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

around me. The wind started to lift me, then set me down again. When I came down, I fell, sort of sprawled out. That’s when I was pinned. The limb broke off and caught me. Then it was all over. The storm passed on, but I couldn’t move. I thought at first it was just a small inconvenience. I was confident I could work free. But, as you see, there was no way of working free.”
    â€œHow long ago did all this happen?”
    â€œI can tell you that exactly. I kept count. Eighty-seven days. The thing I was worried about was rust. I had some bear oil in my bag.…”
    â€œBear oil?”
    â€œSure, bear oil. First you kill a bear, then build a fire and render out his fat. Any fat will do, but bear oil is the best. Where else would you get oil except from animals? Once we used a petro-product, but there’s not been any of that for centuries. Animal fat isn’t good, but it serves its purpose. You have to take care of a body such as mine. You can allow no rust to get a start. The metal’s fairly good, but even so, rust can get a start. The eighty-seven days were no great problem, but if you hadn’t come along, I’d have been in trouble. I had it figured out that in time the wood would rot and then I could work free. But that might have taken several years. I don’t know how many.
    â€œIt was a little boresome, too. The same things to look at all the time. Nothing to talk with. I had this Shivering Snake that hung around for years. Never doing anything, of course, of no use whatever, but always skittering around and sneaking up on you and then sort of backing off, as if it were playing games with you, or whatnot. But when I got pinned underneath that tree, Old Shivering disappeared and I haven’t seen it since. If it’d stuck around, it would have been some sort of company, something at least to watch, and I could talk to it. It never answered back, of course, but I talked to it a lot. It was something one could talk to. But once I got pinned underneath that tree, it lit out, and I haven’t seen it since.”
    â€œWould you mind telling me,” said Cushing, “just what is a Shivering Snake?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Rollo. “It was the only one I ever saw. I never heard of anyone ever seeing one before. Never even heard any talk of one. It was really not much of anything at all. Just a shimmer. It didn’t walk or run, just shivered in the air, sparkling all the time. In the sunlight you couldn’t see it sparkle very well, but in the dark it was spectacular. Not any kind of shape. No shape at all, I guess, or anything at all. Just a blob of sparkling, dancing in the air.”
    â€œYou have no idea what it was or where it came from? Or why it hung out with you?”
    â€œAt times I thought it was a friend of mine,” said Rollo, “and I was glad of that, for I tell you, mister, as possibly the last robot, I’m not exactly up to my hips in friends. Most people, if they saw me, would think of me as no more than an opportunity to collect another brain case. You don’t happen to have any designs on my brain case, do you?”
    â€œNone at all,” said Cushing.
    â€œThat is good,” said Rollo, “because if you had, I’d have to warn you that if forced to, I would kill you to protect myself. Robots, in case you didn’t know, were inhibited against killing anything at all, against any kind of violence. It was implanted in us. That’s why there aren’t any robots left. They allowed themselves to be run down and killed without the lifting of a hand to protect themselves. Either that or they hid out and caught the rust. Even when they could get hold of some lubricant to keep away the rust, the supply didn’t last forever, and when it was gone, they could get no more. So they rusted and that was the end of them, except for the brain case, which could not rust. And after many years, someone