“All of them.”
The robot immobile, answering metallically, “Power.”
“Someday, someday…”
“Checks.”
“Balances.”
“Oh, Walkaway. Someday, just someday!”
“I know.”
The nights had passed restlessly for Packett, while the sickness within him festered. The robot had been constructed in the image of the man. Seeing everything through its vid-eyes, hearing everything through its pickups, but saying little, working hard. Then Packett had known he would die, and Walkaway would live on. An extension of himself; the sword he would someday wield.
He had worked long into the night, foreseeing where others would not foresee, could not foresee, though they had the knowledge. For Leon Packett had been gifted. Sick, but gifted, and he had left his curse, left his justice, left his vengeance, to live on after he was gone.
Walkaway learned of Leon Packett’s death, and the circuit Packett had tampered with, that he had wanted to close at the knowledge of his death, snapped to with a mental thud that only Walkaway felt, that the universe was soon to know.
The robot turned to the Guardsmen and made the one request no one would have considered, the one request that was his legally to make:
“Pay me my wages.”
Three hundred and sixty-five years on Earth. Nine months and fifteen days in space. The warp-drive had been better than ghosts had thought. Memories of McCollum and his fellows from MIT lived within the force bead, and had given it power. Better, far better, it had been, than their wildest imaginings. But Einstein had been correct. Mass, infinity, time zero. He had been correct, and Walkaway had earned three hundred and sixty-five years worth of wages. Per diem. Plus travel pay according to military regulations. They could not withhold it on grounds that he was using military transportation; Leon Packett had seen to that: Walkaway was a private citizen.
Plus interest accrued.
The sum was staggering. The sum was unbelievable. The sum could, would, must bankrupt the Earth government. It was unheard-of. The Prelate convened, and the arguments raged, but Walkaway needed no defense. He merely requested: “Pay me my wages.” And they had to do it.
Oh, they tried to dodge their way out of it. They tried to ensnare him in legalities, but he was a man of alumasteel, and legalities could not affect him.
The circuit had closed, and his life’s plan was set. In the mind of Walkaway burned the conscience and soul of his creator. Leon Packett was not dead. In his creation was re-born the intense, vibrant hatred of power and government and authority. In Walkaway was the perfect weapon; indestructible, uncaring, human as human it need be, inhuman as inhuman it must be, to bring about the downfall of that which Packett had despised.
Fifteen years in a cellar laboratory had carried forth for over three hundred years, and the future was molded on printed circuits.
Finally, they acceded. They paid him his wages. The government of Earth was bankrupted. The world belonged to a man of alumasteel. It was no longer Earth. Had he wished, he might have named it Walkaway’s World. For such it was.
Leon Packett had foreseen much. He had applied Einstein’s equations, and he had known what would happen. The scientists of the Frericks Foundation had known, also, and they had considered it all. But the job had had to be done, in that era before Man had turned inward once more. They had feared what might happen, but not considered it an inevitability. They had looked on it the way the farmer looks on earthquake. Yes, it might happen, but that would be an act of God, not a thing that must be.
But they had not considered Leon Packett. He had taken steps. He had altered his creation, and made it want its pay, when it knew he was dead. For dead he was dead, and alive he was dead. But in the soul of Walkaway he lived again.
So he had created an act of God.
Twisted in thought, crying in the darkness of his tormented mind, Leon Packett had changed the future. Changed it so irrevocably, evened the score so beautifully, Man would remember and curse and live with his name forever. They had known of the possibility, and they had tried to prevent it.
“Let us take Walkaway back to the drawing boards,” McCollum—that shadow lost in the past—had cried. But Leon Packett had overruled him, “No!”
He would not let his name and his future be stolen from him. There was no need for him to go on living out a worthless life. That was bitterness. He had a tool that would and could and needed to drive forward to his ordained destiny. He had Walkaway, and though they suspected what might be, what could be, they never thought it needed to be. They figured without the drive and thirst of Walkaway’s master. They figured without the hatred of a man for himself and for all other men.
Walkaway wanted his wages.
He got them, by getting the Earth.
There was not that much money in the world. Nor was there that much property. But there was the government, and soon Walkaway was the government.
That was the future Leon Packett built for himself, as the shrine of his memory.
Walkaway was not vindictive.
But Leon Packett was.
There haven’t been many changes. Not many. Not for us. It has been the same for a very long time.
Walkaway was fair, and carried forth Packett’s desires in the only way an alumasteel man could.
Changes? No, not many.
But you’ll forgive me, of course. I must hurry now. I’m quite overdue.
I should have been at my lubrication hours ago.
Nothing for My Noon Meal
Man alone. Man trapped by his own nature and the limits of the world around him. Man against Man. Man against Nature. All of thee inevitably come down to the essential question of how courageous a man can be in a time of massive peril. They all come down to how a man can survive, by strength of arm, by fleetness of foot, and most of all, by inventiveness of intellect. This has been the subject of much that I have written, perhaps because I see my Ties and my culture in the most “hung-up” condition it has ever known. Each man, each thinking individual, for the first time in the history of the race, completely—or as near completely as prejudiced mass media will allow—aware of the forces hurling him into the future. The Bomb, ready to go whenever the finger jumps to the proper button, the ethics slowly but steadily deteriorating, the morality finding its lowest common level, and each man, each thinking individual, virtually helpless before the fluxes and flows of civilization and herd instinct. Yet, is he really alone? Ever? Or is the imagination and fierce drive to survive a tenacious linkage among us all? And if it is, then are we not brothers to the man who had
There was a patch of Flubs growing out beyond the spikes, and I tried to cultivate them, and bring them around, but somehow they weren’t drawing enough, and they died off before they could mature. I needed that air, too. My sac was nearly half-empty. My head was starting to hurt again. It had been night for three months at that time.
My world is a small one. Not large enough to hold an atmosphere any normal Earthman could breathe, not small enough to have none and be totally airless. My world is the sole planet of a red sun, and it has two moons, each one of which serves to eclipse my world’s sun for six of the eighteen months. I have light for six months, dark for twelve. I call my world Hell.
When I first came here, I had a name, and I had a face and I even had a wife. My wife died when the ship blew up, and my name died slowly over the ten years I have lived here, and my face—well, the less I remember that, the easier it is for me.