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.In pairs, sweating and cursing in the noonday heat, they took turns with the digging.Beside them, seated at ease on the oblong form of a burial case, was an Academy police guard.A long-barreled radiation rifle rested across his knees.“The less time you spend complaining,” his voice floated up distinctly, “the more you’ll have for digging—and the faster we’ll all be out of here!”One of the diggers stopped and mopped his face with a rag.“A grave for a Robot?” He spat in disgust “I thought they burned whatever was left of them!”“Get on with it,” ordered the guard.“You heard the same as they told us all.This was no ordinary Robot, and it was his request—”“I know, I know,” the other cut in.He imitated some officious administrator’s voice: “ ‘This was a King, my good men, a King from beyond the stars! So let it not be drudgery but a privileged duty!’ “He made a rude noise and broke into a braying laugh while the others nodded and snickered.I felt myself growing dizzy and turned away to seek shelter.In the shadow side of a boulder I lost consciousness.Night had come when once again I awoke.A chill wind blew and an almost-full moon bathed the desert with sterile rays.I crawled to the bluffs edge.The oasis was still.The men had finished their task, leaving behind them an ugly oblong heap of stones.I watched for a long time but nothing moved.Sliding, slamming into unseen obstacles, falling, I made my way down—past the pool, past the grove of palms with its gushing spring, past all the familiar objects of the oasis—to face this new thing, this obscenity.I stood panting in front of the metal cross set into a base of already-hardened cement.Without bending, I could read its moonlit legend:ABD H’LOKK-MOND H’ZUMWarrior and KingKing? I had known it by instinct from the beginning.Warrior? That I also knew.He had fought hard and skillfully to save me, while I, with my blundering, had brought him to his death.Here before me lay what remained of that magnificence, here under an ill-fashioned heap.I fought for breath and looked up blindly to search the stars for something—some sign, some last farewell.“Oh, Gods,” I prayed, “in your goodness, be kind to my King.Let his rest in this alien soil be peaceful and undisturbed.And, Great Gods, most humbly I pray you, ask of my King for me his forgiveness.”Without warning the dam within me suddenly crumbled and the tears, so long denied, came flooding forth.I fell across the grave, ripped and tore at the stones piled atop it, but was too weak to move them.After a time, I pushed myself up to stand unsteady, sobbing in the moonlit clearing of the oasis.It was then the horror began: The watchers—the police and other Academy authorities—revealed themselves.They’d lain concealed, waiting for me to emerge from my hiding place.Now, in my delirious state, they seemed like friends from some nightmare, a crowd of rotting ghouls, these watchers who crept out of the shadows.Their whispering, gibbering, foul-breathed slobbering was all around me.“It’s him: Chrome—the other one.We got him!”“Careful, don’t hurt him! It’s Chrome!”“Hurt him? He’s cut hisself to ribbons already.Look there at his hands!”“Where’s that fool doctor? Here, give me that, you idiot!”A sharp stabbing pain in the small of my back brought merciful, swiftly spreading numbness.But not swift enough nor merciful enough to keep one last frightful thing from me.There was a phlegm-filled cackle, then a gloating voice.“I’ve always said it, boys, and I’m right again: ‘To catch a Robot—use a Robot!’ “As consciousness left me, all my awareness seemed filled and echoing with those ghastly words and their dawning truth: “To catch a Robot—!.catch a Robot—!.catch a ROBOT!!”Part Two: LIMBOXIIIAccording to the medical records, I was a raving incoherent madman for many weeks.Partially from physical exhaustion and lack of food, plus a clumsily administered overdose of Anesthetol out at the oasis—but mostly from my inability to face reality, to cope with the lies implanted hypnotically by S.O.R.A.I’d had no family, no mother or father, there’d been no monorail crash to take their nonexistent lives, I hadn’t been left an orphan.All fictional, to mask the truth: I was that alien hated thing of rumor and gossip, a Robot.When at last I began reaching out for sanity and understanding, the first face I recognized was that of Vortex! Naturally I thought I was still hallucinating.His reality gradually began to sink in, though; no matter how many professionally cheerful nurses were around my hospital bed, or how often the professional pompous doctors from CenMed’s staff visited me, always there remained that silver-uniformed gleam.And even in my dazed state I was aware of the tremendous respect with which Vortex was treated, the bowing and scraping and courtesies shown him whenever he moved.Politeness out of fear? More than that, but certainly that, certainly fear.After the rest had gone babbling on their way, Vortex, his face grave, would come close again.Those incredible eyes were a smoky purple now, so dark was their velvet gray.They would lock upon me, and he would speak softly, slowly in his own language.Soothing me, making me drowsy enough to drift into sleep, to dream of multicolored honeycombs tended by jewel-like bees gently humming as they moved in glittering patterns of metallic greens and golds and purples and the turquoise of butterfly wings.Awakening, I would find him still there, his eyes and voice making the world outside us unimportant, meaningless.Meaningless it was, indeed, even in the face of what I could only assume was reality: that Vortex was alive and beside me, that this was a preferential-care room somewhere in CenMed’s security facilities, and that I was a very sick Cadet.My hands must have been badly damaged; they were still bandaged in several areas.It caused pain to move them, and they were stiff, but I could sense the patching and repairing had been expertly done.With time and exercise I was sure I’d regain full use of them.I was much less certain about my mental faculties.To find one’s physical world turned upside down can be unnerving, but Cadets learn to cope with that early in the whirl and swoop of navigational training machines.To find one’s mental world turned inside out, backwards, warped into an echoing hall of demons was more difficult to deal with
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