• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Lando’s bags bobbed up and down until the seizure passed.

“Did you know,” the robot offered in a subdued, conciliatory voice, “that most of the spouse killings in this system are accomplished with cast-titanium skillets?”

Lando stopped suddenly, stared back at Vuffi Raa in anger. “With a sharp blow to the cranium, or simply bad cooking? Look, my mechanical albatross, there’s nothing personal in this. It’s simply that I haven’t the faintest clue where or how to begin the idiot quest they’ve blackmailed me into, and I stand a far better chance if I don’t have to spend my time stumbling over a useless—”

“Master, I do not wish to oppose your will in this matter. In fact, such would violate my most fundamental programming to the point of incapacitating me. However—”

“I don’t give a damn what happens to your capacitors!”

“—however, before you sell me again, I am determined to prove to you that I am, indeed, far from useless. Perhaps even slightly indispensable.”

Lando stopped again in the middle of the boardwalk, looking down with contempt at the little suitcase-laden automaton. He took a deep breath.

“That, my esteemed collection of clockwork cowardice, would be something to see. What precisely have you in mind?”

Vuffi Raa paused. A lengthy silence followed, and hovercars and repulsor vehicles were suddenly audible swishing by in the narrow, twisted avenue.

Without warning the droid suddenly spoke once more.

“So that is the difficulty; I believe I understand at last. The hotel room. The Constabulary. Your cries to me for help. Your preference, as I understand it, is that I should have been somewhat more, er … physically demonstrative. Even, perhaps, at the risk of worsening the charges against you?”

Lando turned on a booted heel, wordlessly resumed his march down the street. A bus went by, bearing half a dozen gawking tourists being lectured by the driverdroid on what little was known of the Sharu.

“Master!” the droid cried behind him, scurrying to catch up “There was nothing I could do! I am specifically enjoined by my programming never to—”

“Stow it!” Lando snorted, taking some visceral satisfaction in the terse, blue-collar monosyllables. He’d kept his back to Vuffi Raa this time, hadn’t even slackened his pace. The robot, with a sudden burst of speed made awkward by his master’s bags, slipped around Lando and stopped, blocking the young gambler’s further bad-tempered progress.

“Sir, I am not programmed for violence. I cannot harm a sentient being, organic or mechanical, any more than you could flap your arms and fly from this planet.”

“Which only goes to show,” Lando asserted, startled at the droid’s sudden insistent solemnity, “that I was right in the first place.” He stepped around the robot and started walking again. “You’re useless.”

“You are saying, then,” the robot’s voice inquired, very small, at the captain’s rapidly receding back, “that violence is the only solution to this problem, the only capability that is useful or desirable to you in a friend or companion?”

Lando froze, one foot still in the air, stopped dead by the icy disgust he heard in Vuffi Raa’s voice. He set the foot down, turned slowly to face the machine. Not only was he arguing with an artifact—he was losing!

Of course the little droid was right. Why else did he, Lando himself, insist on carrying nothing more than the minimal and miniscule weapon tucked away in his sash? Men of whatever species or construction acted with their minds, survived by their wits. Only a stupid brute would automatically limit himself to the resource of his fists or those of a friend.

That stopped Lando a second time: just exactly when had he begun to consider Vuffi Raa his friend?

“Well, Master,” Vuffi Raa mused, “as I understand the situation, you’re to search for whatever lock the Key may fit. Yet you haven’t any idea whether the lock—and it may be a more metaphorical than material entity—is even on this planet. Correct?”

Lando nodded