Free Destiny Doll by Clifford D. Simak Page A

city installed the beam and our scrawny friend is not the kind of people who could have built this city. He is simply living here—a savage living in a deserted city, picking up whatever scraps he can."
    I should have thought of it myself, I knew. But I had been so burned up at being tossed into the desert world, and burned up, too, when I found the gnome going through our things that I'd been out for blood. If that little twerp had made one wrong step, I would have mowed him down.
    "Tell us," Sara said to him, "exactly what you are. It wasn't your people who built this city, was it?"
    His face was contorted with rage. "You have no right to ask," he screeched. "It is bad enough without you asking it."
    "We have every right to ask," I said. "We need to know exactly what is going on. I'll give you about five seconds."
    He didn't take five seconds. He legs collapsed and he sat down hard upon the floor. He wrapped his scrawny arms about his middle, hard, and rocked back and forth as if he had the bellyache.
    "I'll tell," he moaned. "Do not shoot—I'll tell. But the shame of it! The shame, the shame, the shame."
    He looked up at me with beseeching eyes. "I cannot lie," he said. "If I could, I would. But there is someone here who would know if I were lying.
    "Who is that?" I asked.
    "It is me," said Hoot.
    "What have you got?" I asked "A built-in lie detector?"
    "One of my feeble capabilities," said Hoot. "Do not ask me how, for I cannot tell you. Deficiencies I have in amplitude, but of this and several others I have good command. And this personage, aware of it, has been telling a semblance of the truth, although not in all its fullness."
    The gnome was still staring up at me. "It seems that in times like this," he pleaded, "us humanoids should somehow stick together. There is a common bond . . ."
    I said, "Not between you and I, there isn't."
    "You are being hard on him," said Sara.
    "Miss Foster," I said, "I haven't even started. I intend to hear this."
    "But if he has any reason . . ."
    "He hasn't any reason. Have you a reason, Buster?" He had a good look at me, then he shook his head.
    "My pride is in the dust," he said. "The memories of my ancestors are besmirched. It has been so long—we pretended for so long that at times even we ourselves believed it—that we were the ones who raised this wondrous city. And if you had let me alone, if you had never come, I finally could have died believing it, warm in the presence that it were we who built it. Then it would have been all over, it would not have mattered if someone, or all the universe, should know we were not the architects. For I am the last of us and there is no one further to whom it will ever matter. There are no others after me. The duties I've performed then will be passed on to the hobbies and in the fullness of time they may find some other to whom they can pass those duties on. For there must be someone here to warn and save those who arrive upon this planet."
    I looked toward Dobbin. "Could you tell me," I asked, "what this is all about?"
    "Nothing I will tell you, sire," said Dobbin. "You come to us with a heavy hand. We save your life by putting you in another world, then you suspicion we will not get you out. You are incensed greatly when you find your benefactor satisfying no more than normal curiosity in an examination of your luggage. And you talk of the giving of five seconds and you throw your weight around and act vastly ungracious in every sort of way and you . . ."
    "That's enough from you!" I shouted. "I won't take that kind of talk from a crummy robot!"
    "We not be robots," Dobbin primly said. "I have told you, yet and yet again, that we be but simple hobbies."
    So we were back to that again, to this ridiculous assertion. This strange and stubborn pride. If I'd not been so sore at them, I would have bust out laughing. But as it stood, I'd had about as much of what was going on as I was able to take.
    I reached down and grabbed the gnome by the