Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/22

22 which I had entered, for food. The rest of us set to work on the banks of levers and buttons that surrounded the huge seat and screen, trying different combinations to see what happened. And plenty happened.

From a scoop-like opening at one side, green globes the size of footballs began to emerge. From another opening a whirring and clattering issued. I was sure something was broken but after a time a strange looking mechanism emerged from the opening with a shiny new appearance like a Christmas bicycle. I stood looking at it wondering what on earth it was when it got up, walked toward me on four legs. The girls screamed and began to run and I was not far behind them. But MacCarthy stood his ground. As the machine came up to him it stopped and a round hole in the top of it began to emit words of a deep, rich, human quality.

The robot was a four-foot cylinder standing erect on four short jointed legs. Only one of these legs moved at a time but very rapidly so that the robot moved at a good walking pace and swayed hardly at all. From the top of the cylinder hung three quite long arms. About the top part of the cylinder were a dozen small apertures covered by fine wire grids. What they were all for I don't know, but the robot, by its own behavior was well equipped with senses.

"God," said MacCarthy, "it's a robot. Now what will we do with a robot?"

HAD an idea. I called to MacCarthy. "Take it a little distance away, if you can. I'll turn the eye on it and see what its insides are doing."

MacCarthy extended his hand as one would to a child and the robot took hold of his big red paw and followed him away. I swung the huge eye down upon it and instantly I heard its mechanical thought answering my own.

"When you need food I will get it," it said in abstract thought. "When you sleep, I will watch. When there is work, I will do it. What do you wish of me?"

Just how much could this robot think was what puzzled me. I soon learned, for the thought of the robot answered my unconscious question.

"I can think as well as a wild animal times three," he seemed to say. Anyway, some multiple of a natural animal's thought was what he meant.

What the green globes were for was a question that had bothered me since their appearance. The robot heard this question in my mind, released MacCarthy's hand, went to the growing pile of glistening rounds, picked up one and mounted the stairs to the seat bearing the globe. With one metal finger he poked a hole in its transluscent shell and held it to my mouth. I tasted it and an ecstacy of flavor spread through me. It was the nectar of the Gods, put up in flexible glass. I whooped, waved the green thing at MacCarthy and the girls.

"It's canned!" I shouted. "Drink up. It's on the house!"

"What a house!" I heard MacCarthy say.

Then the robot sat down beside me, took the controls of the eye from my hands. There was nothing I could do about it; he was built of that metal than which there is no tougher that I have ever found. Methodically the robot swung the eye in ever-widening circles, looking—looking. I watched the screen. The robot saw one of the skinny Hobloks. Under the robot's long metal fingers the thing leaped into center focus. The robot seemed to pause in bewilderment. It was not what he expected to see, it was plain. But the Hoblok was also at a ray mechanism watching us. The robot took perhaps ten seconds to read the thought in the Hoblok's mind, then pressed a stud. The Hoblok rolled over, apparently dead.

The robot continued his sweeping search in ever-widening circles. But I was worried about Mula. Perhaps the robot would—no, it was too much to expect. I tapped the robot's metal top, pointed in Mula's direction. Obediently he swung the eye as indicated, much quicker and more easily than I myself could. I waved my hand to indicate farther and farther and far as it was, Mula shortly appeared in the screen. I could hear the robot's mechanical mind as he saw Mula's muchness centered on the screen when a blaze of light and deafening sound thundered into our faces. I felt myself falling; knew no more.

came to with my head in the lap of Fanny de Moina, a miniature edition