"Clifford D.Simak. All the traps of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора

And now, he thought, with the door once shut behind him, he was on his
own. He was running off. He was wearing clothes. He was out at night,
without the permission of a master. And all of these were against the law.

Any officer could stop him, or any citizen. He had no rights at all. And
he had no one who would speak for him, now that the Barringtons were gone.

He moved quietly down the walk and opened the gate and went slowly down
the street, and it seemed to him the house was calling for him to come back.
He wanted to go back, his mind said that he should go back, but his feet
kept going on, steadily down the street.

He was alone, he thought, and the aloneness now was real, no longer the
mere intellectual abstract he'd held in his mind for days. Here he was, a
vacant hulk, that for the moment had no purpose and no beginning and no end,
but was just an entity that stood naked in an endless reach of space and
time and held no meaning in itself.

But he walked on and with each block that he covered he slowly fumbled
back to the thing he was, the old robot in old clothes, the robot running
from a home that was a home no longer.

He wrapped the cloak about him tightly and moved on down the street and
now he hurried, for he had to hurry.

He met several people and they paid no attention to him. A few cars
passed, but no one bothered him.

He came to a shopping center that was brightly lighted and he stopped
and looked in terror at the wide expanse of open, brilliant space that lay
ahead of him. He could detour around it, but it would use up time and he
stood there, undecided, trying to screw up his courage to walk into the
light.

Finally he made up his mind and strode briskly out, with his cloak
wrapped tight about him and his hat pulled low.

Some of the shoppers turned and looked at him and he felt agitated
spiders running up and down his back. The galoshes suddenly seemed three
times as big as they really were and they made a plopping, squashy sound
that was most embarrassing.

He hurried on, with the end of the shopping area not more than a block
away.

A police whistle shrilled and Richard Daniel jumped in sudden fright and
ran. He ran in slobbering, mindless fright, with his cloak streaming out
behind him and his feet slapping on the pavement.