Free A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak Page A

glimpse me.”
    Cushing put the arrow aside and hunkered down, squinting into the maze of fallen branches. A face stared out at him and at the sight of it he sucked in his breath in astonishment. Such a face he had never seen before. A skull-like face, fashioned of hard planes that shone in the sunlight that filtered through the branches.
    â€œWho are you?” he asked.
    â€œI am Rollo, the robot.”
    â€œRollo? A robot? You can’t be a robot. There are no longer any robots.”
    â€œThere is I,” said Rollo. “I would not be surprised if I were the last of them.”
    â€œBut if you’re a robot, what are you doing here?”
    â€œI told you, remember? I am pinned beneath a tree. A small tree, luckily, but still impossible to escape from it. My leg is caught, and free I’ve tried to pull it, but that’s impossible. I have tried to dig the soil to release my leg by which I’m trapped, but that is impossible as well. Beneath the leg lies a ledge or rock; upon it lies the tree. I cannot squirm around to lift the tree. I’ve tried everything and there is nothing I can do.”
    Cushing bent over and ducked beneath the overhanging branches. Squirming forward, he reached the fallen robot and squatted on his heels to look at the situation.
    There had been imaginative drawings of robots, he recalled, in some of the magazines he’d found in the library—robots that had been drawn before there were any actual robots. The drawings had represented great, ungainly metal men who undoubtedly would have done a lot of clanking when they walked. Rollo was nothing like them. He was a slender creature, almost spindly. His shoulders were broad and heavy and his head atop the shoulders seemed a bit too large, somewhat out of proportion, but the rest of him tapered down to a narrow waist, with a slight broadening of the hips to accommodate the sockets of the legs. The legs were trim and neat; looking at them, Cushing thought of the trim legs of a deer. One of the legs, he saw, was pinned beneath a heavy branch that had split off the mighty maple when it had struck the ground. The branch was somewhat more than a foot in diameter.
    Rollo saw Cushing looking at the branch. “I could have lifted it enough to pull my leg out,” he said, “but there was no way I could twist around to get a good grip on it.”
    â€œLet’s see what I can do,” said Cushing.
    He moved forward on hands and knees, got his hands beneath the branch. He hefted it gingerly, found he could barely move it.
    â€œMaybe I can lift it enough,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to lift. Then you try to pull the leg out.”
    Cushing crept closer, settling his knees solidly under him, bent and got both arms around the branch.
    â€œNow,” he said. Straining, he heaved up, felt the branch move slightly, heaved again.
    â€œI’m out,” said Rollo. “You didn’t have to move it much.”
    Carefully, Cushing slid his arms free, let the branch drop back into place.
    Rollo was crawling around on the ground. He retrieved a leather bag from where it lay beneath a pile of leaves, scrabbled around some more and came up with an iron-tipped spear.
    â€œI couldn’t reach them before,” he said. “When the branch fell on me, they flew out of my hands.”
    â€œYou all right?” asked Cushing.
    â€œSure, I’m all right,” the robot said. He sat up, hoisted the formerly trapped foot into his lap and examined it.
    â€œNot even dented,” he said. “The metal’s tough.”
    â€œWould you mind telling me how you got into this mess?”
    â€œNot at all,” said Rollo. “I was walking along when a storm came up. I wasn’t worried much. A little rain won’t hurt me. Then the tornado hit. I heard it coming and I tried to run. I guess what I did was run right into it. There were trees crashing all