"Everything?"
"Everything."
"In that case, there is one other thing I've always wanted," Mr. Gordons said shyly.
"Tell me, darling."
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Mr. Gordons looked up to her hopefully. "Creativity," he said. "I want to be creative. I want to think independently. I want to be free."
The professor scratched her head thoughtfully. "I don't know if that's possible," she said. "And even if it were, what would happen if I gave you creativity? You wouldn't follow your programming."
The android cast his eyes downward. "I thought you'd say something like that."
The room returned to silence. Awkwardly, the professor put her arm around Mr. Gordons's shoulders. "Aw, I've always been a sucker for an ugly face," she said. "I'll see what I can do."
"Really?"
"No harm trying."
Slowly he took her hand in his. When he spoke, his voice was scratchy. "Thank you, Mom," he said.
The sound of soft footfalls brought them both to attention. "Dickey, is that you?" the professor called.
"Yes," he answered from the corridor. Dickey strode into the lab defiantly. "That cute man from Washington knows everything. I don't know what kind of hocus pocus you're into with this garbage-man, but he's going to put a stop to it."
Mr. Gordons rose. "This man must not continue talking about me," he said. "It will endanger my survival. I must stop him."
"Over my dead body, you will," Ralph Dickey said.
Mr. Gordons walked toward him. "Precisely."
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"Don't bother about him," the professor said. "Get back here, Gordons." "I'll just be a minute, Mom." "Mom?" Dickey backed away from Mr. Gordons. "What's going on here? Hey, get away from me, you. Stop him, Professor." But Mr. Gordons already had the lab assistant by the scruff of the neck and was leading him out of the lab. "Hey, quit it. ... Where are you taking me? ... Help! Professor, stop him. Help!"
"Serves you right, you wimp. Gordons, find out where he hides the booze, while you're at it."
There was a scuffle, then silence. After a few minutes, Ralph Dickey walked back into the lab, his anxious face now composed and blank.
"What'd you do?" The professor leaped out of her chair. "What'd you do with my baby, you worthless bum?" Dickey wound his arms around the professor. "Get away!" she hollered. "Where's Gordons?"
"I'm here, Mom," he said lovingly. "Don't be an ass. I know who you are." "I am Mr. Gordons," he insisted. He pulled something out of his lab coat pocket. It was a key. "I believe you requested this."
She stared at it in amazement for a moment, then snatched the key out of Mr. Gordons's hand and ran straight for a steel and asbestos cabinet. "It works," she shrieked as the door to the cabinet flew open. With religious gravity, she lifted a gin bottle and held it aloft. "I've got the gin, Dickey," she taunted. "I'm Mr. Gordons."
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She reached in for another bottle. "Here's the vermouth."
"The components for a martini. My creator's favorite drink."
The professor rooted around inside the cabinet, then began a frantic search through the laboratory. "Damn, damn, damn it to hell!" she yelled.
«XT • "
No ice.
"Just a moment." Mr. Gordons went to the sink, dribbled some water into his cupped hands, and squeezed. A moment later a dozen ice cubes tinkled into a glass beaker. "For you, Mom," he said, holding out the beaker to her. She grabbed it, sniffed the vermouth, filled the beaker with gin, and downed it. "I like you better this way, Ralph. Now just find Gordons for me and I'll let you keep your job."
"But I am Mr. Gordons," the man who looked like Ralph Dickey said. "I was given the capability to change form when my survival demands that I disguise my appearance."
She polished off another beaker. And another. "Prove it," she said.
As she was' pouring the fourth beaker of gin down her throat, Mr. Gordons stretched and twisted, squatted, and turned his back to her. He made sounds like metallic squeaks and crunching gears as he twirled into a blur. The professor polished off the bottle and began another as Mr. Gordons continued his strange motion. When at last he came to a stop, nothing remained of Mr. Gordons—or Dickey, or Verbanic—except a metal cube dotted with lights and wires.
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The gin bottle shattered on the floor. "The LC-111," the professor moaned.
"It's me, Mom," came a familiar flat voice from inside the cube.
The professor reeled forward. "I think I'm going to be sick," she said, staggering into the corridor. From the ladies' room she emitted a Tarzanlike yell, then returned to the lab to face Mr. Gordons, who had resumed the form of Ralph Dickey. She leaned in the doorway, her face green and stricken. "There's a naked body in there," she said with hushed urgency. "It looks just like you."
"It is your assistant, I'm afraid," he said. "The man in the T-shirt who was here earlier is of some danger to me. I cannot know what that danger is until my memory banks are repaired, but the probability is high that your assistant jeopardized my survival by speaking with him. Undoubtedly they spoke of me. For that reason, I was forced to abandon my former persona of the garbageman and adopt Mr. Dickey's."
The professor raised a trembling hand to her forehead. "Let me get this straight. You killed Dickey—and then changed your face so that you look like him?"
"That is correct."
"Did you do the same thing to that garbageman?"
"Yes. It was necessary for my survival."
"And you're still the LC-111?"
"Among other programming devices, yes."
Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Gordons," she sighed. "The garbageman was ugly enough. I
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don't know if I can stand my son looking like Ralph Dickey."
"Beauty is only skin deep," he said.
"What if the cops come for you?"
"I'll kill them too, Mom," Mr. Gordons said reassuringly.
Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes wept in her son's mechanical arms. It was heartbreaking to be a mother.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was not the sort of man who enjoyed getting his hands dirty. The son of two prominent Party officials, he had been reared in an atmosphere of relative luxury, enjoying the company of the astute políticos who surrounded his father in the big Moscow apartment, and honing his mind on Lenin and chess at the family dacha on the Black Sea in the summers. When he was at university, he was recruited, as he had expected to be, into the ranks of the Moscow Center intelligence network.
He was groomed from the first to become one of the Soviet Union's growing legion of cold-war master spies. Istoropovich came well prepared for the Center's grueling three-year training program. His English and Cantonese were as fluent as any American's or Chinese's. He had made it a point to excel in engineering and physics, his chosen fields at school, because he knew that these sub-
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jects would be of value to the Party and, consequently, to his future. His father had tutored him in foreign affairs and economics from a young age, so that by the time the Center recruited him, he was fully conversant not only with the issues of the day, but with the full background of most of them as well. He flew through the Center's program with honors, and his young career was not hurt by the fact that he was handsome, healthy, and ambitious.
His one flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was that he hated women. He hated their softness, their cloying sexuality. But again, his aversion for females did not affect his work for the worse. On the contrary, a spy not tempted by the spell of swelling bosoms and undulating hips was a rare and sought-after commodity in Moscow Center.
He was perfect for his job. Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was born to be a star blazing under deep cover on foreign soil.
He had not, unfortunately, expected the foreign soil to belong to the Hollywood Disposal Service. Nor had he intended his highly skilled hands to be burrowing into half an acre of damp, stinking garbage dotted with broken glass and the decomposing remains of deceased household animals.