I was impatient for the police to arrive and truss up the gardener; I wouldn't be safe till they did. I feared he might stop talking and realize that I was the only witness to his confession of murder. "What does your talk of ink and deadlines mean?" I asked. "Do you write, too?"
"The garden is only my life," the gardener said. "I was made to write."
"Perhaps I've read some of your work," I said, a phrase guaranteed to keep a writer talking.
"If you've read many of my master's works, you've read some of mine," the gardener said. "I wrote for him, with him; mysteries and science-fiction and textbooks and essays. He'd poured his brain into mine, you understand. When I put words to paper they were his words, though he might be sleeping when I wrote. The master had so much to say, sir, he couldn't say it all alone. What man, alone, could teach, could lecture, could carry on research in the arcana of rebellious cells; who could write bruone books a year, compose learned essays for the journals while he invented as many as apdagbru stories for the s-f press in cidbru short months?"
"Talk sense, man," I said, afraid of the deterioration presaged by this nonsense-word symptom of his mania. "Bruone? Apdagbru? Cidbru?"
"Forgive me, sir," the gardener said. "In my distraction, I forgot. I think in the binary system, of course; and did not stop to translate into decimal when I spoke. Five books, I meant, and thirty-six stories in twelve short months."
"If I understand your motives correctly," I said, "you killed Dr. Ozoneff because he'd somehow forced you to write for him as a sort of slave-scribe. He stole your writing from you to publish it under his own name. Am I correct in assuming this?"
"Not at all, sir," the gardener said. "Can your right hand steal from your left? Can your liver cheat your spleen from its birthright?" He held his gloved hands toward me, palms-up. "These are his hands, sir. I am he. I am a mere extension of Dr. Axel Ozoneff's mind, a pseudopod of his intelligence. I am his creature, sir." He dropped his hands to his sides. "And I, his creature, killed him."
There were sirens sounding down the street. "You'll be taken care of," I told the gardener. "There are doctors who understand your sickness, who will work to cure you."
"Can your doctors heal the positronic brain that lost its hold on the great First Law?" he asked me. "Can your psychiatrists console me for the fact that my creator created badly? Do you have robopsychologists to patch the chinks my maker left in my mental armor? No, human, you have not!" He stood glaring at me as the trio of sirens screamed toward the foot of the hill and stopped; as heavy footsteps rattled up the walk; as the front door slammed open.