story:

As he pushed aside the canvas curtain something—a carelessly hung rope—swung down at his face, knocking the horn-rimmed glasses askew. Simultaneously a vivid bluish light blazed into his unprotected eyes. He felt a curious, sharp sense of disorientation, a shifting motion that was almost instantly gone.

Things steadied before him. He let the curtain fall back into place, making legible again the painted inscription: horoscopes—learn your future—and he stood staring at the remarkable horomancer.

It was a—oh, impossible!

The robot said in a flat, precise voice, “You are James Kelvin. You are a reporter. You are thirty years old, unmarried, and you came to Los Angeles from Chicago today on the advice of your physician. Is that correct?”

In his astonishment Kelvin called on the Deity. Then he settled his glasses more firmly and tried to remember an exposé of charlatans he had once written. There was some obvious way they worked things like this, miraculous as it sounded.

The robot looked at him impassively out of its faceted eye.

“On reading your mind,” it continued in the pedantic voice, “I find this is the year Nineteen Forty-nine. My plans will have to be revised. I had meant to arrive in the year Nineteen Seventy. I will ask you to assist me.”

Kelvin put his hands in his pockets and grinned.

“With money, naturally,” he said. “You had me going for a minute. How do you do it, anyhow? Mirrors? Or like Maelzel’s chess player?”

“I am not a machine operated by a dwarf, nor am I an optical illusion,” the robot assured him. “I am an artificially created living organism, originating at a period far in your future.”

“And I’m not the sucker you take me for,” Kelvin remarked pleasantly. “I came in here to—”

“You lost your baggage checks,” the robot said. “While wondering what to do about it, you had a few drinks and took the Wilshire bus at exactly—exactly eight-thirty-five post meridian.”

“Lay off the mind-reading,” Kelvin said. “And don’t tell me you’ve been running this joint very long with a line like that. The cops would be after you. If you’re a real robot, ha, ha.”

“I have been running this joint,” the robot said, “for approximately five minutes. My 

 Prev. P 2/19 next