And Jurgens? No subculture there, but a world that had been abandoned for the stars, with the rejects left behind to slide down into an uncomprehending barbarism. Freedom, Jurgens had said — he finally had gained freedom from the implicit responsibility he and the other robots had felt toward the sad remnants of humanity. Freedom? Lansing wondered. He wondered if Jurgens even now realized he had not regained his freedom. He still played shepherd to his humans, even as he played it now, plunging ahead through this desert heading for a Chaos that he or no one else could claim to understand. Ever since they had come to this unlikely world, he had stood by, always ready to serve, always with the needs and hopes of others, of his humans, foremost in his mind.
For some reason, however, he had not put his entire trust in these humans of his. To him, Lansing, he had told at least part of his story — what his world was like, his hobby of making humanoid puppets, fashioned from the old tales of mankind. (Puppets, Lansing wondered, like the puppet Melissa?) To all the others he had not told a thing, had remained stubbornly silent even when Mary had asked him, more or less, point blank.
That was puzzling, Lansing told himself. Why had the robot confided in one of them and no one else? Was there between the two of them a bond that the robot saw and the man could not?
Up ahead of him, Jurgens had halted at the foot of a small dune. When Lansing came up, the robot pointed at an object protruding from the dune. It was a heavy glass or clear plastic bubble, resembling the helmet of a space suit, and inside it, facing them, was a human skull. The grinning row of teeth flashed a wide-spaced smile at them and one of the teeth, Lansing saw, was gold, glinting in the sun. Hunched out of the dune was a rounded piece of metal and farther along the dune, toward the right, another chunk of metal.
Jurgens took a shovel from his pack and began to dig away the sand. Lansing, saying nothing, stood and watched.
“In a minute we will see,” said Jurgens.
In a few minutes they did see.
The metal contraption was vaguely human-shaped. There were three legs, not two, and two arms, a torso. It measured ten or twelve feet in length, and in the upper part of it was a space in which a skeleton that once had been a man had ridden. The bones that belonged to the skeleton were jumbled all about, disarticulated, in that space the man had occupied. The skull was captured in the bubble.
Jurgens, squatting beside it, looked up at Lansing.
“A guess?” he asked.
Lansing shuddered. “Your guess, not mine.”
“All right,” the robot said. “A walking machine.”
“A walking machine?”
“It could be. That’s the first thing that came to mind.”
“But what is a walking machine?”
“Something akin to this was developed by the humans of my planet. Before they went out to the stars. To be used on other planets. In a hostile environment, I suppose. I never saw one. I only heard about them.”
“A machine to move about in on a hostile planet?”
“That’s right. Tied in with the human nervous system. Intricate circuitry that would respond in the same way as a human body would respond. The human wants to walk, so the machine walks. The arms the same.”
“Jurgens, if this is true, we may be looking at one of the original people of this planet. No other human could have been brought here as we were brought, encased in a contraption such as this. We came in the clothes we stood in, of course, but…”
“You can’t rule it out, however,” Jurgens said.
“Perhaps,” said Lansing, “but such a man, if he came from elsewhere, would have had to come from an alternate world that had become hostile to man. So polluted, so dangerous…”
“A world at war,” said Jurgens. “Full of dangerous rays and gases.”
“Yes, I suppose that would be possible. But once he reached this world, he would have needed it no longer. The air here is not polluted.”
“You must realize,” said Jurgens, “that it might have been impossible for him to separate himself from it. He may have been so biologically tied to it that there was no escape from it. He probably would not have minded it too much. He would have been accustomed to it. And such a machine would have some advantages. In a place like this it would.”
“Yes,” said Lansing, “yes, it would.”
“Here he came to grief,” said Jurgens. “Here, in all his arrogance, he came to final grief.”
Lansing looked at the robot. “You think that all humans are arrogant. That it’s a mark of the human race.”
“Not all humans,” Jurgens said. “You can understand if I hold some bitterness. To be left behind…”
“It has festered all these years?”
“Not festered,” Jurgens said.
They were silent for a time, then the robot said, “Not you. You are not arrogant. You never have been. The Parson was, so was the Brigadier. Sandra, in her gentle way…”
“Yes, I know,” said Lansing. “I hope you can forgive them.”
“You and Mary,” Jurgens said. “I’d lay down my life for you and Mary.”
“And yet you would not tell Mary about yourself. You refused to tell her.”
“She would have pitied me,” said Jurgens. “I could not have withstood her pity. You have never pitied me.”
“No, I haven’t,” Lansing said.
“Edward, let us leave the arrogance behind. The two of us now should be upon our way.”
“You lead, I follow,” Lansing said. “We have no time to waste. I didn’t like leaving Mary. Even now I find it hard not to turn back.”
“Three days more and we’ll be back. We’ll find her safe and sound. Four days is all we’ll give ourselves.”
They found no wood along the way. The land was scoured bare of everything. That night they made camp without a fire.
In a hard, enameled way, the night was beautiful. Empty sand and a soaring moon, while out toward the edges of the sky, undimmed by the white brilliance of the moon, the stars shone with a fierce intensity.
Lansing felt the essence of the night soaking into him — the hard, the cruel, the classic beauty of it. Once he heard what he thought was wailing. It came from the south, and it sounded like the wailing of the great lost beast that had wailed above the city and again from the badlands butte. He listened intently, not certain he had heard it, but it did not come again.
“Did you hear anything?” he asked Jurgens.
Jurgens said he hadn’t.
The robot woke Lansing well before dawn. The moon was hanging just above the western horizon and the stars were paling in the east.
“Eat something,” Jurgens told him, “and we’ll be on our way.”
“Nothing now,” said Lansing. “A drink of water’s all. I’ll eat later while we walk.”
The going was fairly easy to start with, but by noon they began to encounter dunes again, small ones at first, growing larger as they went along. They were in a world of shifting yellow sand, with the pale blue of the sky a dome that came down and enclosed the sand. The land ahead of them gradually sloped upward until it seemed they were climbing into the hard blue sky. Ahead of them a narrow strip of sky above the northern horizon assumed a darker, deeper shade of blue, and as they climbed over the treacherous dunes, the sand sliding underneath their feet, so did the darker strip climb higher in the sky, turning from dark blue at its top to black a little lower down.
Vague, muted mumblings came from the north. As they fought to make their way against the dunes, the mumbling grew louder.