Lucius hesitated a microsecond, but the other side of the argument was just as deadly. If Basalom were human, then not saving him would be an even worse violation of the law.
He felt a strange potential coursing through his circuits, the same potential he had noted earlier in connection with Avery. He cursed the biological fool before him for forcing him into this dilemma. He, Lucius, could very likely die in the attempt to save someone else.
There was no time to think it through any further. Avery, s finger was dangerously close to triggering the laser again. In desperation, Lucius did the only thing he could think of to do: he drew back his arm to throw, formed his hand into a thin blade that would cause the least amount of pain possible, and flung it at Avery’s outstretched arm.
In the moment it took the projectile to reach its target, Lucius wondered if he could have simply knocked the laser from Avery’s hand, but it was easy to convince himself that he couldn’t. It presented a much smaller target, most of which Avery’s fingers covered anyway, and fingers would be even more difficult to reattach than would a forearm.
Besides, there was a certain amount of poetic justice in taking an entire limb.
Avery stared at the stump of his wrist in astonished disbelief. One moment a hand had been there, and the next moment it hadn’t. He had hardly felt the pain when-whatever it was-cut it off; shock kept him from feeling it now.
Intelligence made him grasp the wrist in his left hand and squeeze until he’d closed off the arteries. He carefully avoided looking down at the slidewalk.
Slidewalkhe thought dizzily. Yes, he’d best watch his footing, hadn’t he? Blood could be slippery.
Dimly, through the tight focus his injury demanded of his attention, he was aware of shouting voices and the sound of footsteps. Someone shoved a hand under his arm and drew him erect; he hadn’t been aware he was slumping to his knees. He looked up to see Janet’s humaniform robot supporting him, heard it say, “Master Avery, we must get you to a hospital.”
“No kidding,” he managed to say through clenched teeth. It was beginning to hurt now.
Someone else shouted, “Lucius, come back here! Mandelbrot, stop him!” Metallic feet pounded away down the corridor.
Another pair of hands reached out to hold him, these ones warm and human, and he found himself looking into Janet’s whitened face. She looked worse than he felt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Oh Wendell, I’m sorry.”
“I am too,” he said automatically, and was surprised to realize the words were true, but about what he had no idea.
The computer’s voice woke Derec out of a sound sleep. “Master Derec, wake up. Master Derec.”
“Mmmm?” was all he could manage at first. After the elation of figuring out his mother’s name had faded, he’d realized how long he’d been without sleep and he had ordered a bed made for him right there in the study. He’d hoped that his new discovery would trigger memories of his past, and he’d supposed that sleeping on it would be the best way to integrate that knowledge into whatever subconscious switching network controlled memory, but now, even in his groggy state, he knew it hadn’t worked. He suspected he’d slept too soundly for that. He’d been out before his head hit the pillow, exhausted, and he didn’t feel any different now.
“Wake up,” the computer said again. “Your father has been located.”
That sped the waking process a bit. He sat up and shook his head, stood, and staggered over to the terminal. “Caffeine,” he said as he sat down, and a moment later the desk delivered a cup of steaming black coffee. “Show me where he is,” he said between gulps.
The screen lit to show Avery standing between two unfamiliar people. No, one should be familiar, Derec realized. That had to be his mother. Janet. Again he reached for the cascade of memories that should have been there, but nothing responded to the new stimulus.
That was her, though. It had to be. Then that other person wasn’t a person at all, but her humaniform robot, the one Wolruf had chased northward from the lab. Evidently they had come back together this time. And brought Avery with them? That certainly seemed to be the case. Now that he looked, Derec could see that they were holding onto him, evidently making sure he didn’t get away. Or was that-? No. Avery clutched his right wrist, and he had no hand below it. They were supporting him; that was it. But none of the three was doing anything about his injury! They were instead watching something out of the monitor’s view to the right.
“Pan right,” Derec ordered, and the view slid left in the screen. As it panned he saw Ariel standing in the doorway of what Derec could now see was indeed the lab where he’d revived the robots, and she was also looking intently down the corridor.
The objects of their attention slid into view: four robots-Mandelbrot, Adam, Eve, and Lucius-locked in battle.
They were a blur of motion. It was hard to tell who was on which side-hard even to tell who was who amid the constantly shifting shapes. Only Mandelbrot remained the same from moment to moment. At first it seemed that he fought against the other three, struggling to hold them all captive while they twisted and flowed out of his grasp, but it gradually became apparent that he and two of the others were all three trying to contain only one robot.
“Give me sound,” Derec said, and suddenly his study echoed with screeches and thuds and a peculiar ripping noise that Derec realized was the sound of robot cells being tom free like Velcro fasteners. The robots had changed tactics now; instead of trying to contain their captive-a task as impossible as stopping a flood with their hands-they began tearing him apart. Mandelbrot was doing the most damage. His rigid left arm moved like a piston, his hand pulling free chunks of silvery robot and flinging them away to splash against the walls and ceiling. The other two robots took over the job of flailing at the constantly shifting amoeba their captive had become, pulling off its arms when it tried to grow around them and forcing it back toward Mandelbrot and destruction.
At last Mandelbrot exposed his target: the robot’s egg-shaped microfusion power pack. When he wrenched that free, the struggle instantly ceased. He backed away with the power pack in his hand, and the other two robots flowed back into their normal shapes: Adam the werewolf and Eve the silvery copy of Ariel. The third robot remained a much-diminished, ragged-edged tangle of appendages on the floor. It had undoubtedly been Lucius they’d destroyed. Somehow that didn’t surprise Derec.
Then the implications of what he had seen soaked in, and he spilled coffee all over his desk. Swearing, but not at the spill, he leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair in his haste, and ran from the apartment. His father was hurt. His mother had come out of hiding. And there could only be one reason for the battle he had just witnessed: Lucius had injured a human being. He had directly violated the First Law of Robotics.
Wolruf was talking with the wolf when she felt the forest shudder beneath her feet.
“What I want to know,” she’d been in the process of saying, “is whether or not your desire to serve ‘umans is stronger in the immediate case, or over the long term. Do you think ahead to w’at your ‘elp might do to your masters’ civilization, or do you just follow your laws case by-what was that?”
The wolf had flinched, too, just as the forest had seemed to do. Now it said, “Involuntary response. A robot has just injured a human.”
“ W’ at?”Wolruf felt her hackles rise. That was supposed to be impossible.
The wolf looked into the forest and spoke as if echoing a news broadcast, as it probably was. “The robot Lucius has inflicted non-fatal damage to the human Wendell Avery. Lucius has been deactivated, but all units are alerted to watch for aberrant behavior among other robots. All units must run a diagnostic self-check immediately.” The wolf turned its head to look up at Wolruf. “I must comply,” it said, and it froze like a statue.