The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beside Still Waters, by Robert Sheckley

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Title: Beside Still Waters

Author: Robert Sheckley

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release Date: July 18, 2009 [EBook #29446]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BESIDE
STILL
WATERS

BY ROBERT SHECKLEY

_When people talk about getting away from it all, they are usually
thinking about our great open spaces out west. But to science
fiction writers, that would be practically in the heart of Times
Square. When a man of the future wants solitude he picks a slab of
rock floating in space four light years east of Andromeda. Here is a
gentle little story about a man who sought the solitude of such a
location. And who did he take along for company? None other than
Charles the Robot._

Mark Rogers was a prospector, and he went to the asteroid belt looking
for radioactives and rare metals. He searched for years, never finding
much, hopping from fragment to fragment. After a time he settled on a
slab of rock half a mile thick.

Rogers had been born old, and he didn't age much past a point. His face
was white with the pallor of space, and his hands shook a little. He
called his slab of rock Martha, after no girl he had ever known.

He made a little strike, enough to equip Martha with an air pump and a
shack, a few tons of dirt and some water tanks, and a robot. Then he
settled back and watched the stars.

The robot he bought was a standard-model all-around worker, with
built-in memory and a thirty-word vocabulary. Mark added to that, bit
by bit. He was something of a tinkerer, and he enjoyed adapting his
environment to himself.

At first, all the robot could say was "Yes, sir," and "No, sir." He
could state simple problems: "The air pump is laboring, sir." "The corn
is budding, sir." He could perform a satisfactory salutation: "Good
morning, sir."

Mark changed that. He eliminated the "sirs" f