“Bring it. It is useful.” The second robot said. The first robot clapped the suitcase shut; he threw it into the inflatable boat.
“The raid is finished.” He said. “We can return to our detachment’s bivouac.”
He dragged the boat to the cliff, but the second turned to Alice. And, suddenly from the edge of the clearing, they heard a penetrating voice:
“Whatever is going on here? Who let you loose here, you steel tramps?”
As if this weren’t bad enough, Alice thought. Now they’re going to grab the old man film robot.
“Stand!” The robot standing beside Alice ordered the old man. “Do not move! We will shoot.”
“Just try it!” The old man, instead of trying to save himself, picked up a stick and rushed at the enormous robot.
“Release the child!” He shouted. “I will make scrap metal of you. You heathens, we beat the Turks for General Gurko. How could you have forgotten? I’ll show you how we did it now! Soldiers, brothers, forward to battle!”
The robot stepped backwards in surprise, but, evidently, determined the old man was no match for it. It stopped moving and the old man of a film robot rushed toward it, even though the shock of white plastic hair only reached as high as the metal robot’s belt. The second robot left the boat and intercepted the film robot from the side. The film robot did not see the other enemy and continued, waving his stick, advancing, thinking he was going into battle against the Turkish redoubts.
One of the second robot’s heavy metal hands rose and grabbed the stick out of the old man’s hand. The other hand grabbed the old man around the neck. The old man waved his arms up and down, but there was no way he could get free.
Seeing that the small enemy had been overcome, The first robot tossed the boat over the small cliff and dragged Alice after it. Alice started to struggle, trying to get free or loosen this cursed wire that was now cutting into her ankles.
“You cannot resist!” The robot said. “If you do I will force your head into the water and you will no longer obtain oxygen for metabolic functions.”
Alice stopped shaking her head right away. If the robot had been able to take into its iron head the idea of attacking a human being, it could just as easily get the idea of drowning one. And Alice was very cross with her mother, who had refused to allow her to have the operation to give her artificial gills. Lots of kids had artificial gills put in, especially those who lived near the sea, or under it, or in the pelagic cities on floats as big as whole islands. If she had the synthagills she could have stayed underwater for as long as she wanted.
When I get home, Alice decided, I’ll certainly be able to convince mom to let me have the operation. There must be five million people with gills, I’m not one of them, and then this hapens!
The second robot arrived. He was walking slowly and self-importantly, and the last rays of the sun played over his metal body. He carried a stick in his hand and was using it to push the old man from behind, driving the old man, a typical old man, the grandfather from countless children’s TV series, in front of him. The old man’s hands were tied behind his back, the beard hung down on his chest, but his mouth was free. The old man was muttering something angrily.
“A robot leading a robot.” Alice wanted to say it, but stopped. The old man robot was the most ordinary and well made robot, even if fate had decreed he was to be a movie star. Yes, he had threatened Alice with the stick on the boulevard back in Moscow, but, as Herman had explained, he would never have hit her. It was just his role in the movie, that of an cranky old man.
“Oh, our sins weigh heavilly.” The old man muttered, finding a place for himself in the boat. What have we done to have this befall us, to be captured by metal Anti-Christs!” Then he saw Alice and became very angered.
“What is the child doing here? What is it you are going to do? The child is small…”
“Silence!” The robot said. “The disobedient will be thrown overboard.”
“Oh….” The old man said and grew silent.
The metal robot turned on the engine and the boat soundlessly cut the water toward the entrance to the bay. The robots steered the boat closer to the cliffs evidently they feared being sighted by the film crew. Only after they had gone some distance along the coast did the boat turn toward the open sea. The robots ordered their prisoners to lay in the bottom of the boat and pulled enormous Mexican sombreros from beneath the benches, put them on their heads, and pretended to be vacationers to anyone who saw them from afar.
The engine coughed and whistled quietly, the small waves beat against the boat’s plastic keel, and it seemed to Alice that someone was shouting to her from the coast:
“Alice! A-alice… Where are you?”
But perhaps it only seemed like that.
Chapter Five: The master of the pirate Island
The island at which the boat came to anchor with its prisoners was small, stony, and although it lay not far from the coast, rarely did boats put in to harbor. There was nothing to see here. Once upon a time, two or three hundred years in the past, smugglers had lived on the island and constructed houses rather, huts out of the stones. Their roofs had long since fallen in, but you could still find refuge from the winds inside. Not long ago archeologists had worked here. The archeologists had found nothing, but they left behind a number of pits and trenches cut in the center of the island.
The island was not marked on the maps. It was too small and insignificant, and offered no great threat to shipping. Very few people looked in on this empty corner of the Crimean coast.
Alice, of course, knew none of this. For her the island was a large cliff rising from the water, a rocky desert without a single tree.
The sun had set already, and the island was overcome with purple twilight and gloom. That barge that had run aground on the rocks looked black.
When the boat reached the rocks another robot, just as big and rusty as the first two that had made Alice prisoner, came out of the ruins of a hut and went down to the water.
“You have the loot?” It asked.
“One large human and one small.” A robot said.
“Not a bad beginning.” The new robot said. “I will report to the Chief.” It turned, its joints creaked and scraped, and it vanished into the ruins, the former smugglers’ den.
One of the robots pulled Alice and the old man to the shore, turning off the engine’s controls. The other untied the prisoners hands and pulled the gag out of Alice’s mouth.
“What sort of thugs are you?” Alice said, gasping for air. “You may be able to treat me this way, but what will happen to you when people find out what you’re doing?”
It was as if the robots did not hear her. They stood ‘at ease,’ and they waited at ease, ignoring Alice and the old man robot, until until the robot that had come out of the ruins and gone back returned.
“The General thanks you for your service.” It said.
The two robots stamped their feet in place and froze.
“The General cannot look at your loot now. He is busy.” The robots stamped their feet again and froze again.
“You may rest.” The local robot said. “But only know what measures to take. Is that clear?”
“Aye, aye, sir!” The robots said in chorus, their round eyes flashed and they left, forgetting completely about the captives.
The old man sat down on the sparse yellow grass and said:
“True barbarians.”
“Grandfather,” Alice spoke to him; she had quite forgotten that he was a robot himself. “Grandfather, have you ever seen metal robots before?”
“‘Robots?’ Is that, then, what has made us captive?”
“Yes. Of course, you wouldn’t know.”
Alice had occasion to see many robots, many different types of robots, before, but she had never seen robots constructed of real, heavy metal rather than light plasteel, at least not on Earth. Manufacturing a robot out of metal was inefficient. The robot came out extremely heavy, expensive, and overly complicated.