Smith was sitting cross-legged, as he always did. He was wearing his perennial three-piece gray suit, and his ever-present attaché case was at
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his side. His face was pallid and lemony, as usual, with its standard expression of vague unease tinged with indigestion. Nothing about Harold W. Smith's appearance ever changed much.
"We have a problem," he said. Nothing about Smith's conversations ever changed much, either.
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CHAPTER THREE
Alive again.
Alive again.
Hello is all right.
Alive again.
My name is Mr. Gordons.
Alive again.
This was the poem that flashed through Mr. Gor-dons's tungsten-and-nickel synapses. The poem would win no literary prizes for the creature. He knew this because he knew he was not creative. He was, in fact, so uncreative that he couldn't even tell if the poem was good or not, but he assumed it was not because he was not creative. He was not programmed to be creative. He was programmed to survive.
Still, he thought, there was a chance that the poem might be creative, incorporating as it did the first original sentence he had ever spoken to a human besides his creator.
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The creator herself, a brilliant scientist, had told him that hello was all right by way of introduction. Mr. Gordons was born as a pseudo-human for the first time with the words, "Hello is all right." Hence, it was only logical to include his first words in his born-again poem. Logical, but probably uninspired poetry. Nevertheless, he repeated it aloud for the benefit of his urine-stained, shock-numbed audience of one.
"Alive again, alive again, hello is all right, alive again, My name is Mr. Gordons," Mr. Gordons said in carefully modulated tones.
"H-hello is what?" the squat, dark man with no front teeth asked.
"All right. Hello is all right."
"All right for what, man?" the person said, wiping a trembling arm over his forehead.
It was no use. Mr. Gordons's poem was obviously, as his creator would have said, a turkey. He dropped his performance and concentrated on his newly functional system. "Speech mechanism operative," the robot spoke. "Motor control excellent." He raised and lowered his arm several times. "Hello is all right, all right, all right...."
Something in the voice simulator was stuck. He twisted his head around his neck two full revolutions to erase the repetition.
The toothless man was squinting at him pugnaciously. "What you do to my friend, you?" "he demanded.
"I removed life from him," Mr. Gordons said. "I require something that he possesses, something he would not be willing to give. But you will not be
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killed unless you do something to endanger my survival. I need nothing from you. You are too short."
"Wait a minute, man," the human rumbled, seething. Then he interrupted himself. "What you need from Verbanic, anyway?"
"What is a Verbanic?"
"That guy you murdered over there." He pointed toward the dead garbageman.
Mr. Gordons walked stiffly toward the corpse and picked it up with one hand. "His skin," the robot said. "I need his skin to resemble your species. Yours is too small for my frame."
Then he rotated his thumb so that a spiky metal edge appeared. He pierced Verbanic's flesh and tore a long slit from skull to tailbone.
The human with the missing front teeth vomited. Still retching, he staggered backward and away as Mr. Gordons methodically skinned the human carcass by the cold light of the moon.
Gonzalez ran. The air came burning and ragged into his lungs as he sprinted down one highway, across another, and onto a side road, where he hitched a ride as far as the Los Angeles city limits. From there he caught a north-bound bus that dropped him off within blocks of the police station. He ran until he was inside the precinct doors.
"You got to help me," Gonzalez gasped.
The desk officer looked up at him cursorily. "The methadone clinic's on the other side of La Ciénega," he said.
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"Hey, my best friend just got skinned. You're the cops. You got to do something about it."
"Skinned? You mean he got mugged? Beat out of some bread? Couldn't collect off the numbers? See, you can talk to me, kid, I grew up on the streets." He turned to the other officers in the room, smiling condescendingly. "Like I'm hip, know what I mean?"
"I don't know nothing you mean," Gonzalez said. "I'm saying my friend got skinned—"
"That's enough, Chico. Talk straight."
Gonzalez's nostrils flared. "One second there, Mr. Cop. Don't you Chico me."
"You looking for trouble, punk?"
With every ounce of his reserve patience, Gonzalez restrained himself from jumping the officer. "I am telling you, man, my partner at work just got himself murdered."
The expression in the officer's eyes changed. "You serious, kid?"
Gonzalez nodded, relieved. The officer pulled out a form and began to write. "Name?"
"Marco Juan San Miguel de Ruiz Gonzalez."
The policeman took down the information. "Where did the incident occur?"
"The Hollywood Disposal Center. Off Fifty-one-"
"Oh, yeah. The Garbage of the Stars."