The First Mate had not wanted to come to the bridge. He had known the creature was there, and he had not relished the ideas and disturbing thoughts the being seemed to create.

But he came, because he knew the progress report must be delivered. At all times the Captain must know how far they had come, how fast they were going, how soon they would arrive.

All the information of running. When he stepped onto the bridge, he saw only the Captain’s back, and the blind, blank black face of the viewport. The Captain had deaded it. Space was cut off for the first time since the ship had been launched.

“Captain…?” His voice was a softness, as though all the fragile glass and spiderweb of the silence hanging between them might shatter.

“It died,” Kovasic said, staring straight ahead into nowhere.

“Died? The specimen? How? What could have…?”

“It couldn’t live away from the planet. We broke its heart. It’s that simple; laugh if you want—breaking its heart—but it died, that’s all. And now we’ll go home. Home.” He said the last word with an odd, thick sound. As though it had been something he had known so very long age, and forgotten, and substituted another meaning for it, and now suddenly had learned what it was again, and knew he was damned because it was beyond him forever.

“The Command. It’ll be—it’ll get swallowed by the mercantile…” The First began, fumblingly.

The Captain whirled, his face half-angry, half-imploring.

“Don’t you understand, Charlie? Don’t you know? You ran away from the creature, you must have heard what it said.

“Don’t you see? The Command, the mercantile guilds, Earth, the searching, the always hungering for more more more more…”

He ground to a stop, as though it all meant what he said it meant. Empty nothing.

Then he said the one thing that did matter. He said it knowing he was sounding the one truth that was inescapable. The one truth that Wummel had died because he knew had been deprived him:

“There is no home, if there is no rest. There is no rest if there is no Home.”

Then he turned back to the viewport. The First Mate moved to leave, but the soft words of the Captain, spoken against the deaded surface, stopped all movement. Staring at the empty surface, he murmured.

“It died, and the last thing it felt…” he paused.

“It pitied us, Charlie. That’s all. It didn’t hate us for killing it.

“It just pitied us.”

Perhaps it was inevitable. and perhaps it was only a natural result of the twisted eugenics that produced Leon Packett. In either case. the invention of the perambulating vid-robot came about, and nothing has been at all the same since.

The inevitability factor was a result of live tri-vid, and the insatiable appetite for novelty of the vid audience. If vid broadcasts came from Bermuda in tri-vid color with feelie and whiff, then they wanted wide-band transmission from the heart of the Sudetenland. If they got that, it wasn’t enough; next they wanted programs from the top of Everest. And when they had accomplished that—God only knows how—the voracious idiot mind of the audiences demanded more. They demanded live casts from the Millstone, circling above the Earth; then it was Lunar fantasics with authentic settings…and Mars…and Venus…and the Outer Cold Ones.

Finally, Leon Packett stumbled upon the secret of a perfect, self-contained tri-vid camera, operating off a minute force-bead generator; and in his warped way, he struck instantly to the truth of the problem—that the only camera that could penetrate to those inner niches of the universe that the eyes of man demanded to glimpse, was a man himself.

How completely simple it was. The only gatherer of facts as seen by the eyes of a man…were the eyes of a man. But since no man would volunteer to have his head sliced open, his brains scooped out, and a tri-vid camera inserted, Leon Packett invented Walkaway. In all due to the devil, it was coldly logical, and it was a beautiful bit of workmanship. Walkaway had the form of a human being, even to ball-and-socket joints at the knees and elbows. He stood just under seven feet tall, and his hide was a burnished permanodized alumasteel suit. His hands could be screwed off, and in their stead could be inserted anyone of three dozen “duty” hands, withdrawn from storage crypts, located in the limbs. His head was the only part of him that was slightly more than human. Brilliantly so, again offering Satan his plaudits.

Where the center of the face on a human would have been, the revolving lens wheel with its five turrets bulked strangely. Beneath the lens wheel a full-range audio grid lay with criss-crossed strangeness. The audio pickups were located on either side, as well as front and rear, of the head.

Two sets of controls were used on Walkaway. One set was imbedded in the right arm (and would snap up at the proper coded pressing of a lock-snit at the wrist) and was chiefly used by Walkaway himself when he was asked to play back what he had heard or seen.

The other console controls were in the back, and to my knowledge, were never employed after Walkaway’s initial test runs. He disliked being pawed.

Naturally, the dissenters at Walkaway’s birth, who declaimed the sanity of giving a robot volition and “conscience” with as much strength as his metal frame held, were shouted down. The creature—well, wasn’t he?—had to have the right of free choice, if he was going to get the story in all its fullness and with a modicum of imagination, which the vid audience demanded.

So Walkaway was made more human.

He was able to disagree, to be surprised, to follow instructions almost as they were given, and to select the viewing subjects he wished, when he was filming. Walkaway was a most remarkable…what?

Creature.

“Leon, you’ve got to do it. Don’t be obstinate, that’s just being foolish. They’ll get him somehow, Leon!”

Leon Packett spun in the chair, facing the window. His back was very straight, and his neck held a rigid aloofness. “Get out, McCollum. Get out and tell your pony-soldiers to do the same. Leave me alone!”

Alan McCollum threw up his hands in eloquent frustration. “Lee, I’m trying to get through to you, for God’s sake! All I ask is you listen to them, and then make a decision—”

Packett spun in the chair. His feet hit the floor with a resounding clump and he leaned one elbowed arm at McCollum. His index finger was an unwavering spear, the tip of which aimed between McCollum’s sensitive dark brown eyes.

“Now look, McCollum. I spent fifteen years in a cellar lab, working what I could, and experimenting as best I could, soldering old pieces together because I couldn’t get a Frericks Grant. Then I happened to think of putting two old gadgets together, and I came up with a miracle. Now I’m big time, and the Frericks Foundation uses me in their institutional advertisements.”