He slowed slightly.
Freedom of Shape...that was a strange notion. A disturbing notion.
And obviously a device of The Shapeless One, he told himself, and rushed on.
At the end of the corridor was a gigantic bolted door. Pid stared at it.
Footsteps hammered down the corridor, and Men were shouting.
What was wrong? How had they detected him? Quickly he examined himself and ran his fingers across his face.
He had forgotten to mold any features.
In despair he pulled at the door. He took the tiny Displacer out of his pouch, but the pulse beat wasn’t quite strong enough. He had to get closer to the reactor.
He studied the door. There was a tiny crack running under it. Pid went quickly shapeless and flowed under, barely squeezing the Displacer through.
Inside the room he found another bolt on the inside of the door. He jammed it into place, and looked around for something to prop against the door.
It was a tiny room. On one side was a lead door, leading toward the reactor. There was a small window on another side, and that was all.
Pid looked at the Displacer. The pulse beat was right. At last he was close enough. Here the Displacer could work, drawing and altering the energy from the reactor. All he had to do was activate it
But they had all deserted, every one of them.
Pid hesitated. All Glom are born Shapeless. That was true. Glom children were amorphous, until old enough to be instructed in the caste-shape of their ancestors. But Freedom of Shape?
Pid considered the possibilities. To be able to take on any shape he wanted, without interference! On this paradise planet he could fulfill any ambition, become anything, do anything.
Nor would he be lonely. There were other Glom here as well, enjoying the benefits of Freedom of Shape.
The Men were beginning to break down the door. Pid was still uncertain.
What should he do? Freedom....
But not for him, he thought bitterly. It was easy enough to be a Hunter or a Thinker. But he was a Pilot. Piloting was his life and love. How could he do that here?
Of course, the Men had ships. He could turn into a Man, find a ship....
Never. Easy enough to become a Tree or a Dog. He could never pass successfully as a Man.
The door was beginning to splinter from repeated blows.
Pid walked to the window to take a last look at the planet before activating the Displacer.
He looked—and almost collapsed from shock.
It was really true! He hadn’t fully understood what Ger had meant when he said that there were species on this planet to satisfy every need. Every need! Even his!
Here he could satisfy a longing of the Pilot Caste that went even deeper than Piloting.
He looked again, then smashed the Displacer to the floor. The door burst open, and in the same instant he flung himself through the window.
The Men raced to the window and stared out. But they were unable to understand what they saw.
There was only a great white bird out there, flapping awkwardly but with increasing strength, trying to overtake a flight of birds in the distance.
BESIDE STILL WATERS
Mark Rogers was a prospector, and he went to the asteroid belt looking for radioactives and rare metals. He searched for years, never finding much, hopping from fragment to fragment. After a time he settled on a slab of rock half a mile thick.
Rogers had been born old, and he didn’t age much past a point. His face was white with the pallor of space, and his hands shook a little. He called his slab of rock Martha, after no girl he had ever known.
He made a little strike, enough to equip Martha with an air pump and a shack, a few tons of dirt and some water tanks, and a robot. Then he settled back and watched the stars.
The robot he bought was a standard-model all-around worker, with built-in memory and a thirty-word vocabulary. Mark added to that, bit by bit. He was something of a tinkerer, and he enjoyed adapting his environment to himself.
At first, all the robot could say was “Yes sir,” and “No sir.” He could state simple problems: “The air pump is laboring, sir.” “The com is budding, sir.” He could perform a satisfactory greeting: “Good morning, sir.”
Mark changed that He eliminated the “sirs” from the robot’s vocabulary; equality was the rule on Mark’s hunk of rock. Then he dubbed the robot Charles, after a father he had never known.
As the years passed, the air pump began to labor a little as it converted the oxygen in the planetoid’s rock into a breathable atmosphere. The air seeped into space, and the pump worked a little harder, supplying more.
The crops continued to grow on the tamed black dirt of the planetoid. Looking up, Mark could see the sheer blackness of the river of space, the floating points of the stars. Around him, under him, overhead, masses of rock drifted, and sometimes the starlight glinted from their black sides. Occasionally, Mark caught a glimpse of Mars or Jupiter. Once he thought he saw Earth.
Mark began to tape new responses into Charles. He added simple responses to cue words. When he said, “How does it look!” Charles would answer, “Oh, pretty good, I guess.”
At first the answers were what Mark had been answering himself, in the long dialogue held over the years. But, slowly, he began to build a new personality into Charles.
Mark had always been suspicious and scornful of women. But for some reason he didn’t tape the same suspicion into Charles. Charles’ outlook was quite different.
“What do you think of girls?” Mark would ask, sitting on a packing case outside the shack, after the chores were done.
“Oh, I don’t know. You have to find the right one,” the robot would reply dutifully, repeating what had been put on its tape.
“I never saw a good one yet,” Mark would say.
“Well, that’s not fair. Perhaps you didn’t look long enough. There’s a girl in the world for every man.”
“You’re a romantic!” Mark would say scornfully. The robot would pause—a built-in pause—and chuckle a carefully constructed chuckle.
“I dreamed of a girl named Martha once,” Charles would say. “Maybe if I’d looked, I would have found her.”
And then it would be bedtime. Or perhaps Mark would want more conversation. “What do you think of girls?” he would ask again, and the discussion would follow its same course.
Charles grew old. His limbs lost their flexibility, and some of his wiring started to corrode. Mark would spend hours keeping the robot in repair.
“You’re getting rusty,” he would cackle.
“You’re not so young yourself,” Charles would reply. He had an answer for almost everything. Nothing elaborate, but an answer.
It was always night on Martha, but Mark broke up his time into mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Their life followed a simple routine. Breakfast, from vegetables and Mark’s canned store. Then the robot would work in the fields, and the plants grew used to his touch. Mark would repair the pump, check the water supply, and straighten up the immaculate shack. Lunch, and the robot’s chores were usually finished.
The two would sit on the packing case and watch the stars. They would talk until supper, and sometimes late into the endless night.
In time, Mark built more complicated conversations into Charles. He couldn’t give the robot free choice, of course, but he managed a pretty close approximation of it. Slowly, Charles’ personality emerged. But it was strikingly different from Mark’s.
Where Mark was querulous, Charles was calm. Mark was sardonic, Charles was naive. Mark was a cynic, Charles was an idealist. Mark was often sad; Charles was forever content.
And in time, Mark forgot he had built the answers into Charles. He accepted the robot as a friend, of about his own age. A friend of long years’ standing.