IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT

by Frank Belknap Long

  Instantly the burly cop stepped in front of us and barred our path. “Now you’re really in trouble. You’ve attacked an officer in the performance of his duty.”

  There was only one thing to do. I took a slow step backward and sent my right fist crashing against his jaw. I put all of my strength into the blow, counting on the advantage of surprise. I followed through with a hard left to the stomach, the kind of jab that had served me well on Venus Base on a good many occasions.

  He let out a yell, staggered back and collapsed against the wall, sinking to the floor with a grotesque swaying of his entire bulk.

  I gripped Claire’s wrist again. “Trust me and don’t look back,” I whispered urgently. “We’ve got to keep moving!”

  We were out of the shop before the big officer could flatten out on the floor. We ran swiftly across the pavement outside and climbed into my beetle. I ascended first and helped her straddle the safety rail and settle down at my side, keeping a tight hold on her arm.

  “You made him sit down!” she gasped.

  “For a minute,” I said. “He’ll be on his feet again before we’ve gone three miles. I took the bark out of him, but not the bite. When he gets up a general alarm will go out and we’ll be in the deadliest kind of danger.”

  “Danger?” she breathed. “We will be — in danger?”

  When you’re under great tension in the presence of a child and feel you must talk you’re likely to say what’s on your mind even if you know you can’t count on adult understanding. You’re really half talking to yourself and don’t expect an adult response.

  I didn’t get one, but what she had said surprised me, because it was a big leap forward. For the first time she hadn’t just parroted my words. She had spoken with a rising inflection, had asked me a direct question. For the first time there was strong emotion in her voice. It may or may not have been fear but I was pretty sure that the word “danger” had puzzled and alarmed her.

  Swiftly the beetle picked up speed, sweeping up the driveway with a dull roar.

  I looked at Claire, sitting straight and still at my side, and felt a fierce surge of exaltation. I’d broken the law for a beautiful woman for the first time in my life.

  We were getting acquainted fast.

  *****

  Perhaps it was the heady wine of an exhilaration that was completely new to me which made me reckless. At any rate, I said something to her I had wanted to say in the shop, in defiance of the man’s presence.

  “Claire,” I whispered.

  She looked at me as if startled. “Claire is my name.”

  “I know,” I said. “You just said you liked me. Could you say, ‘I love you’?”

  “I love you,” Claire said. Her voice was strangely toneless, automatic.

  “Say it again,” I urged.

  “I love you,” Claire said.

  There it was, but it just didn’t mean anything to her. I could tell by the way she said it.

  Would it mean anything later? Would she ever say, “John, my dearest one, I will love you until I die. Night and day you are never absent from my thought.”?

  Whether the miracle would ever take place, right at the moment I knew I’d have to think and move fast and put every other consideration aside.

  When a general alarm goes out every traffic tower becomes a scanning trap. With luck you can sometimes outwit a Security Police network, on the human level. The law isn’t infallible and never has been. But when invisible beams fasten on you and start working you over, the odds against you really start mounting.

  Put a frog in a glass of water — any ordinary bullfrog mottled green and brown — and it will start shedding skin cells at a prodigious rate. No two frogs are ever exactly alike, and a frog in a glass would have little chance of keeping its identity a secret from a determined research biologist.

  We were in the same kind of trap. I knew that before we could travel a mile after the alarm went out, identity-ray projectors would scan my skin, hair and, optic disks. They would scan me from head to toe, with scant regard for my modesty. They wouldn’t miss a square inch, and the whorl-findings would be flashed to Central Identification, and at Central my name disk would slide from the big general file and go clicking into an emergency alert slot.

  They’d have me tabbed in almost nothing flat.

  I reached over and gripped Claire’s arm. “When we get out — keep close to me,” I warned. “Do you understand? Close, right at my side. We’ve got to make a dash for it.”

  To make sure that my advice would be followed and remain clear in her mind I acted it out in pantomime the instant we were on the pavement. I took five swift steps forward, returned to her side and advanced again, making it plain that she should try to match her steps to mine and not let the distance between us widen by more than a yard.

  She seemed to catch on. I’d halted the beetle in the middle of the block, flush with the curb, after making sure that an old subway entrance was less than sixty feet away.

  I knew we’d have to reach it fast. As we turned from the car a siren started screaming, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that an orange-colored police beetle was heading straight for us at a distance of perhaps two hundred feet.

  I hadn’t driven the car right up to the subway entrance because there was a weed-choked, debris-cluttered lot on the street side, and the only way to get to it was on foot. The lot said as plain as word: “This is where it begins — the decay of order and public safety. This is where degradation begins. Society does not choose to beautify what it can barely endure. Let the rust and neglect and the slow crumbling serve as a warning, a symbol of what this portal stands for. To enter it is to be self-condemned and bear a burden of guilt which will grow heavier hour by hour, day by day — until death decides the issue in a freedom ruin for a man cut off from all hope.”

  For half a century no subway entrance had been cleared of rubble. They were ugly defacements in the midst of whitely gleam­ing streets and tree-lined squares. But the weight of a firmly established tradition can override Man’s dislike for ugliness and turn an entire society schizoid by giving it a blind spot.

  I was sure that Claire did not know what “schizoid” meant. It was not necessary for her to know. Only that the danger had become so acute that our lives hung in the balance. I reached for her hand and we started off.

  “Don’t look back!” I warned.

  Surprisingly, Claire was good at running. She ran swiftly at my side, her feet clattering on the hard pavement. I let go of her hand almost immediately, for I had merely grasped it to give her reassurance. The siren sound rose higher, became a steady, terrifying drone.

  Halfway down the block three Security Police officers in uniform descended from a careening beetle, and raced toward us, letting the car plunge on under automatic controls.

  It was then that Claire made her first serious mistake. My advice must have made a deep impression on her, for she kept close to me as she ran — too close. Thinking she was at least two feet from me I swerved sharply and collided with her, hurling her violently back against a traffic guidepost.

  The post was magnetically energized and it caught and held her firmly. It startled and frightened me. I grasped her by both shoulders and stared at her in alarm. “Hold perfectly still,” I cautioned. “One wrench will free you, but you mustn’t move.”

  Obviously there was a band of metal under her dress. It shocked me to realize that I hadn’t even had time to ask the man about that. Just how much metal had been used to manufacture Claire?

  When I had helped the man lift her from the tank her body had seemed soft and yielding enough. But just how much metal had been used? A band less than four inches wide would have held her fast to a magnetized traffic post. But what if Claire was more of an artificial woman than I had dreamed?

  It was the worst possible time to have such thoughts. It was also the best time, because the danger we were in prevented me from tormenting myself by letting my mind run in t
hat direction for longer than a second or two.

  I told myself that metal magnetized to only a moderate extent wouldn’t hold fast if I gave it a really violent wrench.

  I exerted all my strength and Claire swung clear. As she lurched forward into my arms one of the pursuing officers opened fire on us. The bullet went wild, splintering the traffic post at its base. I grabbed Claire’s wrist and we started running again.

  She was still good at it. It seemed only an instant before we reached the subway entrance and were swept into its dark, protective embrace.

  As the clamor from outside fell away our feet set up a hollow echoing that resounded through the darkness until even the terrifying siren wail dwindled to a far-off, ghostly mockery of sound.

  Then we stopped to regain our breath, and Claire swayed to­ward me. I caught her in my arms and held her tightly, whispering words of reassurance to her until her trembling ceased.

  I hadn’t intended to kiss her. It wasn’t the right moment for that, but there was no way I could have controlled the impulse, for it sprang from a threefold need. I had to know if her lips would part as the lips of the girl in the vault had done and yield an even greater sweetness. I had to be sure that they were as warm and alive and vibrant as they would have to be if I wanted to kiss her again and again, tomorrow and the next day and for as long as we were together with all of my doubts swept away … And I had to make certain that I would be glad that we had been lovers if I had only that to remember, if disaster overtook us before we could experience the whole of love’s rapture and surrender ourselves to long hours of just being alone together in the silence of the Venusian nights, with the wilderness of stars overhead and only night-flying birds to spy on us.

  She gave a strange little cry when I brought my lips down on hers, not hard or crushingly, for I did not want to frighten her, but so gently that I felt almost foolish and ill at ease for a moment. Can lovemaking ever fail to be impetuous and still transport you into another world, full of light and fire? Can you make love passionately without hardly seeming to do so, keeping your arms resting lightly on a woman’s shoulders, and not even venturing to caress her hair?

  I would not have thought so until her lips melted into mine and the gentleness of kisses became so prolonged, sweet and intimate a miracle that I could have asked for nothing more. I was content with the kiss alone.

  Once or twice in my life I have experienced the wonder of such a kiss in my dreams. A girl in the first flush of young womanhood, fragile and lovely beyond belief, can kiss you that way in a dream and when you wake up you’re glad you didn’t let yourself have somehow marred the perfection of an experience so unforgettable.

  Cynics may sneer, and far back in the twentieth century an orthodox Freudian would have been quite confident that he knew exactly how to interpret that kind of dream. But he would be wrong. It wasn’t dividing sex into two categories and only letting yourself go with the really wanton kind of woman. It wasn’t having a fear of letting yourself go with the super-respectable, super-chaste kind. It just wasn’t … because that slender, incredibly young girl was sex personified. You could have let yourself go easily enough, with no inhibitions and no restraint. But a kiss alone can be a kind of idealization of love on a super-romantic plane, and can linger hauntingly in your memory for days — all the sweetness and wonder of it. In a way, it is complete physical intimacy, if it is passionately sensuous and prolonged …

  The very attenuation of the experience seems to make it more intense and hauntingly beautiful, so that you’re stirred to the depths. It could stem to some extent from a Western European culture-complex distortion in regard to sex — a Medieval troubadour over-glorification of just the romantic aspects of sex. But that doesn’t mean that such an over-glorification isn’t basic to human nature everywhere on Earth, only waiting for the right soil, the right historic moment, to take hold of Man’s unconscious in an almost compulsive way.

  It’s basic enough and from whatever source arising, the old Freudians would have been wrong.

  “Darling, they would have been wrong!” I said.

  I didn’t expect her to understand, of course. But when I re­leased her, the way her eyes seemed to be shining made me almost sure that the way I’d felt when the kiss had gone on and on had somehow gotten through to her. She didn’t say a word and it was too early to take even that for granted. She could have felt nothing, for her response could have been wholly automatic. She’d been made for me, hadn’t she? All of my norm-woman data requirements were on punched tapes, and the firm knew exactly what kind of a romantic fool I could be.

  We were still in great danger. Ordinarily the Security Police have no arrows left in their bows when you plunge into a subway entrance and flee toward a freedom ruin. But they have been known to continue the pursuit, if what the Big Brain tells the monitors about you is alarming enough. They have even been known to go right into the ruins after men and women whose defiance has been so outrageous that Society cannot permit them to escape. They do not hesitate to risk their lives against overwhelming odds, if the emergency is grave enough, and the right to be an outcast, guilt-tormented and exposed on every side to brutal violence, can’t be countenanced without setting a precedent others might seize upon. A deliberate, willfully planned rebellion could blow the top right off the safety-valve provided by the ruins, and the monitors knew it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Claire continued to keep close to me as we moved forward through the echoing darkness, her face mirroring a strange, new wonder. The blue steel tracks seemed to fascinate her. She kept stopping to stare at them; once she bent and ran her fingers over a gleaming rail, back and forth, as if the coolness of the metal surprised and delighted her.

  There was one rail I was careful not to touch, even with my feet, as I ran. It was known as the third rail, and touching it was supposed to bring bad luck; the superstition was as ancient as the tracks themselves.

  How it originated nobody knew. Maybe when people rode on the trains centuries ago young daredevils descended into the tunnel and ran recklessly along the third rail until a train came roaring toward them. It would have been a game — wild, reckless and fearfully dangerous — quite as mentally intoxicating as filling the cham­bers of a primitive hand gun with six bullets, pressing the gun to a vital center, and letting your life or death be decided by a single, quick turn of the revolving cylinder.

  How many of the young daredevils had leapt aside in time? How many had died hideously beneath grinding wheels, their bodies crushed and mutilated without reason, primitive victims of the old Freudian “death wish”?

  It’s curious how the human mind will seize on strange ancient rites and customs in moments of great peril, as if there was something in human nature which made the dangers and follies of the remote past seem an audacious pathway by which modern man could escape to a more primitive level of consciousness. When men lived with their whole bodies, and not just with their minds alone, danger took on an intoxicating, heady quality which our own age has lost.

  “Why do we walk here?” Claire asked.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I said. “We’ll come to an exit soon.”

  Her next question startled me by its childlike innocence. “Will it stay dark?”

  “No,” I assured her. “We’ll go up out of the darkness into light.”

  I kept looking at her face. She wasn’t a child in her beauty, her strange and vibrant warmth. Why did I keep forgetting that I had what few men before me had ever possessed — the rare grace and loveliness of a perfect illusion?

  Her perfection was absolute. Could any man with the blood warm in his veins have asked for more? There was something eerily poetic about her speech. She spoke of darkness, light, fire, walking, running, as if each new experience was the personification of some elemental force, much as a child looking up at the new moon might croon with pleasure, and ask to be taken for a ride through the night sky in a chariot of fire.

  What right had I to f
eel disappointed? I told myself that I ought to feel grateful and very humble in the presence of that kind of thinking, imagining.

  But what I told myself, and what I wanted with every mad impulse of my heart and brain, were two different things. A man wants to be able to swing an adored woman around impulsively, and whisper: “Darling, remember that tune? Remember the last time we heard it? Remember how funny you looked with your strawberry curls whipped by the wind? Remember how rough the sea looked, with the whitecaps dancing up and down? Remember the fishermen coming in from the beach, and how their nets caught and held the sunlight?

  “Remember, darling? Remember, remember? The balcony was just like this one, but you look even more beautiful by moonlight. What are we waiting for? Come on, let’s dance!”

  She saw it before I did, the light flooding down over the tracks a hundred feet ahead. She gasped with delight, and broke into a run.

  I stared at her, startled. It was her first completely impulsive act, breaking away from me like that without a word. Maybe she had a better brain than I had dreamed.

  When I caught up with her, she was out of breath from running and my hope leapt high. But then she spoke, and something went dead in me. “I did not want the light to go away.”

  She nodded, obviously pleased by my quick understanding. A child’s mind, poetic and strange.

  I stared up at the platform looming darkly through the sha­dows. Very carefully I measured the distance with my eyes. “I’m going to put my arm around your waist and lift you up,” I told her. “Do you understand?”

  “No,” she said.

  I stared at her in dismay. “Well — hold still, anyway,” I pleaded.

  For the first time I put both my arms around her, and held her tight. I was aware of her breathing, the rise and fall of her bosom.