Asimov's Future History Volume 1 by Isaac Asimov

head skillfully in the pit of his stomach. When he caught his breath. Tobe asked. “Where’s Randolph Payne’s place?”
    Lank Jake allowed his eyes to unglaze for just a moment. “Brother,” he said, “just you follow the direction I ain’t going.”
    And with that, miraculously, he was gone. There was a shrinking dot dodging trees on the horizon that might have been he, but Sam Tobe wouldn’t have sworn to it.
    That takes care of the posse; but there still remains Randolph Payne, whose reactions took something of a different form.
    For Randolph Payne, the five-second interval after the pulling of the switch and the disappearance of Duckbill Mountain was a total blank. At the start he had been peering through the thick underbrush from behind the bottom of the trees; at the end he was swinging wildly from one of the topmost branches. The same impulse that had driven the posse horizontally had driven him vertically.
    As to how he had covered the fifty feet from roots to top – whether he had climbed, jumped, or flown – he did not know, and he didn’t give a particle of never-mind.
    What he did know was that property had been destroyed by a robot temporarily in his possession. All visions of rewards vanished and were replaced by trembling nightmares of hostile citizenry, shrieking lynch mobs, lawsuits, murder charges, and what Mirandy Payne would say. Mostly what Mirandy Payne would say.
    He was yelling wildly and hoarsely, “Hey, you robot, you smash that thing, do you hear? Smash it good! You forget I ever had anything to do with it. You’re a stranger to me, see? You don’t ever say a word about it. Forget it, you hear?”
    He didn’t expect his orders to do any good; it was only reflex action. What he didn’t know was that a robot always obeys a human order except where carrying it out involves danger to another human.
    AL-76, therefore, calmly and methodically proceeded to demolish his Disinto into rubble and flinders.
    Just as he was stamping the last cubic inch under foot, Sam Tobe and his contingent arrived, and Randolph Payne, sensing that the real owners of the robot had come, dropped out of the tree head-first and made for regions unknown feet-first.
    He did not wait for his reward.
     
    Austin Wilde, Robotical Engineer, turned to Sam Tobe and said, “Did you get anything out of the robot?”
    Tobe shook his head and snarled deep in his throat. “Nothing. Not one thing. He’s forgotten everything that’s happened since he left the factory. He must have gotten orders to forget, or it couldn’t have left him so blank. What was that pile of junk he’d been fooling with?”
    “Just that. A pile of junk! But it must have been a Disinto before he smashed it, and I’d like to kill the fellow who ordered him to smash it – by slow torture, if possible. Look at this!”
    They were part of the way up the slopes of what had been Duck-bill Mountain – at that point, to be exact, where the top had been sheered off; and Wilde put his hand down upon the perfect flatness that cut through both soil and rock.
    “What a Disinto,” he said. “It took the mountain right off its base.”
    “What made him build it?”
    Wilde shrugged. “I don’t know. Some factor in his environment – there’s no way of knowing what – reacted upon his moon-type positronic brain to produce a Disinto out of junk. It’s a billion to one against our ever stumbling upon that factor again now that the robot himself has forgotten. We’ll never have that Disinto.”
    “Never mind. The important thing is that we have the robot.”
    “The hell you say.” There was poignant regret in Wilde’s voice. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Disintos on the moon? They eat up energy like so many electronic hogs and won’t even begin to run until you’ve built up a potential of better than a million volts. But this Disinto worked differently. I went through the rubbish with a microscope, and would you like to see the