me stand the robot upright.
“No,” I said. “We don’t need a sterile environment to work on a robot. Let’s just get him out in the sunlight, away from all this junk, and then we’ll have a couple of mechs check him over.”
We half-carried and half-dragged him to the crumbling concrete pad beyond the barn, then laid him down while I tightened the muscles in my neck, activating the embedded micro-chip, and directed the signal by pointing to the ship, which was about half a mile away.
“This is me,” I said as the chip carried my voice back to the ship’s computer. “Wake up Mechs 3 and 7, feed them everything you’ve got on robots going back a millennium, give them repair kits and anything else they’ll need to fix a broken robot of indeterminate age, and then home in on my signal and send them to me.”
“Why those two?” asked the Baroni.
Sometimes I wondered why I partnered with anyone that dumb. Then I remembered the way he could sniff out anything with a computer chip or cube, no matter how well it was hidden, so I decided to give him a civil answer. He didn’t get that many from me; I hoped he appreciated it.
“Three’s got those extendable eyestalks, and it can do microsurgery, so I figure it can deal with any faulty micro-circuits. As for Seven, it’s strong as an ox. It can position the robot, hold him aloft, move him any way that Three directs it to. They’re both going to show up filled to the brim with everything the ship’s data bank has on robots, so if he’s salvageable, they’ll find a way to salvage him.”
I waited to see if he had any more stupid questions. Sure enough, he had.
“Why would anyone come here?”