“All right, then,” said Sherwood. “If you want it that way, it’s okay with me. Can you take me out of here? My radio is broken and my ship disabled.”
“Perhaps I can,” said the Ship. “Tell me who you are.”
Sherwood hesitated for a moment, and then he told who he was, quite truthfully. For it suddenly had occurred to him that this ship was as much an outlaw as he was himself. It had no markings and all ships must have markings.
“You say you left your last port without proper clearance?”
“Yes,” said Sherwood. “There were certain circumstances.”
“And no one knows where you are? No one’s looking for you?”
“How could they?” Sherwood asked.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just anywhere,” said Sherwood. “I have no preference.”
For even if they should land him somewhere where he had no wish to be, he still would have a running chance. On this planet he had no chance at all.
“All right,” said the ship. “You can come aboard.”
A hatch came open in the hull and a ladder began running out.
“Just a second,” Sherwood shouted. “I’ll be right there.”
He sprinted to the shack and grabbed his sack of the finest diamonds, then legged it for the ship. He got there almost as soon as the ladder touched the ground.
The hull still was crackling with warmth, but Sherwood swarmed up the ladder, paying no attention.
He was set for life, he thought. Unless—
And then the thought struck him that they might take the diamonds from him. They could pretend it was payment for his passage. Or they could simply take them without an excuse of any sort at all.
But it was too late now. He was almost in the hatch. To drop the sack of diamonds now would do no more than arouse suspicion and would gain him nothing.
It came of greediness, he thought. He did not need this many diamonds. Just a half dozen of the finest dropped into his pockets would have been enough. Enough to buy him another ship so he could return and get a load of them.
But he was committed now. There was nothing he could do except to see it through.
He reached the hatch and tumbled through it. There was no one waiting. The inner lock stood open and there was no one there.
He stopped to stare at the emptiness and behind him the retracting ladder rumbled softly and the hatch hissed to a close.
“Hey,” he shouted, “where is everyone?”
“There is no one here,” the voice said, “but me.”
“All right,” said Sherwood. “Where do I go to find you?”
“You have found me,” said the Ship. “You are standing in me.”
“You mean…”
“I told you,” said the Ship. “I said I was the Ship. That is what I am.”
“But no one…”
“You do not understand,” said the Ship. “There is no need of anyone. I am myself. I am intelligent. I am part machine, part human. Rather, perhaps, at one time I was. I have thought, in recent years, the two of us have merged so we’re neither human nor machine, but something new entirely.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Sherwood, beginning to get frightened. “There can’t be such a thing.”
“Consider,” said the Ship, “a certain human who had worked for years to build me and who, as he finished me, found death was closing in …”
“Let me out!” yelled Sherwood. “Let me out of here! I don’t want to be rescued. I don’t want …”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Sherwood, it is rather late for that. We’re already out in space.”
“Out in space! We can’t be! It isn’t possible!”
“Of course it is,” the Ship told him. “You expected thrust. There was no thrust. We simply lifted.”
“No ship,” insisted Sherwood, “can get off a planet …”
“You’re thinking, Mr. Sherwood, of the ships built by human hands. Not of a living ship. Not of an intelligent machine. Not of what becomes possible with the merging of a man and a machine.”
“You mean you built yourself?”
“Of course not. Not to start with. I was built by human hands to start with. But I’ve redesigned myself and rebuilt myself, not once, but many times. I knew my capabilities. I knew my dreams and wishes. I made myself the kind of thing that I was capable of being—not the halfway, makeshift thing that was the best the human race could do.”
“The man you spoke of,” Sherwood said. “The one who was about to die …”
“He is part of me,” said the Ship. “If you must think of him as a separate entity, he, then, is talking to you. For when I say ‘I,’ I mean both of us, for we’ve become as one.”
“I don’t get it,” Sherwood told the Ship, feeling the panic coming back again.
“He built me, long ago, as a ship which would respond, not to the pushing of a lever or the pressing of a button, but to the mental commands of the man who drove me. I was to become, in effect, an extension of that man. There was a helmet that the man would wear and he’d think into the helmet.”
“I understand,” said Sherwood.
“He’d think into the helmet and I was so programmed that I’d obey his thoughts. I became, in effect, a man, and the man became in effect the ship he operated.”
“Nice deal,” Sherwood said enthusiastically, never being one upon whom the niceties of certain advantages were ever lost.
“He finished me and he was about to die and it was a pity that such a one should die—one who had worked so hard to do what he had done. Who’d given up so much. Who never had seen space. Who had gone nowhere.”
“No,” said Sherwood, in revulsion, knowing what was coming. “No, he’d not done that.”
“It was a kindness,” said the Ship. “It was what he wanted. He managed it himself. He simply gave up his body. His body was a worthless hulk that was about to die. The modifications to accommodate a human brain rather than a human skull were quite elementary. We have both of us been happy.”
Sherwood stood without saying anything. In the silence he was listening for some sound, for any kind of tiny rattle or hum, for anything at all to tell him the ship was operating. But there was no sound and no sense of motion of any sort.
“Happy,” he said. “Where would you have found happiness? What’s the point of all this?”
“That,” the Ship said solemnly, “is a bit hard to explain.”
Sherwood stood and thought about it—the endless voyaging through space without a body—with all the desires, all the advantages, all the capabilities of a body gone forever.
“There is nothing for you to fear,” said the Ship. “You need not concern yourself. We have a cabin for you. Just down the corridor, the first door to your left.”
“I thank you,” Sherwood said, although he was nervous still.
If he had had a choice, he told himself, he’d stayed back on the planet. But since he was here, he’d have to make the best of it. And there were, he admitted to himself, certain advantages and certain possibilities that needed further thought.
He went down the corridor and pushed on the door. It opened on the cabin. For a spaceship it looked comfortable enough. A little cramped, of course, but then all cabins were. Space is at a premium on any sort of ship.
He went in and placed his sack of diamonds on the bunk that hinged out from the wall. He sat down in the single metal chair that stood beside the bunk.
“Are you comfortable, Mr. Sherwood?” asked the Ship.
“Very comfortable,” he said.
It was going to be all right, he told himself. A very crazy setup, but it would be all right. Perhaps a little spooky and a bit hard to believe, but probably better, after all, than staying marooned, back there on the planet. For this would not last forever. And the planet could have been, most probably would have been, forever.