At least to a point. Once she tracked him down, all bets were off.
Where to start, though? The computer would obey her wishes, but that was useless against the commands he would certainly have given it to protect his privacy.
Still, even if he were doing all this unconsciously, he had to have left a trail she could follow, and it didn’t take a genius to see where that trail began.
She scooted her chair back, stood, and said, “Come on, Basalom. We’ve got our own puzzle to solve.”
Avery frowned as he watched the miniature robot attempt to walk across the workbench. It was only a foot high and bore an oversized head to accommodate a normal-sized positronic brain and powerpack, but neither of those factors contributed to its clumsy gait. The problem was one of programming. The robot simply didn’t know how to walk.
He’d tried to tell it how by downloading the instruction set for one of his normal city robots into the test robot’s brain, but that wasn’t sufficient. Even with the information in memory, the idiot thing still stumbled around like a drunkard. The programming for walking was evidently stored somatically, in the body cells themselves, and could only be learned by trial and error.
Avery snorted in disgust. What a ridiculous design! Trust Janet to create a perfectly good piece of hardware and screw it up with a bad idea like this one. The problem wasn’t restricted to walking, either. A robot made with her new cells couldn’t talk until it learned the concept of language, couldn’t recognize an order until that was explained to it, and didn’t recognize Avery as human even then. It was ridiculous. What good was a robot that had to learn everything the hard way?
Avery could see the advantage to giving a robot somatic memory. It would have the equivalent of reflexes once it learned the appropriate responses to various stimuli. And if the brain didn’t have to control every physical action, then that freed it for higher functions. Properly trained, such a robot could be more intuitive, better able to serve. But as it was, that training was prohibitively time consuming.
Janet had to have had a method for getting around the brain-body interface problem. No doubt it was in the brain’s low-level programming, but that programming was still in the inductive monitors’ memcubes in his other lab.
Drat. It looked like he was going to need them after all. He briefly considered sending a robot after them, but he rejected that as a bad idea. Robots were too easily subverted. If Derec were there in the old lab, he could probably trick the robot into leading him here to the new lab as well, and Avery wasn’t ready for that.
He couldn’t order the city to carry the memcubes to him internally, either, not if he wanted to maintain his isolation from it.
That left going for them himself. It seemed crazy, at first, to go into an area where people were looking for him, but upon sober reflection Avery realized that he wasn’t really trying to protect his own isolation so much as his laboratory’s. If he retrieved the memcubes himself, there would actually be less risk of exposure. Central was still under orders not to betray his presence, so reentering the city shouldn’t be a problem, and if he should encounter Derec or Janet or anyone else, he supposed he could simply endure their questions and accusations, biding his time and slipping away again when the opportunity arose. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it wouldn’t be disastrous, either.
Avery picked up the miniature robot and held it within the field area of another magnetic containment vessel. The robot squirmed in his hand, but it knew no form other than humanoid, so there was no worry of it getting away immediately. Avery switched on the containment, waited until the magnetic field snatched the robot from him and crumpled it into a formless sphere again. Now there was no worry of it getting away at all.
He turned to go, but paused at the doorway, looking out into the jungle. He supposed he should walk on the surface before he entered the city, just in case, but the idea of walking unprotected in that half-wild, half-robotic wilderness wasn’t exactly appealing. He looked back into the lab, then crossed over to the tool rack by the workbench and picked up the welding laser. It was about the size of a flashlight and had a heavy, solid feel to it. Comforting. He probably wouldn’t need it, but it never hurt to be prepared.
Chapter 6. A Meeting Of Minds
Ariel hated robotics labs. They were always full of bizarre hardware, too much of which looked like torture instruments. They were all, without exception, cold and impersonal and utilitarian in design. Something about them seemed to suck the humanity right out of anyone who entered. Even Derec became just like the robots he worked on when he entered a robotics lab: single-mindedly intent on the task before him. Ariel stayed away from him then, and she tried to stay away from labs all the time.
So, of course, in their search for Dr. Avery, the robots led her directly to the laboratory where he had taken them. The door was still open, and the concave stumps of three examination tables still rose from the floor in the middle of the room. Glittering grains of what looked like coarse sand covered the floor around the remains of the tables, and it took Ariel a moment to realize that they were robot cells. Something was evidently keeping them from rejoining the rest of the city.
She looked around the lab for clues to Avery’s whereabouts, but saw nothing immediately obvious. She didn’t know what she was looking for anyway. He was hardly going to leave a note or a map leading her to wherever he’d gone, now was he? Still, she supposed the robots were right; if they couldn’t find him through Central, then this, the last place where he’d been seen, was the logical place to start looking for him.
She walked over to the workbench at the end of the lab. A light on an arm stuck out from the wall above it, the pool of illumination coinciding with the cleared area amid a clutter of machinery. All the machinery faced the light. It seemed pretty obvious that someone had been working here, then, but whether it had been Avery or Derec, she couldn’t tell.
She should have insisted that Derec come along with her. He’d have been able to make more sense of this jumble of equipment, but no, he was too busy for that. While he sat there in his study playing with some idiotic formula for God only knew what, Avery could be escaping the planet with the seeds for galactic destruction.
A noise in the corridor outside made her turn around. The four robots paused in their examination of the room as well. Lucius stepped silently toward the wall beside the doorway, and the other three moved just as silently to flank him, staying out of view from whomever or whatever was beyond the door. They’d coordinated their motion via comlink, Ariel supposed.
Mandelbrot turned toward her for a moment and raised his finger to his speaker grille, motioning with his other hand for her to move out of sight as well. She nodded and backed over to stand against the wall. She felt silly hiding from a noise, but she felt very much out of her element here; she would humor the robots until she learned who was out there.
She didn’t have to wait long. Avery’s voice was instantly recognizable, even with the false note of enthusiasm in it.
“Well, my dear, fancy meeting you here. What a surprise.”
Ariel supposed he was talking to her, that he somehow knew she was in the lab. She could see no reason to hide, then, but before she could respond, another voice, this one female and less familiar, answered him. “Wendell Avery. The pleasure’s yours, I’m sure.”
She hadn’t expected to find him quite so soon, so Janet hadn’t prepared what she was going to say to him yet. After their initial surprised volley, there was a long silence while they each sized up the other. Janet noted that Wendell’s hair had finally made the transition from gray to white, and that his taste in clothing hadn’t changed a bit since the day she’d left him. He still wore a white ruffled shirt and baggy trousers. Knowing him, they could be the very ones he’d worn on their wedding day.